Five Facets of Photography: Travellers, Exploration and Photography – Robert Peary

I’m putting together material for my U3AC course ‘Five Facets of Photography’ and discovering fascinating photographic byways.  I’ll share some of these in occasional posts.

In 1891 Robert Peary lived with the world’s northernmost people, a community of Greenland Inuit known as the Inughuit, as he was contemplating an expedition to be the first to reach the North Pole.  When he eventually set out he took along entire indigenous families.   Peary, Matthew Henson, his black servant, and six Inuit, leaving their families, came within almost 100 kilometres of the Pole.  Much has been written about the men’s journey, but almost nothing has been said about the women who were left behind.

Study in Bronze, Robert Peary, c. 1909

It appears that Peary was interested in exploring more than just the icy regions and fathered at least two mixed-race children.  One of his photographs from his time in the arctic region is Study in Bronze.  The version published in The Explorer’s Eye (Eds Fleming and Merullo, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005) shows the figure naked to the waist.  It is suggested that the woman may have been of mixed Scandinavian and Inuit parentage.  Like many western men of the time, Peary viewed indigenous peoples through a veil of paternalism, laissez-faire philosophy and eugenicist racism.  He said, ‘If colonialization is to be a success in the polar regions let white men take with them native wives, then from this union may spring a race combining the hardiness of the mothers with the intelligence of the fathers.’  History does not record which qualities his two mixed-race children inherited.

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