Multiple Meanings

Mission Photography between New Guinea and Europe, 1896 – ca. 1930

Abstract

Images were crucial to the modern mission enterprise. Missionaries exported pictures from Europe to instruct non-Christian peoples in the new faith as well as they produced images from their world-wide fields of work. This study discusses the transnational use of photography on the part of a German Catholic mission in colonial New Guinea, and shows that, with the technical innovations in the 19th century, the visualization of the missionary encounter to European audiences gained significance. This new impact derived from both, the indexical nature of photographs and the meanings they assumed when they were put to use in different contexts and spaces.