ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the career of the American-born photographer Caroline Gurrey who emigrated to Hawai’i at the turn of the twentieth century soon after it was annexed by the USA. The chapter examines the portraits of mixed-race Hawai’ian children that Gurrey made for the Yukon-Alaska Exposition in 1909. It argues that stylistically, these showed the influence of the new international style of Pictorialism with its penchant for soft focus and natural lighting, and the further influence of the Photo-Seccession group based in New York, with its interest in beauty and semi-nudity. The chapter further suggests that if we want a fuller understanding of Gurrey’s intentions and her photographs’ historical importance, we need to compare them to the pictorial photographs of Native Americans produced by Edward Sherrif Curtis as part of his ‘salvage’ project and the American government’s eugenics-inspired policy of creating a multiracial society that precluded race mixing. Gurrey, it is argued, was sympathetic to the indigenous Hawaiian cause and believed that the beauty of the nation’s mixed-race children needed to be recorded before it disappeared under the impact of America’s purist policies.
