Book review: Christopher Wright (2013), The Echo of Things. The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands. Durham, London, Duke University Press

Compte rendu d'ouvrageThis book is a collection of four chapters, some of them already published elsewhere, focused on photographic attitudes and practices in villages located on Roviana Lagoon, New Georgia, in the Western Solomon Islands. The first chapter (“The Men of the Boat”) deals with colonial photography, its production and local reception, at the turn of the 20th century, and discusses the reality of the islanders’ “first contact” with photography. Chapter 2 (“A Devil’s Engine”) examines the local expectations and practices of the medium throughout the 20th century, again by questioning the status of photography as a ‘modern’ technique imposed to ‘savage’ people by dominant outsiders. Chapter 3 (“Photographic Resurrection”) is concerned with the role of photography as establishing a link between the living and the dead and shows how photography, as a mnemonic practice, is connected to “preexisting Roviana processes of memorialization” (p. 15). Chapter 4 (“Histories”) discusses the way historical photographs from the colonial past are being appropriated and thus contribute to the writing of history from a local point of view