The Photographic Assemblage: Duration, History and Photography in Papua New Guinea

For Biangai speakers of Papua New Guinea, photography and its images first appear during early colonial contact in the 1920s and spread relatively rapidly through the boom of gold mining and expansion of colonial control. For Biangai speakers, agentive qualities are dispersed throughout an active landscape. Thus, flora and fauna can be viewed as active forces, indexing the otherworldly agencies of spiritual beings. Photographs and the photographic practice complicate these agencies as image relations coincide with other object relations. Gell viewed the photographic subjects as a “pure” case of the social agent influencing the image or index; but when the photograph captures another active and coexisting object‐relation in its image, each with its own unique intentionality, agency is further dispersed. This paper will explore this multilayering of social agencies resulting from Biangai photographic practices, consider both historical photos taken of Biangai and contemporary photos taken by Biangai.