ABSTRACT
Most of Portman’s several hundred photographs of the Andamanese, their cultural life and ‘natural’ habitat were taken between 1890 and 1895, although some are considerably older. His collaborators in this enterprise were dozens of aborigines who posed for the photographs, carried his camera equipment, and assisted in the process of taking (and possibly developing) the pictures, many of which are of a very high quality in the technical sense.1 Clearly, Portman is not the sole author of this extensive collection, and much of his work is within established idioms of colonial photography and anthropology.2
