An eye for Gauguin

By GRAEME LAY

Few places are more photogenic than Tahiti. At every turn a photograph frames itself in the mind's eye: a row of freshly caught bonito hanging from a rack, a child asleep on its grandmother's lap, Moorea's serrated profile from the Papeete waterfront, a beautiful mixed-race woman in pareo or two elderly Chinese men playing mah jong in a cafe.

That the people and landscapes of Tahiti have long been subjects of inspiration for photographers has been emphasised by a photography festival held in and around Papeete, French Polynesia's capital.

Nine exhibitions in seven venues, organised by the French Polynesian Ministry of Culture and the Museum of Tahiti and Her Islands, displayed historic and contemporary photographs of this fabled island and its variegated people.

The photographs of contemporary Tahiti, many in colour, are striking, particularly underwater shots by Philippe Bacchet and those of Tahiti's flora by Tatiana Salmon.

A once-in-a-lifetime shot of a just-hooked mahi mahi from underwater, taken by veteran Erwin Christian, also stands out in this collection.

But it is the historic photographs of Tahiti which haunt the imagination. The exhibition De Londres a Tahiti - la famille Bambridge et allies, held in the Maire (town hall) of Papeete, was devoted to a single family and its multitudinous descendants.

Englishman Thomas Bambridge (1817-1881) married a Tahitian woman, Marae O'Connor, and by her had 17 children. They in turn married locally, multiplying exponentially and conflating the three main bloodlines of French Polynesia: European, Polynesian and Chinese.

It was not only the photographs of this prolific tribe which fascinated, but also the genealogical wheels on display, rotating outwards and incorporating other ubiquitous families of Polynesia: the Wichmans, Greigs, Shepherds, Napas and Hoefts.

It was touching to see elderly Tahitian women, spellbound by the Bambridge family photographs and tracing their forebears through the pink and blue spokes of these genealogical wheels.

At the Museum of Tahiti and Her Islands, a selection of work by legendary 19th-century South Pacific photographers is exhibited - men like Paul Emile Miot, George Spitz and Henry Lemasson - who chronicled Tahitian life and landscapes from the 1860s onwards, a time when photography was asserting itself as an art form and not merely a technological novelty.

Their photographs depict the Tahiti which has gone forever: Papeete as a village, its buildings dotted around the waterfront, overlooked by forest and towering coconut palms; its streets and shop verandas lit by gas-lamps, its harbour filled with many-masted sailing ships.

The Tahitians are portrayed either posing solemnly, dressed in heavy black suits and dresses, or lying languidly, the women bare-breasted. A revelation, too, is a short film, Tahiti, Gauguin et la photographie.

It shows how at least two of the great painter's Tahitian works, Papa moe Mysterious Water (1893) and Mere et Fille - Mother and Daughter (1899) were inspired unmistakably by two George Spitz photographs, viewed by Paul Gauguin before he left France for Tahiti. Art imitating photography, indeed.

A website of these exhibitions can be viewed on the Tahitian Press Agency website.

* Graeme Lay visited the exhibitions as a guest of Tahiti Tourisme and Air Tahiti Nui.