Photography of indenture

Abstract

The 1882 photography book by British photographer Colonel Henry Stuart Wortley, Tahiti: A Series of Photographs, features an image of a family of service workers. Wortley, who only briefly passed through the island, refers to the couple in the photograph as his ‘servants’. This article traces the margins of the journey of Wortley, as well as that of Lady Annie Brassey, an ultra-wealthy traveller and photography enthusiast who visited Tahiti in 1876 and who contributed the letterpress to Wortley’s book. By analysing the text and images of the book and looking at the historical context of Tahiti at that time, and the place European military personnel, travellers, entrepreneurs, royals and local workers had in the island’s economy and society, this article argues for the incentives and implications of trivializing and invisiblizing Tahitian labour. Looking at our engagement with a photograph as a transtemporal performance, beginning in the photograph’s commission, through the moment of encounter and until its printing and viewing years later, this article considers as a beginning of an entanglement the encounter between Wortley and the Tahitian family. I discuss how, by travelling in 2022 to Tahiti and revisiting Wortley’s photographs in different locations around the island, I aimed to influence those entanglements.