Witness | Travels with Mark Adams’ Photography

Since the 1970s, Mark Adams has produced an extraordinary body of photography, notable for its dedication to sites and signs of cross-cultural histories and exchanges around Aotearoa, as well as colonial legacies across the Pacific and Europe. In this lecture Australian anthropologist Nicholas Thomas, who has known Adams since 1993, explores the photographers’ work over the last 50 years. Beginning with the photographer’s images of Samoan tatau in Auckland suburbs in the late 1970s and early 1980s and particularly focusing on his exploration of James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific, Thomas explores how Adams acts as a witness to histories that are powerful, complex and more than ever unresolved.   

Nicholas Thomas first visited Polynesia in 1984 to undertake research in the Marquesas Islands. He has since travelled extensively across the Pacific, and written on Indigenous histories, empire and art; his books include Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (2012), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize and Gauguin and Polynesia (2024). Since 2006, he has been Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.  

Image 1 credit: Mark Adams 13.11.2000. Hinemihi. Clandon Park. Surrey. England. Ngā tohunga whakairo: Wero Tāroi, Tene Waitere, 2000, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of the Patrons of the Auckland Art Gallery, 2014.

Photo 2 credit: Photographer Annie Coombes