TATAUPhotographs by Mark Adams

Plate 5630.6.1985. Chalfont Crescent, Mangere, south AucklandJim Taofinu‘uTufuga tatatau: Su‘a Sulu‘ape Paulo II

Plate 5730.6.1985. Chalfont Crescent, Mangere, south AucklandJim Taofinu‘uTufuga tatatau: Su‘a Sulu‘ape Paulo II

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Two views, front and back. A man tattooed with a Samoan pe‘a stands alone in the centre of his living room in a low-cost house in suburban Auckland. The room is simply decorated with family photographs draped with shell and plastic necklaces on the walls, colourful bed sheets on the sofas and mats on the floor. The man wears a red-painted pandanus lei around his neck – an item of formal Samoan attire (which is to say he has ‘dressed up’ for the occasion) – and proudly shows o! his pe‘a to those interchangeable entities: the photographer, camera and viewer. The title of the work gives the date and place the photograph was taken, the man’s name and the name of his tattooist: 30.6.1985. Chalfont Crescent, Mangere, south Auckland. Jim Taofinu‘u. Tufuga tatatau: Su‘a Sulu‘ape Paulo (see plates 54 and 55).

Such is the basic formula for Mark Adams’s remarkable portrait series within his larger photofile on Samoan tatau: a man with a pe‘a in a room confronting the photographer, camera and viewer. Sometimes the man portrayed is alone; sometimes he is with others: friends, spouse, family members, the tattooist and his helpers. The nature of the rooms varies, reflecting di!erent individual social and cultural back- grounds, but usually they are domestic interiors (lounges, bedrooms, garages), or personally significant spaces (a dealer in his gallery, a tattooist in his tattoo parlour, a priest in his small country church). Otherwise, the basic scenario is constant.

Beside the portraits, the other main subject in the series is the scene of tattooing itself – photograph after photograph of individuals undergoing the ordeal, primarily in domestic settings.1 They might be seen as contemporary ‘genre pictures’, a category of image from the history of Western painting depicting events in the lives of ordinary people and often set in homely interiors.

There are exceptions to the trope of the intimate interior in the complete ‘Tatau’ series, including photographs of tattoo conventions,#Samoan village ceremonies, hotel swimming pools and industrial factories. Nonetheless, the room is a predominant motif, which I focus on in this essay.

What is it about this scene – tattooed man in a room – that is so compelling in Adams’s work? Is it just a voyeuristic fascination with bodies in private spaces, made alluringly real by the photographic medium’s power of illusion? Is it the striking design of the pe‘a, with its intricate lines and patterns that wrap intimate

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parts of the body? Or is it our instinctive interest in the violence of the pe‘a’s acquisition contrasting with the ordinariness of suburban interiors? Or is there a broader sociological or historical theme running through the series? Is ‘Tatau’ a portrait of a class, a Samoan ‘proletariat’, perhaps, formed by the migration of islanders from homeland villages to the factories and labour markets of Auckland city? Is the series an essay on the post-colonial survival of indigenous cultural practices? Or a commentary on the epiphenomena of globalisation – all those television sets and displaced signifiers of cultural di!erence running through the series, from Mexican sombreros to Japanese bonsai trees to the pe‘a itself?

It is no doubt part of the series’ power that it can be about all these things without being reducible to any one of them. However, in this essay I want to explore two themes that stand out for me in the photographs. One is the correspondence between Samoan tattooing as a memory system and Adams’s photographic interest in historical sites (the interiors of ‘Tatau’ among them) particularly as these sites are also concerned with the problem of memory and its relationship to violence and identity. The other is the theme of place, the places we inhabit, which ‘Tatau’ amply documents; and a more existential idea of place, for which these rooms are metaphors: what does it mean to have a place, to be of a place, to make a place or, conversely, to be or feel placeless or out of place?

The room as a recurrent trope in ‘Tatau’ has its origins in Adams’s extended portrait of his friend Tony Fomison, which he began in Christchurch in 1971. The portrait was a long-term project, which Adams returned to at various points during their lifelong friendship (Fomison died in 1990). Some of the first studies capture the painter posing as a romantic visionary. He is photographed alone in a raging storm against the backdrop of the windswept hills of Banks Peninsula, his body braced against the elements, his eyes closed as if communing with inner voices or inhaling the spirits of the landscape. In another study he is photographed in the same somnambulant state beside an expressionistically distorted window. Fomison’s posing is theatrical in these photographs. They are romantic clichés. But they register something genuine of his desire – and not only his, but Adams’s also – to confront an internal condition corresponding to the

far left:1972. Portrait of Tony Fomison at

Tai Tapu, Banks Peninsulaleft:

1971. Portrait of Tony Fomison at Beverage Street, Christchurch

opposite:left:

18.3.1978. The parlour, Gunson Street, Freemans Bay, Auckland

middle:18.3.1978. The stairwell, Gunson Street, Freemans Bay, Auckland

right:18.3.1978. The bedroom, Gunson Street, Freemans Bay, Auckland

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historical impetus of the time. The late 1960s and early 1970s were the beginning of an important era of political and ideological decolonisation in New Zealand, and what that meant for P$keh$ was a serious question for Fomison and Adams. It informed their political commitments, their solidarity with M$ori protest against colonial injustices and with calls to recognise land and Treaty rights. But it also meant a personal confrontation with the nature of their own historical identity as settlers – or the descendants of settlers – in New Zealand and the wider Pacific.

The mode of the portrait changed after both men moved north in the early 1970s. In Auckland, Adams began to photograph the rooms of the artist’s Gunson Street villa in Ponsonby. While retaining their focus on an individual subject, which is to say while remaining a portrait, these studies drop the usual conventions of depicting face and body and focus on the things the subject has gathered around himself in the spaces where he lives. Adams’s portrait now conveys Fomison as someone dispersed in the things he has acquired, inherited, bought, selected and brought back to construct his personal dwelling place, like a bird building a nest from the debris of its wider world. It is a task everyone faces to one degree or another. Where do you build your ‘nest’ and what form must it take, what content must it hold, for you to feel, if only minimally, ‘at home’ there? The problem recalls Martin Heidegger’s famous essay on the relationship between building and dwelling, where dwelling implies an existential aim underlying the merely technical or pragmatic processes of building.2 To dwell entails our subjective existence in the world as something worked at through an intimate engagement with ordinary things and spaces as we find ourselves among them. Heidegger does not limit the concept of dwelling to domestic interiors. Ultimately, it extends to neighbourhoods, towns and cities and involves the shared feelings of entire communities; but private interiors exemplify the concept because there, the subjective significance of space is individually apparent. So, too, is the precariousness of dwelling since we do not feel ‘at home’ just anywhere.

Adams’s photographs of Fomison’s villa document this intimate but precarious engagement with things and spaces. The painter gathers objects, images, books and furnishings that are like shreds and fragments of his historical identity. A wall in the artist’s front-room parlour is decorated with colonial

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landscape paintings, old ethnographic prints of M$ori and Pacific islanders, various Polynesian artefacts – a sheet of tapa cloth, a taiaha, a string of piupiu, a kete – displayed like 19th-century collections of ‘native curios’. A cranny above the stairs is filled with the artist’s collections of outdated domestic utensils – rolling-pins, knitted doilies, cake tins and wooden eggcups – that evoke the homeliness of another time.

Fomison plays with the feeling of the uncanny in the construction of these spaces. He creates the homely in order to provoke a sense of the unhomely, according to the Freudian notion whereby the repressed or forgotten return to disturb us in precisely those places where we have made ourselves most at home.3 Fomison’s rooms cultivate this disturbance: the cosiness is too cosy; the homeliness is strangely anachronistic; the skulls and rosary beads and the monstering presence of his own artwork (like the dead Christ after Holbein and the diseased hands from a medical journal in his bedroom) are calculated to unsettle the very nest they are part of. Adams’s photographs of these spaces establishes the room as an important site in his oeuvre and are precursors to the rooms in ‘Tatau’. The latter will reject Fomison’s gothic theatricality, his self-spooking ‘haunted house’ aesthetic. But they remain sensitive to the idea that everyday living spaces can be troubled by immanent memories welling up from the past.4

The origins of ‘Tatau’ can be told in two ways. One is the familiar story about how the project got started. In 1978, Adams was asked by a friend, Alan Taylor, to provide photographic illustrations for an article he was writing on Samoan tattooing for the magazine Craft Australia. Taylor knew a man in Grey Lynn with a pe‘a, Mr Salati Fiu, who was willing to model for a small fee. Adams was willing to help out, although he knew next to nothing about Samoan tattooing at the time. Significantly, most of the photographs from that first session resort to conventional ethnographic types, as required by the article they illustrated. The pe‘a is cropped from the body of its anonymous wearer and displayed against a neutral background in the quasi-scientific mode typical of 19th-century ethnographic photography; or the model is posed with stereotypical ‘attributes’ of his ‘nativeness’, as in the photograph of Mr Fiu holding a bush knife – a prop he volunteered (evidently knowing the routine). But the shoot also produced the singular portrait of Mr Fiu framed to include the room

far left:2.4.4978. Proof sheet of Mr Salati Fiu

left:Unknown photographer. Side view of tattooed man

Reproduced in Carl Marquardt, The Tattooing of Both Sexes in Samoa, 1899

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he occupied – the ‘context’, as Adams would call it (see plate 1). Framing a view is a straightforward business, but clearly it took something to break the mould of a hundred years or so of photographic convention in picturing the ‘other’. In any case, the photograph was an exception in that series and taken very much for Adams’s own artistic purposes.

But ‘Tatau’ can also be said to originate in the subjective e!ect of that first portrait, which provoked something disturbing for Adams. For him, the striking formal correspondence between the patterns of the pe‘a and those of the wallpaper, with its royal wreaths and crowns, resonated with the di!erence between European and Polynesian cultures, and the whole complicated history of their entanglement since the 18th century. Was the man with the pe‘a ‘out of place’ in the room, an anachronism in the contemporary world (which was the standard reading of the fate of colonised cultures in modernity)? Or was the room, with its imperial wallpaper and colonial architecture, ‘out of place’ with the man – or rather, as Adams remembers thinking, ‘out of place’ here, in Aotearoa, in the South Pacific? And if the room is ‘out of place’, then what is this place? Where in fact am I? Whose place is this? Is this ‘New Zealand’, or some other place in which I am a stranger? What ‘belongs’ here and what doesn’t?''5 Adams was deeply impressed by the power of the photograph to interrogate his historical identity in this way; by its ability to pose the larger question of his ‘dwelling’ in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific. It motivated his e!orts to find out more about Samoan tattooing in the city and eventually led to his friendship with Sulu‘ape Paulo and thereby to opportunities to photograph that ‘original scene’, so to say, again and again.

Another defining work in the series is the photograph of Tom Ah Fook, taken at his home in west Auckland in October 1978 during one of Adams’s first outings with Paulo (see plate 13). The photograph depicts Paulo and his two assistants sitting on the floor in the middle of Ah Fook’s living room, absorbed in the task of tat-tooing his left knee. As in the portrait of Mr Fiu, the work’s peculiar frisson arises from the contradiction between old colonial stereotypes about the place of tattooing in the modern world (such as that depicted in Robert Flaherty’s famous documentary Moana: Romance of the South Seas (1926), in which the ritual of tattooing is set in timeless, faraway Samoa and nostalgically portrayed as the custom of a noble race, utterly

2 .4.1978. Mr Salati FiuTufuga tatatau: Fa‘alavelave Petelo

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exotic to the West), and the insouciant manner in which the business takes place in this ordinary lounge one fine day in Auckland. The scene’s sublime matter-of-factness calls into question a raft of modern preconcep-tions about what it means to dwell in modernity because here, in the middle of the city, in the late 1970s, the Samoan way of dwelling is alive and well, entirely at home, and carrying on regardless.

The group’s absorption in their task is doubled by our own fascination with the room, its contents and the drama unfolding before us as if we were not there. (But we are, and our presence, via the photographer, is betrayed by the reflection of his lighting rig in the television screen.) Still, there is a kind of spellbinding dreaminess to the room, in stark contrast with the bodily violence of the operation we observe. The things in the room – the television on the far side; the bonsai tree on top of it; the picture window covered with diaphanous curtains and the hazy view of Auckland beyond with blue sky and pu!y clouds; the 21st- birthday keys and floral spray on the pink-papered wall; the sofas covered in plastic; the mats on the floor; the tufuga’s tools in an orange bowl – all elicit an intrigue of their own that drifts away from the main event, stirring only a vague reverie of associations in our minds. That reverie may be arbitrary, a ‘free play’ of the imagination, but it is just this quality that involves us personally in the ‘meaning’ of the photograph and disposes our viewing to the workings of memory.

In a conversation with me in 2003, Adams described his thoughts about the central tropes of ‘Tatau’ – the room and tattooing – in terms of their correspondence through a common theme of violence:

I was thinking of the context and the interiors as – when you start saying it, it sounds kind of na! – but like a symbol in a way, it’s something that’s occurred because of a colonial incursion, it’s here because of colonialism, and . . . that implies violence. But the tattooing is also violent. It’s a kind of controlled violence being done to the body, and that’s something that’s been done here for God knows how long. But the two are sitting there together.6

In associating the violence of tattooing with colonialism, Adams is not suggesting tattooing is a kind of simile for that history that recalls the blood shed on colonial battlefields or the violent character of first

7.10.1978. Triangle Road, Massey, west AucklandTom Ah Fook

Tufuga tatatau: Su‘a Sulu‘ape Paulo II

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encounters. Rather, he is making a link to the common problem of memory and the cultural and ideological shaping of consciousness. The violence of tatau is addressed to memory. Whatever its cultural or social meaning, tatau says, first of all, you will not forget this! It is a painful ordeal administered to a sensate and fully conscious human body. The marks of tatau are first the aesthetically charged traces of that trauma; their significance is only subsequently given by culture. In its traditional context, the ritual served to induct young males into Samoan society as properly Samoan men who were fit to participate in the culture, to serve the chiefs, represent the village, and so on – a function it still to some extent serves. Indeed, as Alfred Gell argues, the ritual corresponds metaphorically to the process of being born, or rather, reborn, whereby a properly cultural being emerges from an ordeal of pain and bloodletting, wrapped and protected by the powerful designs of the pe‘a.7 Emphasising this metaphor, the final mark administered in the tattooing process is known as the pute, which covers the navel as the last remaining sign of the man’s natural birth. As Sulu‘ape Paulo put it, ‘When the pute is finished and your tatau is complete, you are no longer a mother’s boy.’'8 However, the tattooing of the pute introduces a paradoxical significance to the pe‘a. On the one hand, it serves to authenticate the recipient as a legitimate member of the culture and to remind him of his responsibilities in the society. On the other hand, it is also a reminder to forget a former existence, visibly crossed out on his body: ‘You are no longer a mother’s boy.’

For Adams, the subjects he photographs, like the patterned traces of the pe‘a, also have an identity-a%rming function as well as the mnemonic potential to recall the violent origins of that identity. His photographs, he once said, are primarily about him.9 But there is always a collective dimension to identity, so that we might also speak here of being P$keh$ – although even this may be too narrow, since colonial his-tory informs the making of most of the modern world. Who is not subjectively implicated in colonialism’s legacy today? The various projects Adams has developed over the course of his career have focused on sites associated with the historical formation of modern New Zealand and indeed the modern world: ‘Cook’s Sites’, which documents locations across the globe associated with Cook’s voyages; ‘Land of Memories’, which documents historical landscapes in the South Island of New Zealand; ‘Tatau’, which documents the

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places where we live, from Auckland to Amsterdam; an unnamed photofile of places where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed; another of sites of cross-cultural interactions in Rotorua and the Bay of Plenty; and others.10 These sites mediate memory in ambiguous ways. Most are fairly banal places – parks, roadways, bridges, factories, museums, eateries, roadside landscapes, ordinary lounges, bedrooms – that reflect back to us the world we already know. They ‘wrap’ us in images of the familiar in the same sense that tattooing once ‘wrapped’ Polynesian subjects in images of gods and ancestors. Many sites in Adams’s work reflect the ambiguous construction of memory and forgetting. Some are occupied by intentional memorials – statues, obelisks, stone cairns, memorial parks – or edifices to the reconstruction of the past – library stores, museum displays. The pe‘a, too, is a memorial form in the site of the room. Thus, at the heart of Adams’s work is a sustained meditation on the relationship between site and memorial, memory and constructed memory, the full amplitude of human consciousness and the way consciousness is moulded by culture and ideology. The question to which this meditation leads is whose memory is it? For the sites in Adams’s photography are typically riven by divided memories. The violence that haunts them is often the violence of memory itself, since the very memorials that would commemorate the founding of one historical community – settler New Zealand, for example – elide the memory of other communities, vanquished by history or marginalised as political enemies in the present. The dilemma is well expressed by Paul Ricoeur, who writes:

There is no historical community that has not arisen out of what can be termed an original relation to war. What we celebrate under the heading of founding events are, essentially, violent acts legitimated after the fact . . . The same events are thus found to signify glory for some, humiliation for others. To their celebration, on the one hand, corresponds their execration, on the other. It is in this way that real and symbolic wounds are stored in the archives of collective memory.11

Adams’s photographs repeatedly return to this ‘wound’ at the origins of settler/modern identity. Every-where he looks he sees the traces of its founding violence, like the memory of his own tattoo. Consider, for example, the photograph of an estuary and rocky promontory in the South Island of New Zealand

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from his series, ‘Land of Memories’. As Harry Evison notes, the promontory is called Shag Rock by P$keh$ and Rapanui by M$ori. The estuary is the mouth of two rivers known as Opawaho and Otakaroro by one community and Heathcote and Avon by the other. What was once a rich source of food and flax for the tribe Ng$i Tahu is now the ‘gateway’ to the modern city of Christchurch, Adams’s ‘home town’.12 The photograph does not just passively reflect these divisions. It is the aching expression of them, conveyed through a haunting, melancholic stillness. In the foreground a stretch of sand is imprinted with human footsteps. They are emblems of the ambiguity of memory. On the one hand, ephemeral, soon to be washed away, they signify its vulnerability to erasure and forgetting. On the other hand, they illustrate a Ng$i Tahu proverb (the subtitle of ‘Land of Memories’), ‘Whenua i maharatia, haehae nga takata – scars on the land, made by people’, which associate the footprints with unforgettable wounds, with memories embedded like scars in the landscape itself. ‘Land of Memories’ seems to document generic landscapes or locations related to the construction of modern New Zealand: its roads and bridges, towns and farms, parks and beaches. But each remains a contested site, some still (or until recently) in legal dispute over unjust colonial expropriation, others haunted by the memory of colonial conflicts or of ways of life obliterated by the construction of hydroelectric dams and industrial factories.

In ‘Cook’s Sites’, Adams follows in the tracks of the famous navigator and photographs sites Cook visited and places where he interacted with the locals. Again, it is not history Adams documents but the way history inhabits – or fails to inhabit – memory in the present. In 2003, he photographed a monument in a Sydney park in Botany Bay dedicated to the memory of Sir Joseph Banks, the famous botanist and aristocrat on Cook’s first voyage. The monument is an imposing but familiar structure, typical of memorials in city parks everywhere; the sort of place you jog past in the morning or sit and have your lunch by (its familiarity, of course, the very expression of its ideological hegemony). It commemorates the founding of the Australian nation with a bronze plaque dedicated to Banks as ‘the patron of Australia’ but obscures the violence – the decimation of the indigenous population – on which that founding was based. Indeed, Adams calls the memorial ‘a monument to blockage’. What saves the photograph from merely repeating

20.8.2003. At the landing place, Kernell, Botany Bay, New South Wales, Australia

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the blockage, he says – and here we gain an insight into the workings of his photography – is the rain. There are water stains down the sides of the monument and puddles on the ground where it had rained earlier in the day. There is ‘history’ for you: it rained that day.13 This is nothing, of course, but in Adams’s work that sign of next to nothing, of something as banal as a water stain, is the agent of a possible anamnesis, a counter-memory that brushes ‘against the grain’ of the dominant story.

Consider, finally, Adams’s 2002 diptych of Kealakekua Bay, the site of Cook’s historic reception by Hawaiians in 1778 and of his death at their hands the following year. As far as divided memories go, this is a loaded site. Adams photographs the bay at dusk, framing the far shore where Cook was slain as a distant silhouette tapering to nothing between sea and sky. An obelisk erected to the navigator’s memory is barely discernable in the blackness – it’s only a tiny sliver of grey visible if you search for it. What is not apparent in the photograph, however, is that the viewer is positioned at the base of an unseen heiau, a Hawaiian temple site, where Cook was ceremonially inducted into the rites of the god Lono. We are thus between two memorials, two ‘memory systems’: European and Hawaiian. To see one is not to see the other. As one disappears into the landscape, the other looms behind.

To return to ‘Tatau’, it is important to recognise its continuities with the concerns of Adams’s historical landscapes. That the rooms are also memory sites is true in the obvious sense of the kind of things that fill them – photographs, souvenirs, family mementos, 21st-birthday keys – all things that constitute the informal archive of our personal and family memories. They are also, as Adams saw, filled with ‘symbols’ of ‘the violence of colonial history’, disguised in the banality of the everyday: the Victorian cabinet filled with dainty tea sets in the photograph of Faiga Mamea (see plate 37); the photographs of church choirs and cricket teams in the portrait Mr So‘oalo Fou (see plate 8); the tokens of Christian religiosity – pictures of Jesus, statuettes of the Virgin Mary, framed maxims on virtuous living – that are scattered throughout the series; and so on. Indeed, the colonial baggage of the series is so pervasive as to become the object of ironic parody in the portrait of Michel Thieme, impersonating the role of the ‘white savage’ (see plates

8.4.2002. At Hikiau Heiau, evening view across Kealakekua Bay, Hawai‘i

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66 and 67). But ‘Tatau’ is something other than the historical landscapes. Indeed, the series works as a kind of counterpoint to the melancholy of those landscapes. It focuses on the practice of Samoan tatau and portraits of tattooed men as an in-your-face answer to colonial narratives of cultural decline, racial purity and fixed location. For nothing is more insistent in the series than its will to document the cultural vitality of Samoan tattooing in the present: taking its transposition to migrant communities in its stride; inventing new forms and rituals to make it meaningful to Samoans in the present; and boldly incorporating ‘foreigners’ and ‘foreign markets’ into its expanding sphere of operations.14

The dialectic between room and tattooed man also prompts reflection about the way we construct our ‘place’ in the world. How does a migrant villager from Samoa make the empty shell of a state house in a foreign city habitable for himself and his family – and not just physically habitable? How do two Lebanese brothers make their home in Sweden? How does a New Zealand-born Samoan, divided between the homeland of his parents and the place he grew up, make himself at home between those separate locations? How does a son of colonial settlers in New Zealand make or remake his place in that country in the face of the violence of the colonial past and the impetus of a post-colonising present? The portraits in ‘Tatau’ all represent individuals for whom the Samoan pe‘a – and the painful ordeal of acquiring it – is somehow part of the answer to these questions, as are the intimate spaces they construct around them.

One of the most interesting and, for Adams, personally significant photographs in the series is the group portrait The evening of the umusaga for Fuimaono Norman Tuiasau, taken in May 1980 (see plate 31). The photograph depicts Fuimaono in the lounge of his family home amid a gathering of family and friends, including the painter Tony Fomison. The group has assembled after a formal ceremony held earlier in the day to mark the completion of Fuimaono’s pe‘a (see plates 26–29). As the man of the occasion, Fuimaono stands in the centre of the group, bare to the waist, and dressed in an emerald green lavalava, his pe‘a just visible above it. Beside him to his left, also bare to the waist and tattooed with a pe‘a, is Fomison, his right hand resting somewhat awkwardly on the head of the little girl in front of him, like a self-conscious actor not entirely sure of his role and in need of a prop. Fomison presents a curious figure in this ensemble –

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though no one seems particularly bothered by his presence. To the left of the photograph, Fuimaono’s father, S$ Tolua Tuiasau, wearing a lavalava cut from the same cloth as his son’s, sits in an armchair with an unlit cigarette, an expression of stoic pride on his face. Fuimaono’s mother, Laumua Tuiasau, stands behind him to his right, partially eclipsed by his shadow – a fact that cannot but recall one of the meanings of the pe‘a discussed earlier: the passage into manhood signified finally by the mark of the pute over the navel (still red and swollen on Fuimaono’s body). Here, he is no longer a ‘mother’s boy’. The rest of the group, except for two women in animated conversation on the sofa and a few distracted children, look directly at the camera, photographer and viewer. On the whole, everyone is relaxed and smiling. Only Fomison’s awkward gesture and perhaps the man standing behind the piano on the left register any discomfit or uncertainty about their company and what they are facing. And what are they facing? In the first instance it is Adams, who is orchestrating the tableau from behind the camera. Then of course it is the camera itself, a large wooden box with a lens on it that will ‘take’ their picture. And, finally, it is the abstract place of an infinitely substitutable viewer, you and I, who are there but not there, looking at them looking at us. Like Diego Velásquez’s famous painting Las Meninas, the portrait is addressed to our side of the pictorial screen. It stages a fiction of inter-human confrontation, an illusion of reciprocity of presence in which those in the room face you looking at them looking at you. If we question who they are, they are also questioning who we are.

For Adams and his New Zealand audience, The evening of the umusaga for Fuimaono Norman Tuiasau does this in a particularly pointed way. On the one hand, it is an extremely personal photograph, a portrait of the photographer’s friends. The conviviality of the group has to do with the fact that it is he, Mark, and not just anybody on our side of the room (although ultimately it is anybody, and that universal address is an important part of the meaning of the photograph). Fomison’s gesture and the quizzical look of the man behind the piano mark the outer edges of their cohesion as a community. But within those boundaries, the sense of friendship in the group is utterly convincing. This is a ‘family’ portrait. On the other hand, the group is strikingly heterogeneous in its composition, bridging di!erences of culture, class, gender,

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age, experience and history. Indeed, the group represents a kind of utopian microcosm of larger social and historical forces unfolding beyond its walls. Or rather, their presence in the room is analogous to the ‘world’ they were making in various ways outside it.

At this point it is necessary to say something of the background of the main actors in the photograph. Fuimaono, for example, is a New Zealand-born Samoan who was studying law at the University of Auckland in the mid 1970s. He then lived in Ponsonby where he met Fomison (they were neighbours) and became good friends with him and Adams. Between 1979 and 1980 he and Fomison were tattooed by Sulu‘ape Paulo, sharing occasional sessions together at his parents’ home in Onehunga and the tufuga’s home in south Auckland. Some of those sessions Adams documented (see plates 26–29). His decision to acquire a pe‘a, which was unprecedented among New Zealand-born Samoans at the time, was a radical cultural act that directly addressed his situation as a son of migrants. On one level, it was an a%rmation of his identity as Samoan: ‘For me, the reason why I got tattooed was so there would be no doubt about who I was, and to have the recognition of one’s family, one’s community.’''15 Yet he was also redefining what it meant to be Samoan – and the meaning of the pe‘a – in an urban, migrant, New Zealand context. If the essence of the tradition (the training of chiefs or leaders) was a%rmed by his tattooing, its pragmatic significance was entirely adapted to a new place and new times. Fuimaono had been a member of the activist group the Polynesian Panthers, who were modelled on the American Black Panther Party and made up of second generation urban Pacific islanders like himself – university and senior high school students who campaigned in various ways for the rights and needs of Pacific communities. He was active in the Samoan Students Association at the University of Auckland and would later serve the cause of Pacific people in New Zealand as a lawyer and a public servant. He shared the political ideals of his generation to decolonise the Pacific, which informed his activism and solidarity with the struggles of M$ori. Most New Zealanders will recognise Donna Awatere (see plate 29) in trademark sunglasses as one of the two women in conversation on the right. She was a leading member of the influential group of urban M$ori activists Ng$ Tamatoa, which played a catalysing role in the resurgence of M$ori protest in the 1970s and

10.5.1980. Grotto Road, Onehunga, AucklandThe evening of the umusaga for Fuimaono Norman TuiasauTufuga tatatau: Su‘a Sulu‘ape Paulo II

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1980s, as well as the author of the radical text Maori Sovereignty. Her interlocutor on the sofa is Zita Anich. Both she and Awatere were psychologists at the time working for the Department of Education at the University of Auckland. The fair-haired boy in front of Zita is Morgan Coney, son of the influential New Zealand feminist Sandra Coney (who had left the gathering some time earlier). Fomison of course adds yet another element to the mix: the struggle of New Zealand settler culture to reckon with its problematic history in the Pacific and to forge a post-colonial relationship with its indigenous cultures. (Fomison once remarked that he was tattooed ‘to compensate for the blood of Tupua Tamasese Lealofi [leader of the Samoan passive resistance movement], who was shot by New Zealand soldiers in 1929’'16). The man behind Fomison (under the Mexican sombrero in the corner of the room) is Noel McGrevy, a scholar of tatau and part of the circle around Paulo. The rest of the group are Fuimaono’s siblings and relations. They are among the thousands of Pacific migrants and their New Zealand-born children adapting to life in New Zealand while preserving their language and culture in the wake of the massive Polynesian diaspora after World War II. More could be said about these individuals but this is enough to indicate the sense in which their extraordinary gathering in this portrait was part of a broader concern to remake their ‘world’ and the conditions of their ‘dwelling’ in it.

I want to conclude this chapter by recalling once more the analogy Adams drew between the violence of tattooing and the mnemonic potential of the room to recall the violence of our colonial origins. Adams called this a symbol, but there is a sense in which it is also real, in which the photographs evoke a literal pain. Pain is a preoccupation of the series. The studies of men undergoing the operation, the close-ups focused on bleeding, swollen flesh, all exemplify the photographer’s obsession with this theme. In the sequence of photographs of Fomison being tattooed in the converted garage of the Tuiasau home, the violence of the process is conveyed through a sequence of intimate close-ups. The camera is right there, inches away from the place where the ‘au is being hammered into the artist’s flesh. There is pain in the middle of that cluster of bodies, but the camera can only represent it at a distance. It gets closer and closer, viewing the action

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from this angle and that, but the experience of pain is always beyond its reach. Inevitably, the fascination with blood and violence is diverted into another kind of visual fascination: with the intricate tracery of the pe‘a’s design; or the aesthetic medley of textures, patterns and forms; or the curious miscellany of objects in a room – an ashtray, a packet of cigarettes, an empty jar. This ‘diversion’ takes us away from the violence of the ritual into a kind of aimless reverie mediated by things. But distraction, one could say, is its own alleyway into the possibility of a memory as real and painful as the experience of being tattooed.

In his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes presented a theoretical distinction between what he coined the ‘punctum’ and the ‘studium’. These terms di!erentiate between the conventional function photographs serve as evidence, record, document or illustration in the construction of objective histories (‘studium’), and an a!ective experience provoked by some arbitrary detail in certain photographs which is uniquely subjective and non-communicable to anyone other than the individual feeling it (‘punctum’), and which he describes as a kind of ontological pain.17 ‘Punctum’ means a prick, a point, a wound, a cut, a little pain, but one experienced somehow at the core of one’s being. The idea of the ‘punctum’ emerged from Barthes’s deep dissatisfaction with a mode of historical writing that presupposed a bodiless, abstract subjectivity oblivious to its own foundations in history, a history it was content simply to know. Yet photographs have a potential to move us personally. Adams’s photographs explore a similar duality. On one level, they document sites like crime scenes, tourist spots and curios shops. On another level, these sites, shot through with random details – a pattern on wallpaper, a water stain on a monument, some footprints in the sand, an awkward gesture – have the potential to cut through what we know to touch, painfully, what we are.

opposite:left:3.4.1979. Grotto Road, Onehunga, AucklandFrom left: Fuimaono Tuiasau, unidentified man (solo), Noel McGrevy, S! Tolua Tuiasau, Tony Fomison, Tufuga tatatau Su‘a Sulu‘ape Paulo II, Sese Lemamea (solo)

middle:3.4.1979. Grotto Road, Onehunga, AucklandFrom left: unidentified man (solo), Tony Fomison, Tufuga tatatau Su‘a Sulu‘ape Paulo II, Sese Lemamea (solo)

right:3.4.1979. Grotto Road, Onehunga, AucklandTony Fomison Tufuga tatatau: Su‘a Sulu‘ape Paulo II