Henry Adams in Tahiti

Abstract

While touring Tahiti in 1891, the American historian Henry Adams compiled an album of large-scale photographic prints that he purchased from commercial studios in Papeete. Souvenir album making was a popular pursuit amongst nineteenth-century Euro-American travellers who used the opportunity to project, validate and narrate desired travel experiences. Unlike others, Adams’s album is seemingly random and banal and lacks any clear narrative. This article attempts to make sense of Adams’s album. It asks to what extent the photographs performed their common function and validated Adams’s experience and expectations of Tahiti. It questions what the album reflects of Adams’s background, tastes and position in the islands as an elite traveller. It considers what was available for Adams to purchase from Papeete’s commercial studios, businesses that traded at a key moment in Tahiti’s complex colonial history. This article suggests that the album is a site where Adams’s desires and despair in colonial Tahiti overlap and contradict. Ultimately, it is a sign of his disappointment in photography as a medium incapable of capturing his island experiences.