This book investigates the histories of photography, photographers and the camera in the Pacific, and the parallel histories of colonial expansion, colonies, territories and Empires, and decolonisation from the 1830s through to the 1960s. It looks at albums, postcards, portraits, colonial handbooks, illustrated newspapers and magazines, serialised pictorial encyclopaedia, and illustrated books, and how published black and white photography documented a place, people and their cultures. The material ranges across the early years of the camera in the Pacific, to the colonial era, and through to today's increasingly prolific mobile phone photography. Most of the argument, insight and data is from so-called old photographs, but reference to the present underpins the discussions on how photographs have been used in historiography over the two hundred years following the invention of the camera. Four essays focus on Papua New Guinea, two on Fiji, and one on American possessions in the Pacific, one each on pictorial encyclopaedia, colonial handbooks, illustrated magazines, and illustrated books, two on postcards, and three on photography generally in Oceania.
