staging: a recurring kimono, suggestively falling off one shoulder, sometimes revealing a breast. The reappearing item of clothing hints at manipulation by photographers who were perhaps creating images not for their subjects, but for others: tourists or seekers of soft porn.

The photographer who produced many of the images still surviving in the hands of collectors or libraries was the Frenchman Felix Morin. From 1869 to the late 1890s he maintained a studio along a main shopping artery in the Trinidadian capital of Port of Spain, next to a landmark Anglican church where tourists would have found him easily. His ad in Stark’s Guide-Book and History of Trinidad, published in Boston in 1898, began with a direct appeal: “To Travellers.” Promising “Curios of All Sorts” and “Special Views Takenwith the rhetoric of empire was eventually rewarded with a bronze medal at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London and an honorable mention in the 1878 Paris exhibition.

It is perhaps fitting that Morin was both photographer and land surveyor; before staking a claim to territory, one has to map it. In a sense, his photographs of resplendent, thriving Indian women offered visual affirmations of imperial expansion: “coolie belles” were no doubt sexualized ethnic types, but in Morin’s photographs, they also appeared wealthy, suggesting that Indian women in the West Indies had done well to leave India. By portraying prosperous outcomes, the photographs arguably justified indenture while simultaneously erasing the fact of its existence. The women were posed in the studio against painted backdrops rather than in