Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association

This article discusses the recent visual return of photographs made in Iatmul villages (East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea) between 1929 and 1933 by British anthropologist Gregory Bateson to those communities. It introduces the project and its methods, focusing on the specificities of returning culturally sensitive images to the region. It then discusses Bateson’s photographic practices in relation to the broader history of anthropology and its uses of the camera, highlighting the ways in which photography can be seen as cutting its subjects from their original context. It also uses the metaphor of a lotus growing, comparing the return of photographs to Iatmul communities to a horticultural “striking” process and the researcher to a gardener placing a “cutting” in a fertile environment in which it can sprout and grow anew.