Ulugali'i Samoa: Samoan Couple

New Zealand-based artist Kihara identifies herself as a fa’fafine, a Samoan term for gender non-binary. This photograph comes from the artist’s series Fa’afafine: In a Manner of a Woman. Here the artist poses herself as both the man and woman in a double portrait.

The femme figure on the right holds a woven fan and wears an ensemble of bark cloth (siapo) and a shell necklace. The masculine figure on the left wears a red lei (ulafala) and clutches a fly whisk (fue). The artist has superimposed her head on the body of a male sitter to acknowledge her sex assigned at birth.

Formally posed in a portrait studio complete with a black-drop of tropical foliage, the sepia-toned composition recreates those staged by European photographers in the 19th century. Such images functioned ideologically to reinforce the logic of colonization and were often collected as postcards. By asserting her own image and authorship within a trope of ethnographic photography, Kihara undermines romanticized and cis-heteropatriarchal stereotypes of the Pacific as an “exotic” land of “noble savages.”