TALES OF TIME: 19th Century Colonial Samoa

Thomas Andrew (1855 – 1939) was a New Zealand photographer who lived in Samoa.

Andrew took photographs that are of significant historical and cultural value including the recording on camera of key events in Samoa’s colonial era such as the Mau movement, the volcanic eruption of Mt Matavanu (1905–1911) and the funeral of writer Robert Louis Stevenson.

Many of his surviving images are held in the collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and include landscapes and studio portraits of Samoans that went beyond the colonial stereotypes of the time.