Photographing Imperial Citizenship: The Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee’s Lanternslide Lectures, 1900–1945

Abstract

This article traces one of the first attempts at photographing citizenship by examining some of the 7600 images produced for the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee’s lanternslide scheme, a series of geography lectures documenting the land and peoples of the British Empire that circulated in classrooms around the world between 1902 and 1945. This unusual government project brought together imperial propaganda and visual instruction to teach children what it meant to look and to feel like imperial citizens. The lectures on India, in particular, point to the speculative nature of COVIC’s project, which sought to predict which populations might pose a threat to the empire and how they might be safely managed and contained through colonial education. By reading COVIC’s photographs and texts against contemporaneous visual culture in the empire, the article analyses the inconsistencies in photographing imperial citizenship amongst the more recognizable visual categories of race, class and gender.