Abstract:
The series Fa’a fafine; In a Manner of a Woman consists of seven highly staged images that evoke 19th and 20th century ethnographic photography.4 In Ulugali’i Samoa (Samoan Couple), we are confronted by a man and woman attired in distinctive ethnic costume and holding ethnographic “artifacts” (Fig. 1). The man wears an ulafala (a seed necklace worn only by people of high rank) and holds a fly whisk; both elements of costume connote his status. The woman is adorned with more delicate, feminine neckwear (the work of another contemporary Samoan artist, Ela To’omaga Kaikilekofe) and holds a fan in her hands. The staging of this photograph reenacts some central tropes of early ethnographic photography in the Pacific. First, the presentation of a high rank couple (often) and was long ago replaced by more nuanced methods of visual anthropology, the type of gaze Portman advocated persisted in popular culture representations of Pacific peoples (Banks and Morphy 1997; Edwards 2001). Kihara’s photograph is clearly staged in a studio, yet uses background props to create an illusion of being set in the natural world – just as was the case in earlier anthropological studies. In his influential writings on photography, the theorist Roland Barthes coined the term “punctum” to describe an at first inconsequential detail that pricks at you as it does not seem quite right. This element ultimately functions as a fulcrum that transforms the interpretation of a photograph (Barthes 1981, 51-59). For me, the “punctum” of this photograph is the wainscoting that cuts behind the couple. Evident even in the small gap between the pair, this fragmentary architectural detail ruptures the continuity of the photograph, destroying the fantasy of an exotic other world. It makes clear that this is a staged studio portrait, a highly artificial genre that was also a commonplace of ethnographic photographs. An example is Dunedin photographer Alfred Burton’s image of Samoan Princesses (1884; Fig. 3), who appear against a painted backdrop that has been supplemented with some living plants and ethnographic props. Kihara's couple is presented in an identified male chief and his wife is common in this kind of photography, as in Alfred Tattersall' s early twentieth century photographs.
