Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and Photography on Malakula Since 1914 (review)

In the last two decades there has been a surge of publications devoted to the photographic practices of important past anthropologists. This trend has been particularly true of early anthropologists who worked in Oceania. Michael Young’s Malinowksi’s Kiriwina Field Photography, 1915–1919 (1998) was an exemplar for subsequent treatments both in presentation and analysis. Similarly, Haidy Geismar and Anita Herle’s new book on the photography of John Layard sets a new standard in this area of scholarship. Drawing on Layard’s large collection of original glass-plate negatives and artifacts at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, as well as unpublished manuscripts in Layard’s papers, which are held at the University of California, San Diego, this magnificent book is a major contribution to the early history of British anthropology in Oceania and to visual anthropology at large. Geismar and Herle’s thorough documentation, broad coverage, and thoughtful analysis are further matched by the publisher’s high production values.

The photography of John Layard can productively be compared to that of Malinowski. Layard, Malinowski, W.H.R. Rivers, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown were all aboard the S.S. Euripides in 1914, bound for a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Australia. When war broke out in Europe, plans were changed and the serendipitous misadventure of the anthropologists aboard the ship precipitated Malinowski’s sojourn in Mailu and the Trobriand Islands, changing the course of British anthropology. In contrast, Layard followed Rivers to the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), where Rivers almost immediately abandoned him on Atchin, an island off the northeast coast of Malakula. During his approximately 15 months on Atchin, Malakula, and Malakula’s surrounding islands, Layard “took nearly 450 photographs, collected almost 400 artefacts and made seventeen wax cylinder recordings” (18). The present volume reproduces over 200 of those photographs, most of them never before published.

After returning from the New Hebrides to join in the war effort, Layard suffered from mental and physical breakdowns. In comparison to Malinowski, he published little. His only major ethnography, the 816-page Stone Men of Malekula (1942), was based on a brief trip he took to Vao, an island neighboring Atchin. Layard eventually gave up his efforts in anthropology, took up psychoanalysis under the tutelage of Jung in Zurich, and opened a private practice in Oxford. However, the experience of fieldwork on Atchin and Malakula left an indelible mark on him and the people he studied (cf. 295:N. 98685, 296:N. 98686). Struggling with the sexual and social conservatism of his day, he drew continually from his fieldwork to imagine a world outside of the strictures of genteel European society.

Layard’s sensitivity to the experience of fieldwork is beautifully captured in his photographs, which include portraits of informants, material culture, ceremonial scenes, and moments of everyday family life. Layard’s skill as a photographer is evident in the image of a young man with his back toward Layard, as they paddle in a small dugout canoe toward a heavily foliaged island in the distance (3:N. 98591). The composition includes meticulous detail in the foreground and a huge expanse of water and approaching land, and was not a small feat for the technology of the day. Layard spent most of his time with people of a similar status to himself, and thus many of his most evocative photographs are of youths preparing for initiation into the Maki grade system (33, 107–108, 171–204). In contrast, there are striking images of women who insist on facing away from the camera when their husbands are not present (23, cf. 92–93).

Geismar and Herle eschew presenting a vision of life in and around Malakula around 1915 as a kind of “‘untainted’ idyll” (15) of the sort that Layard and Rivers set out to find. Instead, there are numerous images...