MAKING HISTORIES: THE TORRES STRAIT EXPEDITION OF 1898

Abstract

The Cambridge Torres Strait Expedition used photography to address two agendas, both of which were grounded in the temporal ambiguities of photography. Photography was used first as an integrated tool of anthropological investigation, particularly in the field of salvage ethnography and through reenactment; and second as a site of social interaction between the expedition and the Torres Strait Islanders through the exchange and display of photographs. I argue that these two agendas and their function as history are grounded in the temporal ambiguities inherent in photographic inscription. The first, the scientific, depended on the construction and representation of a static temporality; the second, the social, on active real time, which embraced the passage of individual lives and the process of social change. My theoretical position thus addresses the complex historiographical implications of photographic inscription of histories.

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