Allan Hughan was a British merchant and ship's captain who had been shipwrecked in New Caledonia in 1870. By 1871 he had started a commercial photography business in Nouméa, and the following year he was appointed government photographer. In addition to studio portraits his work included views ofNouméa and the interior of the island, documentation of the traditional way of life and customs of the Kanak people, and an official photographic study of the French penal colony on the Isle of Pines.

Francis Herbert Dufty was an English-born photographer who had arrived in Fiji in 1871 with his teenage brother Alfred, having already spent a number of years as a photographer in the colony of Victoria with his other brother, Edward. Over the following two decades, through studio and outdoor photography, the Duftys documented the Fijian Islands' indigenous peoples and European visitors, their vanishing traditional way of life and rugged, tropical scenery. The present photograph came from a traveller's album dating from taround 1880, which contained Pacific Islands and Australian views.

Sophia Hoare, née Johnson, (also known as Mrs. S. Hoare, Madame S. Hoare, Suzanne Hoare, or Susan Hoare) immigrated from Manchester, England to Auckland, New Zealand with her husband, Charles Burton Hoare and their three daughters in 1863. There Charles established a photography studio called Hoare & Wooster; the partner named Wooster has yet to be identified with certainty. By 1868 the Hoare family had moved on to Papeete, Tahiti, where Charles again opened a studio. There is no record of him in Tahiti after 1876, and he may have travelled to San Francisco, dying there or elsewhere in the United States around 1879. Sophia took over the business and ran Atelier Hoare for over 30 years.