The Echo of Things The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands

"The Echo of Things is a very fine book based on Christopher Wright's deep understanding of photographic technologies and artifacts and the lives of those artifacts in a specific milieu. Evoking the diverse uses and valuations of images among Solomon Islanders during the 1990s and 2000s, it is classical ethnography in the best sense; it is a dedicated study in which the locals do a lot of the talking." - Nicholas Thomas, author of In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories "Christopher Wright argues persuasively that photography is thought of in Roviana (Solomon Islands) as a kind of echo, a trace that physically conflates image and sound in reproducing its object. He attends carefully to Roviana perspectives and practices yet deftly locates them in the context of global theorization of photography and its many vernacular uses. Drawing upon richly detailed ethnography, he links analysis of one society's response to the medium to elucidate important debates across anthropology and photography more broadly." - Jane Lydon, author of Eye Contact: Photographing Indigeneous Australians "Echoes of history figured in light and shade across the colonial divide, this precise yet loving account of a non-Western visual culture teaches me once again how little I see but how much Christopher Wright can show about the startling possibilities within those limitations." - Michael Taussig, Columbia University