A British colonial official named Maurice V. Portman took dozens, if not hundreds, of nude photos of men in the Andaman Islands in the late 19th Century. They ranged from genuinely scientific anthropometric pieces to sexually suggestive reenactments of scenes from Classical antiquity. The above is in the mid-range of that spectrum, depicting some tribal men in authentic ethnic body painting. I should also note that Portman was alleged to have engaged in sex with his subjects. Ironically, the genuine anthropometric photos he made are considered quite good and are still used as a reference today. I plan to do a future series featuring those.
Maurice Portman was quite a controversial individual even during his own lifetime. The Andaman islands today constitute a union territory of the Republic of India but in Portman's day were part of the Raj and are an archipelago of nearly 600 islands, only a few of which are inhabited. Portman himself drifted briefly back into the national consciousness in 2018 when John Allen Chau, an American Evangelical missionary, visited North Sentinel Island to convert the inhabitants and was promptly dispatched to his heaven with a bow and arrow. The tribesmen then buried him where he fell on the beach and attempts to remove the body were abandoned. The aboriginal peoples of the The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are under the Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Act of 1956 which prohibits travel to the island. It would have been best if both Portman and Chau had just simply left them alone.
ReplyDeleteAt least the Government of India had the good sense in 1956 formally leave them alone. The missionary had to know the history and was fatally foolish.
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