Journal of Material Culture
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Material and Memory: Photography in the Western Solomon Islands
Chris Wright
Journal of Material Culture 2004; 9; 73
DOI: 10.1177/1359183504041090
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MATERIAL AND MEMORY
Photography in the Western Solomon Islands
Ć% CHRIS WRIGHT
Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
Abstract
Despite frequently making use of photographs in their fieldwork and
research, anthropologists rarely take account of their materiality. The
identity of photography as a medium and its phenomenological status is,
from the outset, assumed as given. There is no concern for what photogra-
phy actually is in different cultural contexts. Recognizing photographs as
material culture is a way to address this blind spot, and suggests that any
methodological use of them requires a more complex and subtle approach.
Key Words Ć% material culture Ć% memory Ć% methodology Ć% photography Ć%
Solomon Islands
Allan Sekula has remarked on the seemingly natural and commonplace
act of someone taking a small piece of paper out of their wallet and
saying  this is my dog (1982: 86). But to what extent is this extraordi-
nary act of transubstantiation replicated in cultural contexts other than
those of Europe and North America? My concern here is with the impli-
cations of this everyday phenomenology of photography for an under-
standing of what it is, and what it does, in other cultures.
The use of photographs in fieldwork is an accepted and regular
aspect of contemporary anthropological practice. Whether formally
acknowledged as  photo-elicitation , or the subject of casual conversa-
tions, talking to people about photographs is something that anthro-
pologists frequently find themselves doing. Yet, even where photography
forms an important methodological technique, its identity as a medium
is often naively taken for granted. The focus remains fixed solely on
Journal of Material Culture Vol. 9(1): 73 85
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Journal of MATERIAL CULTURE 9(1)
photographic content, without any consideration of the materiality of
photographic form. The photograph is of anthropological interest for
what it shows, not for what it is.1
So, in a recent publication on the fieldwork photography of Bronis-
law Malinowski, contemporary Trobriand Islanders are asked to identify
empirical details in the photographs, or to reminisce about the indi-
viduals or events portrayed, but their attitude towards photography
itself, as material culture, is taken as given and unproblematic (Young,
1998). They are consulted in order to render the photograph s caption
more complete  a European/North American archival project. There is
no concern for photography s ontology, for what it might actually be for
Trobriand Islanders, for how they might figure its ability to effectively
contain or evoke the past. This anthropological blind spot automatically
reduces others to avatars of European/North American subjects from the
outset. In summing up the first hundred years since its inception Paul
Valery argued that  the mere notion of photography, when we introduce
it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its truth
value, suggests this simple question, could such and such a fact, as it is
narrated, have been photographed? (1980: 195). But perhaps this
equation of photography with the historical itself, although certainly true
of certain European/North American contexts, is not so readily appli-
cable to other cultures? Given the possibilities of its local and cultural
inflection, photography s identity cannot be assumed with such apparent
ease.
John Tagg has famously argued that  photography as such has no
identity and is instead colonized by various powers  state, carceral,
medical, anthropological  that put it to work in their name (1988: 63).
But, if certain similarities  for example in its role as a relic, and its capac-
ities for memorialization  were found to exist cross-culturally, would
this not then argue for the existence of elements that would constitute a
photographic  identity of some kind, however mutable this identity is
in its various local and cultural incarnations?
The argument that follows is based on research I carried out in the
western Solomon Islands in the South Pacific in 2000 2001. The project
was based in Roviana Lagoon on New Georgia island and centred around
the use of a large collection of copy prints  made from photographs of
the area taken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries  to discuss issues
of memory, history, and embodiment with people in and around the
lagoon. I am concerned here both with recognizing the provincial nature
of Eurocentric notions of photography, and with suggesting that a certain
corporeality and materiality do constitute elements of its identity. Such
an awareness of photography as material culture argues for a different,
and more nuanced, methodological approach towards it in anthropo-
logical research.
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Wright: MATERIAL AND MEMORY
CAPTURING THE SOUL
The anthropologist Arthur Hocart recorded attitudes towards photogra-
phy amongst the people of Simbo island in the western Solomons when
he conducted research there in 1908:
The soul is called galagala, which also means a shadow, a reflection; it is
caught in a camera. A Shortland man says  it stop all over a man : by taking
a looking glass you can see it. When a man dies, his soul (galagala) comes
out at the mouth: some men can see it by the use of charms. Rakoto says it
is just like a man and big or small according as it belongs to an adult or a
child. A certain shadowiness seems associated with departing spirits, for one
man asked whether a vague figure in an advertisement of Odol [a brand of
soap] was a ghost. (1922: 81)
This ability to  capture souls is a founding myth of photography which
continues to mark it as a distinctly savage practice. Although it is figured
here as an account of the reactions of  primitive others (a genre that has
a long history in encounter narratives), this capacity has been, and
continues to be, a defining feature of photography s vernacular use in
Europe and North America. Their uncanny ability to achieve a presence
is responsible for the strange intensity of our attachment to particular
photographs. Hocart s account reveals that, although it may have been
subject to certain fears,2 photography was readily ascribed a place by
Simbo people within a pre-existing scheme of connections between the
living and the dead, between the seen and unseen. Does this demon-
strate an aberrant primitive reading, a misreading, of photography, or a
recognition of one of its fundamental tasks? Some clues towards under-
standing the connections between photography and the soul  which are
as relevant for Roviana people today, as they were for Simbo people then
 are provided in the terms used to describe both these  objects .
In Roviana the word maqomaqo is commonly used to translate  soul ;
it is also a ubiquitous term in contemporary discussions of photographs.
Variously glossed as shadow, reflection, shade, spirit, and soul,
maqomaqo is also used to describe both the photograph as an object, and
photography as a process. But despite, or perhaps because of, the
slippage and ambiguity involved, a consideration of maqomaqo is import-
ant to understanding conceptions of photography in contemporary
Roviana. Makoni described to me his relationship to the only photograph
he has of his father:
When I see it he is alive. I kept that photograph [maqomaqo] and after he
had died I looked at that photograph and my father was still alive. When I
look at the photograph I say  that is my father . It is him. It is the paper
shadow [maqomaqo]. It is his soul [maqomaqo].3
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Journal of MATERIAL CULTURE 9(1)
FIGURE 1 Talking about photographs, Buni, Vona Vona lagoon, 2001.
For Makoni the photograph is a powerful relic that retains a physical,
bodily connection to his father; it partakes of his father s substance. It
is a post-mortem memorial, a monument, and an object that, in its imma-
nence, achieves or conjures up an  impossible presence.4 It is the only
image Makoni has of his father, and for him, as for many other contem-
porary Roviana people, photography is a scarce resource. Photographs
arrive from elsewhere; from relatives in the capital Honiara, or further
afield in Australia; from tourists; or previously from missionaries,
traders, or colonial officials when they were, occasionally, given to local
people. There are still very few cameras in Roviana, and it is only since
the 1960s that people have had any real access to using the medium
themselves. Knowledge of photographic processes is also limited, and
many people do not recognize the existence or role of negatives. Until
the mid-1980s most exposed films were sent away to Australia to be
processed, usually by one of the Chinese-owned general stores in
Honiara or elsewhere, and only prints were given back. It is still unusual
to find someone who owns any negatives.
Photography s reproducibility  an aspect taken to be fundamental
to European and North American conceptions of the medium  is not
recognized in Roviana, and as a result photographs retain the aura of
their early 19th-century incarnation as daguerreotypes. Formed directly
through the reaction of light and chemicals on a metal plate, and so
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Wright: MATERIAL AND MEMORY
FIGURE 2 An ancestral skull-house (oru) in Roviana lagoon. R.W. Williamson
1 May 1910.
With kind permission of Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland No.11392
lacking any real negative/positive process, the daguerreotype was a
singular, unique object. As such it was surrounded by a popular
discourse full of references to  mirrors with memory ,  shadows , and
 captured souls . In Europe and North America in the mid-1800s this
discourse was related to folklore practices such as the covering of
mirrors in the house of the deceased so that they would not attract their
soul and become haunted objects.
In literary accounts daguerreotypes were endowed with a spiritual
force, and people were scared of having their image taken. They were
 living pictures which were treated as detached portions of people and
equated with their souls or spirits. The novelist Honoré de Balzac
imagined the process of having one s daguerreotype made as one in
which a physical  skin was taken off a person or object, transported
through the air, and then deposited on the photographic plate.5
Daguerreotypes were sometimes made into photo-jewellery; lockets and
brooches, often accompanied by locks of human hair, which were
designed to be worn and so maintain a further bodily connection. The
daguerreotype was a relic, enclosed in its small jewel-like case  velvet-
lined and gold-framed. Its qualities as an object, its tactility, were funda-
mental  it was an object to be touched and handled, providing a
comforting solidity. It actually needed to be held at a particular angle to
the light in order to be legible at all as a positive image, rather than reveal
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Journal of MATERIAL CULTURE 9(1)
a negative that resembled, according to popular accounts, a  deaths head
in place of a living face.
Alongside any rhetoric of science and progress surrounding photog-
raphy s inception in Europe and North America was a popular discourse
that expressed fears about the new medium. Alan Trachtenberg has
suggested that the  animistic tropes in early written accounts of photog-
raphy can be taken as a return, at the site of the image, of guilty
repressed beliefs in the old animistic universe expelled by Christianity
(1989: 66).
For Makoni the photograph is, like the daguerreotype, a unique
object. It constitutes an important physical connection with his father;
it achieves a living presence   when I see it he is alive . The accounts
given by contemporary Roviana people, as well as Hocart s report,
suggest that this savage ability of photography does not represent a
rupture with either earlier Roviana visual regimes, or with ideas about
relations between the dead and the living, but rather their continuation
through a new medium. In the western Solomons the introduction of
photography does not mark the radical irruption of a shockingly new or
modern way of seeing, but a recognizable vehicle for the maintenance
of connections with ancestors. Historically, the photograph is only one
more object in a long line of media that have the status of relic and the
capacity to achieve a presence.
OBJECTS OF MEMORY
As well as attitudes towards photography, Hocart (1922) also recorded
the Simbo post-mortem practice of  catching or  transferring the soul,
and contemporary Roviana people attest to similar practices being
performed by their own ancestors. In Hocart s account, after death the
soul of the deceased is transferred to a leaf that has been inserted in the
hole of a small shell ring. Both the leaf and the shell are placed in the
thatch of the deceased s house and  are henceforth spoken of as  the
soul  . At a later stage of the mortuary rituals this hybrid object  part
human/part non-human  is attached to the skull of the deceased, which
has been ritually prepared, and both are then placed in an ancestral
skull-house in a process called  putting in the dead . If the skull of the
deceased is not available it can be substituted by an angular upright
stone, or carved stone or wooden heads. These practices reveal the soul
as partible, as something that is capable of being transferred to certain
objects which then embody it, and this process was central to Roviana
ideas about maintaining connections with ancestors through relics.
Central to these notions of embodiment were the ideas that
surrounded the veneration of ancestral relics enshrined in skull-houses.
Roviana skull-houses (oru) had wooden  doors (leva) containing a small
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Wright: MATERIAL AND MEMORY
FIGURE 3 Skull-house on Kundu Hite island, Vona Vona lagoon, which
allegedly contains the skull of Inqava, a well-known Roviana chief. Inqava had
an obituary, written by T.W. Edge-Partington and accompanied by a
photograph, published in the anthropological journal Man in 1907 (7: 22 23).
The skull-house and shrine on Kundu Hite island are also known as  Skull
Island , and tourists who visit Roviana can pay a small  custom fee to see the
site and take photographs.
aperture which allowed the ancestral soul to enter and leave the struc-
ture. Contemporary people refer to the oval designs to either side of the
aperture as  eyes , and stress that visiting skull-houses brought you into
the presence of the ancestors and allowed a communicative efficacy that
was based on a reciprocity of vision. Shankar Aswani (2000) has recently
argued that these post-mortem representational practices reveal a muta-
bility of persons and things, and a process of embodiment that was key
to reproducing Roviana culture and polity.
Skull-houses developed as part of a cultural complex that involved
both the veneration of ancestral skulls and the ritual treatment of skulls
captured in headhunting raids. Recent work carried out by Peter
Sheppard and others (2000), has shown that the development of this
representational complex occurred when previously inland populations
began to resettle on the coast of New Georgia in the 16th and early 17th
centuries. During this phase of coastal resettlement new chiefly lineages
were established and a new range of interconnected media were devel-
oped. These material objects facilitated processes of memorialization and
the maintenance of direct physical connections with the deceased. The
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Journal of MATERIAL CULTURE 9(1)
FIGURE 4 Skull-house on Kundu Hite showing door (leva), ancestral skulls,
and shell valuables.
blessing of ancestors (tinaminae) was a pre-requisite of authority amongst
the living, and the skulls of chiefs and other media, including a variety
of shell valuables, provided efficacious material connections to ancestors
through which power was materialized, channelled and circulated.
The advent of Christianity  in the form of the arrival of the Methodist
Mission in Roviana in 1902  did not result in the wholesale abandonment
of these ideas of embodiment. However, changes did occur to some repre-
sentational practices and it might be possible to trace a progression linking
ancestral skulls, carved wooden or stone heads that represent ancestors,
over-modelled ancestral skulls (kibo), and more  naturalistic types of wood-
carving which appeared with the encouragement of colonial and mission
patronage. Although one version of this constructed genealogy would see
photography as a further, and perhaps final, stage in the movement towards
a heightened sense of realism, for Roviana people what is important is the
notion of embodiment and the maintenance of material connections. As
David Freedberg has argued in relation to certain medieval French statues
and relics:  what is at issue is the response that is predicated on the assump-
tion of presence, not the fact of representation (1989: 28).
Ć% Ć% Ć%
Among the range of images prominently displayed on a wall of Chris
Mamupio s house is a photograph of his father, Simon Mamupio. It is
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Wright: MATERIAL AND MEMORY
FIGURE 5 Wall of Chris Mamupio s house, Munda, Roviana lagoon 2001.
enshrined in a home-made wooden frame, an operation which enhances
its status as a relic. Chris made the wooden frame himself after his
father s death in order to  keep him safe , and the photograph, along with
the other images, are the visual focal point of the room in which guests
are received. For Chris, the photograph is an object that is particularly
 strong ; it is imbued with a presence and a special power. When he talks
about it he does so in the quiet reverential tone often used in oral
accounts of ancestors. The photograph was taken in 1974 by a consular
official from New Zealand who was present at the great feast (inevana)
that took place to mark Simon s inauguration as a chief.
In recounting the history of the photograph Chris performs its biog-
raphy; talking about all the colonial officials and tourists, as well as local
people, who came to the feast which established Simon as  a chief for
looking after the people . Seated with his  lieutenant behind him, Simon
wears a woven sun-shade (toropai) which, together with his distended
earlobes (from wearing large wooden ear-plugs  hobehobe) and large
shell valuable (bakiha) around his neck, are visual reminders of the  time
before . According to Chris, Simon s death in 1991 marked the beginning
of the current period in which  there is no respect anymore .6 He
explained to me why the photograph is so strong:
I get power from it. I get blessing [tinaminae] from my father when I look at
the photograph. I talk to the photograph, that is why I put it on the wall. I
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Journal of MATERIAL CULTURE 9(1)
sit with him. The camera takes some-
thing from inside a person. With this
photograph I can remember my
father. It keeps him. When I look at
the photograph my father sees me. I
ask him questions and he answers.
He is here.7
Chris s insistence on photo-
graphic presence demonstrates
the persistence of earlier Roviana
beliefs about embodiment,
applied here to a new type of
object. It reveals a corporeality of
the photographic image, a status
as relic, that is common to both
European/North American and
Roviana uses of the medium.
Although Chris also speaks to his
father when he visits the latter s
Christian grave, the discourses of
Christian burial preclude the
FIGURE 6 Simon Mamupio.
ability of physical remains
avowedly functioning as relics in
the way that ancestral remains once did, and the photograph becomes
one site where notions of embodiment can still be admitted. Skulls no
longer function as media for accessing ancestral blessing, but the photo-
graph is a space where this remains at least a possibility. Contemporary
Roviana people assert that a soul can be equated with a photograph in
the same way as it is with a skull, and for Chris the photograph does
maintain a direct physical connection with his father. However, photog-
raphy as a medium plays no wider role in the reproduction of a Roviana
polity, as was the case with the communal practices of ancestor venera-
tion centred around the skull-house. In this respect photography has
reinforced, or perhaps even initiated an individualization of memory,
while preserving its material dimensions.
 Seizing the shadow ere the substance fade 8 was how early
daguerreotypists advertised their arcane craft, and I have shown how a
similar intention is relevant to contemporary Roviana photographic prac-
tices. But, in identifying similarities between the two photographies I am
not suggesting that Roviana people are replicating Victorian attitudes
absorbed as a result of colonialism, but that notions of materiality and
embodiment, although culturally figured in different ways, are a defining
feature of both practices. Both practices reveal photography s savage
identity. Notions of photographic embodiment continue to underwrite
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Wright: MATERIAL AND MEMORY
many European/North American
uses of the medium and despite,
or perhaps as a direct result of,
the advent of digital media, indi-
vidual photographs can retain an
aura and assume the role of relics.
Although there is undoubtedly
influence in the other direction,
particularly among the younger
generation, contemporary
European/North American photo-
graphic practices resemble those
of Roviana, rather than vice versa.
In tracing the contours of its
cross-cultural entanglements,
photography s role as material
culture needs to be taken into
account and, as anthropologists
using photography as a methodo-
logical tool, we must consider not
only the photo-graph, but also the
FIGURE 7 Faletau Leve holding a
photo-object.
photograph of himself as a young
man, Munda, Roviana lagoon.
Acknowledgements
I owe all my friends in Roviana a great debt, especially Faletau Leve, Ronald
Talasassa, David Kera, Chris Mamupio, Donald Maepio, Rev. Robertson Bato and
many others. Leana Hola. Lawrence Foanaota and the staff of the National
Museum in Honiara, and the Saunders family, gave me a great deal of support.
Peter Sheppard, Shankar Aswani, Christine Dureau, and Takuya Nagaoka
welcomed me as a colleague and provided invaluable advice and practical help.
I also owe a lot to Andrew Garner, Haidy Geismar, Susanne Küchler, Daniel
Miller, Lucy Norris, Anna Lisa Runasdottir, and Chris Tilley, for their useful
comments, and to my supervisor Chris Pinney for his continuing support.
I am very grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the UK for
a post-graduate award that made my research possible.
Unless indicated otherwise, all photographs were taken by the author in
2000 2001.
Notes
1. This point is made by Elizabeth Edwards (2001) in relation to the use of
archival anthropological photographs, particularly in museums, and Geoffrey
Batchen (2001) has highlighted the importance of tactility and materiality 
the primacy of the photographic object  to various European/North
American vernacular photographic traditions. My thoughts on photography
in Roviana draw upon both these important works.
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Journal of MATERIAL CULTURE 9(1)
2. There are photographs taken in the late 1800s that show western Solomons
people hiding their faces from the camera, and others showing villages
allegedly deserted because people are afraid of the camera.
3. Interview with Makoni, Buni village, Vona Vona lagoon 2001. Translation of
this kind is fraught with ambiguity and I have chosen to translate maqomaqo
in three different ways to reflect, in the first instance, Makoni s physical
gesture towards the photograph as an object; in the second, his use of the
term  paper shadow  using the pijin term  pepa (paper)  elsewhere in the
interview to relate photographic processes to taboos surrounding shadows;
and thirdly, his adoption of the quiet reverential tone of voice used to discuss
ancestors.
4. Roland Barthes refers to photography s concern with  the impossible science
of the unique being (1984: 70 1). Considering Makoni as a contemporary
Roviana equivalent of Barthes, who famously wrote about a photograph that
achieved the presence of his dead mother, reveals the extent of the assump-
tions that unwittingly lie behind much use of photography in fieldwork
methodologies.
5. Quoted in Taussig (1993: 21).
6. Beginning in the late 1990s, several years of political, economic, and social
unrest in the Solomons have put increasing pressure on ongoing issues of
authority and leadership in Roviana. Concerns over a lack of  respect among
the younger generation have a much longer history.
7. Chris Mamupio, Munda, Roviana lagoon 2001.
8. Quoted in Trachtenberg (1989: 181).
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Wright: MATERIAL AND MEMORY
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Ć% CHRIS WRIGHT is a Lecturer in the Anthropology Department at Gold-
smiths College, London where he runs the MA in Visual Anthropology. He is
currently completing his PhD on photography in the Solomon Islands and
recently co-curated the exhibition, Presence at Leighton House in London.
Together with a colleague he organized the international three-day conference,
Fieldworks: dialogues between art and anthropology at Tate Modern in Septem-
ber 2003. [email: [e-mail]]
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