Mixed Race Studies

‘Beautiful Hybrids’: Caroline Gurrey’s Photographs of Hawai‘i’s Mixed-race Children

History of Photography
Volume 36, Issue 2 (May 2012)
pages 184-198
DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2012.654947

Anne Maxwell, Associate Professor of English
University of Melbourne, Australia

In the early years of the twentieth century the Hawaiian-based American photographer Caroline Gurrey produced a much praised set of the photographs of Hawai‘i’s ‘mixed race’ children. Critics have noted that stylistically Gurrey’s photographs belong to the pictorialist school and possibly even to the high art style of the Photo-Seccessionists, however research into her background and life, and the contexts in which these photographs were produced and consumed, suggests that if we want a fuller understanding of both Gurrey’s intentions and these photographs’ historical importance, we should also take note of the part they played in the burgeoning eugenics movement and indigenous Hawaiians’ reactions to American imperialism.

According to Naomi Rosenblum, professional women photographers did not emerge until the 1880s, following a shift in attitudes concerning female education and employment opportunities. When this occurred, there was a veritable explosion of female interest in the medium so that bv the early twentieth century not only were there thousands of amateur women photographers but the numbers taking up photography (or professional and artistic reasons were also large. Historians of photography have investigated the achievements of these early women photographers, with the result that over the last decade a rough consensus as to who were the most important has emerged. Not surprisingly, most of those singled out are from the USA, Great Britain, France and Germany, where the technology and the professional and social networks supporting early photography were most advanced. Missing are the professional women photographers who lived and worked in the smaller western and non-western countries adjacent or peripheral to these larger ones. Although fewer in number, these women warrant historical and critical attention, if only because the limited institutional support available in these places meant they had to labour that much harder to achieve recognition.

One such is the Hawai‘i-based American photographer Caroline Gurrey (whose name before marriage was Haskins), who was active during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Gurrey gained limited critical acclaim while she was alive, but because of her Hawaiian location, and because she was obliged to abandon her artistic ambitions for photojournalism, her name has now virtually sunk into oblivion. Of the few contemporary critics who know of Gurrey’s achievements, most agree that her most important works are the artistic portraits of Hawai‘i’s…

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