Benin art revisited: Photographs and museum collections

Abstract

Sometimes surprising results were obtained in doing ethnographic fieldwork among the Benin people of southern Nigeria by using photographs of art objects seized by a British military expeditionary force against the Benin kingdom, in 1897. These results have import for the documentation of museum collections today. The more than two thousand objects taken from the Oba's palace in 1897, dating from the 16th to 19th centuries, were sold to offset the expedition's expenses and subsequently entered European and American museums around the turn of the century with little documentation. Photographs are here used to revisit Benin art and to probe the events represented, the identity of persons portrayed, and the content and meaning of the objects collected. Ethnohistoric photographs as well as studio portraits, made available in Nigeria, were used in this study along with field photographs. Specific objects reveal continuities and discontinuities of form and meaning, and manifest the effects of conquest and colon...