Christian Hedemann

Hedemann had taken a great interest in photography ever since he visited the World Exposition in Vienna in 1873 where many exhibits featured photography. Before leaving for Hawaii he acquired a camera of his own and learned the art of making images on glass plate negatives, using the wet plate collodion process. The first dated photograph is a view of his house with a Danish flag taken in Hana on 1 February 1880. It was followed by informal portraits of his growing family and home, as well as of the sugar mill, co-workers and friends. In 1883, he converted his carriage shed into a studio with removable roof sections to improve the light. This allowed him to take portraits not only of the native inhabitants, which proved invaluable to ethnic studies, but also of Chinese and Portuguese workers and a small colony of Scandinavians. • Illustration — Hawaiian pineapple field (tinted): Christian Hedemann (1880s) The photographs of his wife and seven children show how Danish traditions were maintained, for example in the children's clothing, while his photographs of the mills document the industrial evolution of the islands. Some of these were presented at the Hawaiian Government Exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1889, demonstrating not only the progress of the plant, but also the industrial transformation of Hawaii. In January 1889, Hedemann was one of the founding members and the first president of the Hawaiian Camera Club, which brought amateur photographers from Honolulu together with those he had met during his travels around the islands. The club gave Hedemann the opportunity to follow and experiment with the latest techniques such as magnesium powder flash photography and photographic enlargements as well as the use of the so-called magic lantern. In 1892, when he first returned to Denmark, Hedemann took his lantern slide projector with him in order to show his new home to his family and friends. Hedemann died in Honolulu in 1932 leaving a collection of photographs which provide a record not only of his close-knit family and his faith in the industrial age but also of the islands themselves at the end of the 19th century.