Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter sets the scene for the book, sketching the situation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when colonial expansion in the British and French empires coincided with the appearance of portable, mass-produced cameras. It explains the book’s methodology, to observe anomalies in the mass of repeated visual tropes, and identifies the three categories of photographic images under discussion: views from the ‘small wars’ of the colonial front, early conflict photographs more generally, and photographs of suffering and physical coercion inflicted for the purpose of repression. The chapter briefly considers some of the issues around photography that the book will investigate in greater detail, notably photography as a process and the power relationship between the photographer and the photographed. It concludes by providing a brief summary of the chapters to follow.