Veins of Influence: Photographic Albums, Curatorial Authority, and Colonial Self-fashioning in Charles Hose’s Sarawak

Charles Hose (1863–1929) is widely recognised for his contributions to ethnography, natural history and colonial administration in Sarawak during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While scholarship has focused on his fieldwork and extensive collections, his photographs have largely been treated as individual ethnographic images embedded in texts or dispersed across museum archives, rather than as parts of structured visual artefacts. In particular, his photographic albums have received little sustained attention as integrated curatorial and narrative constructions. This article reframes Hose’s photographic practice through a curatorial and art-historical lens, arguing that his albums constitute curated visual texts in which sequencing, captioning, and material form actively construct meaning, rather than passive repositories of images. It shows that the albums and their photographic plates were carefully composed to produce narrative coherence, assert ethnographic authority, and shape metropolitan understandings of Borneo, while also constructing Hose’s authorial persona. Using the ‘veins of influence’ methodology, the article traces the movement and afterlives of Hose’s photographic materials in four albums – as ethnographic evidence, aesthetic composition, autobiographical statement, and instrument of colonial authority. Drawing on these underexamined albums held in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Cambridge University Library, the Royal Geographical Society, and the British Museum, this study foregrounds the album as a primary analytic unit. This approach demonstrates how Hose’s albums circulated across institutional and public networks as hybrid artefacts, showing that colonial knowledge was materially constructed through photographic sequencing in album form and placement in archives, shaping both representations of Sarawak and Hose’s enduring authority.