A thought occurred to me, a striking and unsuspectingly creeping notion, about my subject. This idea had begun to hit the edges of my mind when, as a part of my research into Rapa Nui, I routinely looked at modern photographs of the island, with and without its famous heads or moai. These were all striking photographs of course, with the natural beauty of this treeless, rocky, and grassy island, but their main import did not truly reveal itself to me until my discussion. In almost every single image of the famed Easter Island Heads there is one important detail lacking: people. 

Now this needs some context as images exist online, and I imagine in some vacationer’s camera rolls, of tourists and various travelers posing next to the heads. What remains absent, however, are any people native Indigenous islanders. As discussed with Sigi, who I hope won’t mind being used as firsthand example, and coming from my own memories this encourages the image that the people who made these heads are long gone and buried, like the makers of Stonehenge of old. In reality, the heads were most likely crafted in a period spanning 1200-1700 and the makers, the Rapa Nui themselves, still very much live and survive on the island. To this day, trying to revive their culture which came incredibly close to extinction. 

When dealing with a project such as mine, which is going to in large part focus on the desolation of culture and the people who make up said tapestry, an empty photograph becomes poignantly loud. In the emptying of the photograph of all Rapa Nui, and in the connected encouragement of an “empty island,” the people of the land are pushed aside and made irrelevant in their own story. The very land itself becomes barren and virgin, waiting for outsiders to place their assumptions. The history, and the continuing life, of the people who live and make the tapestry of the island thus become, in effect, irrelevant to what this narrative would be. They are gone, and always will be. This idea then, and ideas like it, are what I must grapple with if I am to truly speak on Rapa Nui. For any true history to be made an actual picture, not just a frame, must be attempted for any worthy endeavor. 

Missing People and Pictures