Nicole Peduzzi
PhD Candidate
2004: lic.phil. at the University of Basel, Switzerland (Social Anthropology, Modern History and Comparative Religious Studies).
Research interests
Social anthropology of Oceania, visual anthropology, museology, history and colonial encounters in the Pacific.
19th Century visual images and technologies have played an important role in shaping contemporary understandings of Pacific cultures. At the turn of the 20th Century many conventions of visual representation in fine arts and photography were carried over into the postcard format. Because of the particular ways historical postcards construct, disseminate, and perpetuate images of indigenous people, they are important sources to study the colonial perception of non-Western communities.
My PhD project “Travelling Miniatures: Kerry & Co.’s Historical Postcards of the Pacific 1893-1917” focuses on postcards by Sydney photographer Charles Henry Kerry (1857-1928) and approaches them as cultural objects. I examine the processes of production, distribution, and consumption of these postcards to shed light on their socio-cultural and historical context.
As artefacts created in various personal cross-cultural encounters, I am particularly interested in considering both the Euro-American and indigenous notions of realism and narrative. Using archive-based research I assess how indigenous peoples in the Pacific were imagined, understood, or misunderstood by those ‘behind’ the camera, as well as what influence those ‘in front’ of the camera had in the process of the image-making.
I have carried out a nine months research on the postcard collection at the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas’ Photographic Study Collection as a Sylvan C. Coleman and Pamela Memorial Art History Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005-2006). In 2007-8 I spent eight months in the Pacific doing research in various archives and museums in Australia, Hawai'i, Samoa and Fiji.
Fig.1: Kerry & Co. (Sydney), In the Shade of the Palms, c.1906, lithography, PSC 2006.13.
Fig.2: Kerry & Co. (Sydney), In the Shade of the Palms, c.1906, lithography, PSC 2006.13. (verso)
Figures 1-5: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Photograph Study Collection.
Nicole Peduzzi
Fig.3: Alfred John Tattersall (Samoa), Zwei Schönheiten von Samoa, c.1905, collotype, PSC 2006.22.
Fig.4: Gustav Arnold (Fiji), Fijian Canoe under Sail, c.1907, collotype, PSC 2006.76.70.
Fig.5: Kerry & Co. (Sydney), Aboriginal Chief, c.1905, lithography, PSC 2006.76.655.