Grapengiesser , Klinkmüller , Riethmaier , Stünzner and McKay families are all of high importance for photo researchers of the Samoan colonial period . Other smaller collections contained real seams of gold that were unique in content – images from the Sasse , Meiritz , Conradt , Reye , Berking , Schaumkel , Meyer , Pfeil , Von Reiche , Hansell , and Thompson families , for example . After a time the net spread to capture images from Australia , Samoa , America and Germany .
But scanning images was the easy part . Working out who was in the photos and where and when they were taken , often took a lot longer and a lot more work . Some albums were cooperative – they were captioned , or their owners knew identities and details . But for a large proportion of the images scanned there was no information : the memory of the ‘ who ,’ ‘ what ,’ ‘ when ,’ and ‘ where ’ had been lost years ago . That information vacuum offered a means by which we could offer something in return to the album owners : in exchange for their generosity we could research their images , using a broad range of sources – comparisons from other albums and publications , cross referencing scenes and faces , reading contemporary accounts , and interviewing old-timers from Samoa – to rediscover the lost ‘ back story .’ This patient detective work stretched over months and even years and enabled us to fill in the gaps for a surprisingly large number of ‘ mystery ’ photographs . In this way we were able to reconnect album owners with the genealogical and historical importance of their collections .
Digital Restoration
The other time-consuming aspect was the digital restoration of damaged , marked , stained or faded photographs . It became clear early on in the project that the earlier that photographs had left the islands for New Zealand the better condition they were in . The humid , cycloneprone climate of Samoa is hard on photography . Mould and rain damage are ever-present dangers . For example , the collection of glass plate negatives that Alfred Tattersall gathered in his more than 60 years of professional photography in Samoa from 1887 to 1951 was destroyed in Apia in the January 1966 cyclone while in storage at a home in Apia ( see ‘ Chapter 12 : What Became of Alfred Tattersall ’). Nevertheless , despite the more benign New Zealand conditions most photos that were researched required some repair or optimisation .
Agnes Sasse Heeney Collection
This photograph , which is featured on page 180 , required 25 hours of digital restoration to remove a stain and thousands of dust spots and blemishes .
Deposition of images from this project in the digital archives of the Museum of Samoa is made with both the original scan , for reference purposes , and a digitally restored version if appropriate . This work is ongoing . Digital restoration was undertaken for a large proportion of the photos that have been featured in “ To Walk Under Palm Trees .” Without this work many of the photos would have been of less viewer interest or unusable . Most digital repair work involved the removal of spots and blemishes that the passage of time had caused . On some high-resolution photos these spots numbered in the thousands , and each had to be individually cloned out (‘ one-
| To Walk Under Palm Trees - The Germans in Samoa : Snapshots from Albums | Tony Brunt
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