Photography as Labour and Industry: Reading Photographic Archives of Indentured Labour

How can we analyse the myriads of photographs of nineteenth-century indentured workers scattered across Australian libraries and museum collections? Using Harriett Brims’ 1890s photographs of Australian South Sea Islanders as a case study, the article offers a valuable contribution to labour history methodology. While historians have examined archival images of South Sea Islanders searching for evidence of slavery, art historians have tended to focus on the photographer’s unique skills and craftsmanship. Their methodologies risk obscuring the economic and social relations that underpinned the production of photographs in colonial capitalism. In fact, colonial photographers were businesspeople who made a living selling promotional pictures of plantations and mines. As entrepreneurs, they extracted value and labour from their subjects. Instead of looking at photographs as evidence of physical violence and coercion, or as expressions of the unique talent of the photographer-as-artist, we must then recognise the invisible exploitation of the workers depicted in them, whether they were willing or unwilling participants in the production of the images. This way we can bring a more critical awareness to photographic archives.