‘With the Eyes of Another Race’: Congo Atrocity Photographs and the Commemoration of Easter 1916

Abstract

The Gallery of Photography's exhibition, Reflecting 1916: Photography and the Easter Rising (March 19th–May 1st 2016), was one instance of Roger Casement’s prominence within the centenary commemorations of 1916. A number of Congo atrocity photographs were included to represent Casement's humanitarian work in Africa and the Congo Reform Campaign he co-founded. The presence of maimed African bodies — within a picture-scape largely concerned with the ruins of Dublin following the Rising — was unsettling. However, the display of these photographs also poses urgent ethical questions regarding the complex intersections of photography, humanitarianism and empire. This article places the Congo atrocity photographs alongside other Irish visions of Africa to ask how these exchanges, between imperial and humanitarian visuality, might be understood in an Irish context. The article highlights the diminishment of an Irish post-colonial solidarity through its replication of the de-individuating tendencies of colonial imaginaries.