A man adorned with traditional ornaments wielding two spears on a beach at Ahia, Ulawa in the Solomon Islands. Beattie’s approach to photography is marked by a documentary impulse that nonetheless betrays a staged or composed sensibility, often reflecting the colonial gaze of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work sought to preserve visual records of Indigenous peoples and landscapes, showing them both as examples of different cultures and as scenes meant to be visually appreciated.