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THE ECHO OF THINGS: The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands. Objects/Histories. By Christopher Wright. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2013. xv, 221 pp. (Maps, figures.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5510-6.
Christopher Wright's perceptive contribution to the Objects/Histories Series argues for an ethnographic approach to understanding photography. He looks at the uses of photographs in Roviana Lagoon in the Solomon Islands and examines the ways in which the people of Roviana are entangled with photography: as once colonial subjects, as producers and consumers of photography, and also Roviana perceptions of the past, present, memory and history.
Wright questions the normative value of Euro-American photography and seeks to provincialize those dominant models through an ethnography of Roviana photographic practices. Underpinning Wright's approach is a perception of photography as socially activated which draws not only on Bourdieu's notion of the "sociogram" but also Elizabeth Edwards' concept of the photograph as an oral history. Wright does a thorough synthesis of many contemporary and historical commentators on photography, from John Tagg and Victor Burgin to Allan Sekula, Peter Galassi, Christopher Pinney, Barthe and Batchen, among others, drawing on a wide terrain of photographic interests. In doing so Wright has brought together an interesting...