Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the Native and the Making of European Identities

Rating:
Summary: Colonial Photography and Exhibitions
Review: Dr Anne maxwell is justifiably regarded as a world authority on this new and thought-provoking field. With brilliant use of rare photographs and research into old exhibitions, she illustrates her argument; that the various colonial powers of this and last century made clever, political use of pictures and exhibitions. These were propaganda to convince people at home of their own superiority; that it was the duty of "civilised" people to assist faraway savages by subjugating them. Usually industrial interests -- such as the colonial sugar barons -- were the real beneficiaries of this subjugating process.

Dr Maxwell is a senior lecturer at Melbourne University. But her research for this volume stretches far beyond Australia's troubled Aboriginal issue. She looks at how exotic images from the lenses of Victorian photographers stylised and romanticised colonial races. The process included the Hawaiians, the American Indians, the New Zealand Maori, Philipinos and much of Polynesia and Micronesia. She spares us none of the cruelty perpetrated in the name of such questionable progress. Her descriptions of how "primitives" were dragged off to suffer the London winter in grass skirts -- for the amusement of smug Victorian exhibition-gawpers -- make heart-breaking reading. Even the king of Hawaii was exhibited as a curiosity in an American circus!

The photographs, gleaned from museum archives all over the world, are this book's greatest strength. Even the most clinical academic must feel the mute woe in the eyes of the "noble savages" whose tragedy has been frozen, black-and-white, in time.

A must-have for any serious student of Post-Colonial study and for photography buffs.

Rating:
Summary: Colonial Photography and Exhibitions
Review: Dr Anne maxwell is justifiably regarded as a world authority on this new and thought-provoking field. With brilliant use of rare photographs and research into old exhibitions, she illustrates her argument; that the various colonial powers of this and last century made clever, political use of pictures and exhibitions. These were propaganda to convince people at home of their own superiority; that it was the duty of "civilised" people to assist faraway savages by subjugating them. Usually industrial interests -- such as the colonial sugar barons -- were the real beneficiaries of this subjugating process.

Dr Maxwell is a senior lecturer at Melbourne University. But her research for this volume stretches far beyond Australia's troubled Aboriginal issue. She looks at how exotic images from the lenses of Victorian photographers stylised and romanticised colonial races. The process included the Hawaiians, the American Indians, the New Zealand Maori, Philipinos and much of Polynesia and Micronesia. She spares us none of the cruelty perpetrated in the name of such questionable progress. Her descriptions of how "primitives" were dragged off to suffer the London winter in grass skirts -- for the amusement of smug Victorian exhibition-gawpers -- make heart-breaking reading. Even the king of Hawaii was exhibited as a curiosity in an American circus!

The photographs, gleaned from museum archives all over the world, are this book's greatest strength. Even the most clinical academic must feel the mute woe in the eyes of the "noble savages" whose tragedy has been frozen, black-and-white, in time.

A must-have for any serious student of Post-Colonial study and for photography buffs.