ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two photographs taken on a British gunboat anchored off Tutuila, Samoa, by a Royal Naval officer, Captain W. A. D. Acland. The 'ethnographicness' of these photographs was defined by the subject-matter, two different groups of Samoans on board a ship, their 'otherness' determining the classification. The photographs show, at the moment of temporal fracture, stillness, space and a set of relations within space. This is not merely the specifics of physical space – the side of the Great Gun and the rigging – but a cultural space that is itself grounded in temporality. The chapter considers the institutional phase of the social biography of these photographs. It also considers how detailed teasing out of the photograph through 'theory close to the ground' can facilitate the emergence from one context to others. Extending context and moving beyond the instrumentality of the photograph opens a conceptual space in which we can see how silences have been made.
