Making the visual record of New Guinea: William G. Lawes’s photographic encounters

Abstract

Missionary relationships with local populations following annexation of Pacific places by imperial powers involved intense interactions with potential and actual converts. Reverend William G. Lawes of the London Missionary Society and other New Guinea missionaries supplied photographs from the field to anthropologists and to the secular press. How such images were created in situ demands detailed study. This article examines embodied encounters involving the camera between Lawes and Papuans of the Port Moresby mission district and ambiguous materializations of such encounters in the physical mediums of glass plates and paper. Investigating photographic equipment and materials, place and climate, and their impact in early photographic encounters reveals the complexity of such meetings of European/missionary, Papuans, and camera technology in which Indigenous populations frequently shaped the visual conception of their land and their persons.