During 2006, Edith Amituanai visited France and Italy as part of a Creative New Zealandfunded five-week project to photograph professional rugby players. Each of her subjects had a Pasifika background, and many of them were her relatives or friends. The theme for her work at that time was “third wave” migration, as the children or grandchildren of people who emigrated from the Pacific Islands to New Zealand in the twentieth century, started to move back out into the world to seek new opportunities.

The title for the series, Dejeuner, was suggested by one of the subjects, Philemon Toleafoa, mentioning to her how he missed the shared meals and family gatherings back home in New Zealand in particular the Sunday lunch at his grandmother’s house. The use of the title Dejeuner also recalls a famous painting by Edouard Manet created in 1862-3 Dejeuner sur l’herbe where a large female nude sits with fully dressed men in a sylvan glade, gazing out at the viewer while her male companions remain engrossed in conversation. She is starkly-lit, and the painting is often used as an example of “photographic” lighting, since there are almost no shadows cast. Daguerrotypes, the forerunners of photographs, were an innovation in Paris at this time, and they had a profound effect on painting. The writer Emile Zola felt this was Manet’s greatest work, since in it he had realised the dream of all painters: to place figures of natural grandeur in landscape.