Abstract
In the winter of 2018, I presented a conference paper on a set of nineteenth-century photographs from the national archive of the French colonies. The series, titled “Types Comoriens” (Comorian types), comprises seven photographs commissioned by the French École Coloniale between 1890 and 1896. The École Coloniale was a French colonial school created in 1889, and dedicated to the recruitment and training of French colonial administrators. The school was instrumental to both the institutionalization of colonial knowledge and the development of French higher education. The images are full-length portraits of seven young Comorian natives, naked, standing in front of a white background. My paper looked at the beaded strings that the indigenous islanders wore around their waists, which I traced back to an East African puberty ritual called unyago. Subsumed in the minutiae of my anthropological analysis, I did not register the violence that had been folded into the photographic frame. Nor did I realize that I, myself, was reenacting the voyeuristic gaze of the colonial photographer by re-producing these images in my conference presentation. For the purposes of my presentation, I cropped the subjects’ naked bodies but decided to show their faces. Even then, this timid gesture seemed insufficient, uncomfortably incomplete.
Highlights
In the winter of 2018, I presented a conference paper on a set of nineteenth-century photographs from the national archive of the French colonies
The series, titled “Types Comoriens” (Comorian types), comprises seven photographs commissioned by the French École Coloniale between 1890 and 1896
My second reading of the “Types Comoriens” series required a radical shift in my understanding of the ontology of photography
Summary
In the winter of 2018, I presented a conference paper on a set of nineteenth-century photographs from the national archive of the French colonies. The present essay is an account of my multiple returns to these difficult, terrible images It offers a reflection on the ongoing violence of the colonial gaze and the ethics of looking at captive bodies in the archive, as I wonder: How do we remember those whose lives have been “recorded in the act of their annihilation?”2 How do we attend to the past without committing further violence?. I had first considered the seven photographs as material evidence of what has been (as Roland Barthes puts it), as a reflection of some past reality, and this line of inquiry had led me to an impasse: it was impossible to determine the subjects’ identity, their origins, and whether they had gone through slavery. This essay is an invitation for us, spectators of photography, for you and for me, to reorient our gaze toward the site of its emergence: our bodies and their traces, the colonial baggage that they carry
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