"Moving Pictures is a remarkable book which provides an important case study of the value and importance of visual return for communities in the Papuan Gulf of Papua New Guinea and Oceania more widely. Through their critical engagement with Frank Hurley's photographs, Lamb and Lee demonstrate how and why heritage collections in museums and archives need to be examined with communities if we are to effectively address ongoing processes of dispossession in Oceania, and to understand our intersecting histories and obligations."
-Joshua A. Bell, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, USA
"This important book offers a valuable intervention into debates about colonial collecting and photography, visual repatriation, and the continuing power and resonance of the archive in the present day. Through deeply engaged and ethically driven research with descendants, Lamb and Lee reveal how the creation of this visual heritage was shaped by complex intercultural relations."
-Jane Lydon, University of Western Australia
"Moving Pictures innovatively and sensitively documents the analytical and emotional responses of contemporary Papuan Gulf peoples to the repatriation of images from the early twentieth century. Lamb and Lee take the visual repatriation process to a new level of sophistication, complexity, and nuance with an international reach and relevance well beyond the Gulf of Papua."
-Ian J. McNiven, Monash University, Australia
This book explores the people of the Kikori River Delta, in the Gulf of Papua, as established historical agents of intercultural exchange. One hundred years after they were taken, reproductions of Frank Hurley's colonial-era photographs are returned to the descendants of the Kerewo and Urama peoples whom he photographed. The book illuminates ways in which the movement, use, and exchange of objects can produce distinctive and unrecognised forms of value andpresents a reconsideration of the colonial legacies that continue to affect the social and political worlds of people in the twenty-first century.
Lara Lamb is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia.
Christopher Lee is Professor of Literature and Culture at Griffith University, Australia.
