Exposing New Guinea: The early photographers, W. G. Lawes and J. W. Lindt
Abstract
This thesis explores the early photographic
representation of southeast New Guinea through a close
examination of the lives and work of two of the first Europeans
to fix the region and its inhabitants on glass plate negatives.
It has been acknowledged that the London Missionary Society
missionary William G. Lawes and the professional photographer
John W. Lindt created images of New Guinea that have become
iconic through their repeated reproduction in print media, their
global dispersal, and replication by subsequent
visitors-with-cameras to the region. However, the immediate
circumstances of their photographs’ production have received
little attention in the literature. Focussing on the nature of
Lawes’s and Lindt’s photographic encounters, traces of which
can be read from the images themselves as well as their writings,
reveals the significance of the camera as well as the agency of
Papuans in shaping the photographic record. The contemporary
framings of their New Guinea images are also considered in order
to understand fully the different trajectories for the promotion
and influence of their photographs, which are now equally widely
dispersed in archive collections around the world. In the
chapters that follow I reconstitute the histories of Lawes’s
and Lindt’s New Guinea photographs in order to better
understand their production and circulation. The result of this
investigation is a more nuanced visual history that encompasses
the specific encounters, networks, technology, and texts that
shaped the early photographic record of New Guinea.