{"id":23246,"date":"2012-05-20T23:43:04","date_gmt":"2012-05-20T23:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=23246"},"modified":"2012-05-20T23:43:04","modified_gmt":"2012-05-20T23:43:04","slug":"ethnographic-pictorialism-caroline-gurreys-hawaiian-types-at-the-alaska%e2%80%93yukon%e2%80%93pacific-exposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=23246","title":{"rendered":"Ethnographic Pictorialism: Caroline Gurrey’s Hawaiian Types at the Alaska\u2013Yukon\u2013Pacific Exposition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ethnographic Pictorialism: Caroline Gurrey’s Hawaiian Types at the Alaska\u2013Yukon\u2013Pacific Exposition<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

History of Photography<\/a>
\nVolume 36, Issue 2<\/a> (May 2012)
\npages 172-183
\nDOI: 10.1080\/03087298.2012.654943<\/a><\/p>\n

Heather Waldroup<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of Art History
\nAppalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1909, a series of photographs by Honolulu<\/a> portraitist Caroline Gurrey was exhibited at the Alaska\u2013Yukon\u2013Pacific Exposition<\/a> (AYPE) in Seattle. The photographs, which combine elements of the Pictorialist<\/a> style and ethnographic photography, are portraits of young men and women of either Native Hawaiian or mixed-race heritage. The archival record indicates that the photographs were purchased in Honolulu by a member of the Exposition’s administration, and Gurrey’s original intention for them is currently unknown. Nevertheless, the author argues that through their display at the AYPE \u2013<\/em> an exposition that stressed industry, expansion and commerce as its key themes \u2013<\/em> Gurrey’s portraits served a significant role in the articulation and visualisation of the Exposition’s central goals and the United States’s desires for settlement of the newly-acquired Territory of Hawaii by bourgeois white agriculturalists.<\/p>\n

A portfolio of portraits of Hawaiian teenagers created by Caroline Hawkins Gurrey in 1909 tells a rich story about the intersection of American imperial interests and the persuasive\u00a0powers\u00a0of photography in the early twentieth century, Gurrev was already a successful portrait photographer in Honolulu when this portfolio was selected to be exhibited at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacifc Exposition (AYPE) in Seattle during the summer of 1909. She photographed a number of Honolulu’s elite, such as Sanford Dole, using the Pictorialist style, and was known for producing various photographs\u00a0documenting life in contemporary Hawai\u2018i<\/a>. The fifty photographs in the Hawaiian Types’ series<\/a>\u2014now held at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives\u2014were chosen and displayed by the AVPE’s administration to illustrate Hawaii’s racial landscape for a very large audience of fairgoer. The photographs’ style which combines tropes of ethnographic photography with the aesthetics of Pictorialism, underscores a key goal ol the AYPE: to combine supposed truth with aesthetic beauty in order to market\u00a0Hawai\u2018i to potential settlers of the relatively new American territory…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ethnographic Pictorialism: Caroline Gurrey’s Hawaiian Types at the Alaska\u2013Yukon\u2013Pacific Exposition History of Photography Volume 36, Issue 2 (May 2012) pages 172-183 DOI: 10.1080\/03087298.2012.654943 Heather Waldroup, Associate Professor of Art History Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina In 1909, a series of photographs by Honolulu portraitist Caroline Gurrey was exhibited at the Alaska\u2013Yukon\u2013Pacific Exposition (AYPE) in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,4405,20],"tags":[10806,10805,10804,911,3872,10828,10809,147],"class_list":{"0":"post-23246","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-articles","7":"category-literary-criticism","8":"category-media-archive","9":"category-oceania","10":"category-usa","11":"tag-caroline-gurrey","12":"tag-caroline-h-gurrey","13":"tag-caroline-haskins-gurrey","14":"tag-hawaii","16":"tag-heather-waldroup","17":"tag-history-of-photography","18":"tag-photography"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}