Colonial Photography Research Articles

Review Forum: The Violence of Colonial Photography

For this review forum, Susan Cook, Simon Dell, and Nancy Rushohora were invited to explore issues raised in Daniel Foliard’s The Violence of Colonial Photography . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. pp. 368. £16.99. ISBN 9781526163318. Foliard was then asked to respond.

From the ‘culture wars’ to reparative histories

The ‘culture wars’ that dominate public discourse in the UK turn, very often, on the significance accorded to histories of empire, slavery, and colonialism. What seems to be primarily of concern is the place of such histories in the telling of our national story. In this section, the articles explore different ways in which we could think about the relationship of the past with the present. Specifically, the articles collected here use the frame of ‘reparative histories’ as a potentially more effective way of engaging with complex and contested pasts. They address the idea of a reparatory sociology, colonial photography, representation and indigenous spaces, the gendering of reparative histories, and the need to rethink the welfare state from such a perspective.

Photoanthropocene: The decentered lens of colonial photography

AbstractPhotography—what Barthes called “the living image of a dead thing”—is often overlooked in discussions of cultural heritage decolonization. This paper focuses on a historical photograph attributed to the Hong Kong commercial photographer Lai Fong 黎芳, also known as Afong, that documents the aftermath of the Tianjin massacre of 1870. A photographic print of the image is held in the Robert Hart collection, a little‐known collection of historical photographs accumulated by the Irishman Robert Hart during his half‐century as an administrator in China. Like many such collections—and like Tianjin itself in the late Qing period—the photography collection resists easy categorization, and sits uneasily between Europe and Asia, Chinese and foreign, imperial and anti‐imperial. This essay proposes a “photoanthropocene” perspective, drawing on theoretical writing by Mirzoeff, Zylinska, and others to locate colonial photography within the early anthropocene. The photoanthropocene offers new ways to understand, interpret, and decolonize colonial photography.

Beyond the Frame: Exploring Dimensions of Colonial Photography in India

The paper “Beyond the Frame: Exploring Dimensions of Colonial Photography in India” delves into the multifaceted dimensions of photography’s inception in India during the colonial era. Investigating photography as both an art form and a technological import by the British, it explores its role in representing and often misrepresenting India and its people. Focusing on early pioneers such as the Daniel brothers, Fox Talbot, Louis Daguerre, and Monsieur Montaino, the paper discusses the challenges of early photographic techniques and their evolution. It highlights figures like Linnaeus Tripe, John Murray, and Samuel Bourne, emphasizing their impact on documenting India’s landscapes, monuments, and social narratives during moments of historical significance like the 1857 revolt. Furthermore, the paper examines the colonial gaze inherent in early ethnographic photography and discusses the emergence of Indian photographers like Raja Deen Dayal. Overall, it underscores photography’s pivotal role in representing colonial power dynamics and cultural narratives in India, amalgamating art history, media theory, and postcolonial studies.

Unruliness and Exorbitance

Unruliness and Exorbitance

On the longevity of visual colonial stereotyping and its influence on twenty-first-century societal and identity debates

This paper engages with current societal identity debates related to select postcolonial southern African circles, whose European origins can partially be traced back to the creation of the colonial photography genre. The contemporary visualisation of non-white Africans in the European landscape is linked to a genre that was born in the times of High Imperialism. As a child of its time, colonial photography laid the foundation for both racist and racial depiction patterns of certain African peoples and what their supposed traits and looks were from the coloniser’s point of view, thereby creating seeing patterns. Until today, social debates and political movements are linked to the visualisation of non-white peoples. This project is about the historical muting of sub-Saharan Africa through stereotypical images and its links to the shaping and maintenance of postcolonial identity debates concerning racialised visualisation traditions in Europe. This repetitive visual blinding is another form of colonial aggression by constantly perpetuating certain image(rie)s and thereby facilitating colonial mentalities. Examples presented below show how far-reaching the colonial photographic stereotypes are by not limiting the scope of seeing traditions to photographs. Instead, other areas of visible everyday spaces like street names, monuments, statues, lawsuits or book covers are included.

A feminist analysis of colonial representations of Visayan women at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition

ABSTRACT Significant works have been published on American colonial photography in the Philippines, which primarily focus on the depiction of Filipinos in general and not on the images of Filipino women, specifically Visayan women. Using an intersectional feminist lens, this article examines how Visayan women were portrayed at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition through colonial photography by comparing their representations with those of Visayan men and indigenous Filipino women in terms of gender, ethnicity, religion and social class. It interrogates how the Americans utilized photography not only as an imperialist instrument but also as an effective means to propagate their gender ideology in the newly acquired colony. While indigenous Filipinos were generally represented as savages, indigenous women were doubly so owing to their implied inferiority to men. And while Visayan women were depicted as ‘the most civilized’, their representation in photographs still promoted a certain type of gender ideology that circulated the idea of male superiority over women, portraying them as how the colonizers perceived them, thus reinforcing the power of the colonizer over the colonized. This study also challenges photography’s claim to objectivity by comparing Visayan women’s images in colonial photography with their actual roles in society.

Remediating family memories of Italian colonialism: Beyond the Frame as process and product

The article analyzes Beyond the Frame ( Oltre i bordi, 2023), a film based on Simone Brioni's fortuitous discovery of a family archive: a box of photographs taken in Italian East Africa in the 1930s by a distant relative. Beyond the Frame discusses colonial photography and visuality, as well as the material legacies of that past, challenging the gaze through which they framed the subjective and collective idea of Africa in Italian society. The article is divided into two parts, each of which discusses colonial photography and how Beyond the Frame observes, interprets, and reflects on how the legacy of colonialism shapes our present. In the first part, Brioni traces the process that led to the construction of a narrative that interweaves personal reflections and collective history. In the second part, Gianmarco Mancosu draws upon Ann Laura Stoler's work to discuss how the colonial archive and the remains of empire fashion our present, with a particular emphasis on photography and on colonial traces in the Italian cityscape. The article shows how the film works with as well as against the archive: how it enacts a process of resignification, thus modifying the original meaning of colonial pictures.

Martin Parr and the Legacy of British Colonial Photography

British contemporary photographer Martin Parr’s collection 7 Colonial Still Lifes (2005) delivers banal and benign images of remnants of British colonisation in Sri Lanka. While Parr’s early collection The Last Resort (1986) was harshly critiqued for its judgmental lens on the working-class British, some identified a contemporary ‘othering’ in Parr’s imagery. This line of reasoning was not explored to its fullest extent. Forming a postcolonial reading, I argue that what Parr’s critics have missed (or dismissed) is the historical legacy of British colonial photography. The images from The Last Resort bear a striking resemblance to the nineteenth-century British colonial photographer John Thomson’s collection Street Life in London (1877). Thomson is the first street photographer to reverse the colonial lens back on to his own people with similar results. However, in his still life photographs Parr trains his probing critical lens on empire itself, with much more successful results.

Foliard, Daniel. The Violence of Colonial Photography

Foliard, Daniel. The Violence of Colonial Photography

Clinical images, imperial power and Bhau Daji’s secret treatment for leprosy at the Royal College of Physicians Museum

In 1874, Indian polymath physician Bhau Daji (1822–1874) passed away suddenly – and the details of his secretive ‘cure’ for leprosy died with him. Drawing on a collection of clinical photographs and illustrations at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) Museum, this paper will unravel Daji’s place in the College’s empire-wide enquiry into leprosy in the mid-nineteenth century. We will argue, drawing on Elizabeth Edward’s (2014) work, that these images represent ‘photographic uncertainties’ – both conforming to and undermining traditional conventions of colonial photography, while at the same time highlighting Daji’s place as an ambiguous figure in colonial medical hierarchies. We treat the images as ‘visual arguments’ (Fox and Lawrence, 1998) testifying to the effectiveness of Daji’s secret remedy and the contagious nature of the disease. Despite the supposed objectivity of the photographic form, Daji’s treatment was never seriously investigated by the Leprosy Committee of the Royal College of Physicians. Transported from Bombay to London, we will consider the differential value placed on Daji’s medical expertise as captured by the patient images. In the spirit of the current movement to ‘decolonise collections’, we reflect on how this case study demonstrates the need for specialist medical museums to interrogate their own colonial pasts.

Humanising the Squatter: Photography in the Service of Resettlement in Emergency-era Malaya

This article explores the ways in which photography was used by the colonial state in Malaya to promote the supposed success of resettlement – the counterinsurgency scheme through which around half a million people were forcibly moved into camps, later renamed ‘New Villages’, during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60). While this study engages with the ways in which the racialised category of the ‘squatter’ – that is, rural Chinese who were the main object of resettlement – was reflected in official photography, it also argues for the need to consider such photography within broader developments in photographic practice and consumption in Southeast Asia during the early 1950s. These include the role of local Malayan photographers as part of the state propaganda apparatus and the emergence of Humanist photojournalism as a mode of expression in the same period. In doing this, the article suggests that the interaction between colonial photography and commercial photojournalism in Malaya complicates the extant literature on the ‘colonial gaze’ while contributing to an emerging body of research on the tensions between colonialism and Humanism in early postwar photography.

Bagamoyo Imperial and Actual: Representation of the First Capital of German East Africa in Colonial Postcards and in the Works of Walter Dobbertin

In recent decades, items of colonial photography, including those dedicated to German East Africa, have become the subject of research by historians and anthropologists. Many of the photographs eventually became postcards issued to introduce newly conquered territories to the citizens of the empire, to a lesser extent their population, culture and way of life, and to a greater extent those achievements (both real and imaginary) that the metropolis had brought. This included military stations, churches, missions, infrastructure (railways, train stations, lighthouses), askari troops recruited from local population, etc. On these postcards we can see various species of acacias and palm trees, numerous Araberstrasse and Kaiserstrasse streets, monuments to the emperor and chancellor, ships in the Dar es Salaam bay, “native beauty” and “native quarters”. On the one hand, postcards reflect what colonizers wanted to display before their homeland, on the other they reflect what this homeland itself wanted to see, e.g. images of exotic hot tropics, successes of German administrators and troops. Postcards, being selected in their very plots and created for the propaganda purposes, depict German East Africa strictly deliberately and strictly as a colony. Bagamoyo served as this colony’s capital for about two years. On postcards depicting the town we see the quintessence of the German military and administrative presence: this is tangible both in the choice of depicted objects (fort, boma, Wissmann’s monument in memory of soldiers who died during the suppression of the coastal uprising, meeting place of the colonial administration, etc.) and the frequency of these choices. Images of local residents on postcards are marginal, the “black quarter” is opposed to new European buildings, and the elements of the Arab-Swahili cultural component of Bagamoyo are not represented at all. On the contrary, photography of Walter Dobbertin allows to have a look at Bagamoyo in the end of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th centuries in a much more complete and complicated way. He took photos of inhabitants of Bagamoyo with clear accent and opened vision – women, children, Arabs, Muslims in kanzu and kofias, without censoring either the phenotype or the cultural components of Islamic religion (mosque, Muslim cemetery, tea houses). It’s fascinating, because negative attitude toward Arabs and Islam is stressed throughout many German colonial narratives written by military and civil officers. The Arabs as “the first colonizers of the region”, i.e. predecessors of Germans themselves, almost never appear on the postcards, as well as Islam-associated objects like mosques or Muslim cemeteries. The article is concerned with this difference between postcards and photographs of Bagamoyo as the latter reveal what had been blind spots of official representation of colony’s first capital and give very personal and much more sincere vision offered by talented photographer Walter Dobbertin.

Morocco in Colonial Photography

This article represents an attempt to approach the notion of colonial discourse and photography more closely with the exigencies that put Morocco under the zoom of the colonial lens. This photographic documentation shows that nations, Morocco, in this case, were annexed to imperial powers through the utilization of various means of representation. This annexation was carried out not only by military officers, missionaries and spies but also by cartographers, travel writers and photographers who never ceased to polish the lens of their cameras so as to be able to represent indigenous identities, as well as their social lifestyles, and cultures. Therefore, the purpose of the present work is to sketch the colonial experience that links the imperializers with the imperialized through chronological documentation of colonial power and domination. Therefore, the main interest centres around the question of rereading this colonial history by analyzing and questioning colonial photography and its role in colonial expansion over Morocco. Besides, it is to unmask the alleged objective embedded in this country's 'civilizing mission'.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Impressions: Photography and Travel Writing, 1888-1894, by Carla Manfredi

Reviewed by: Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific Impressions: Photography and Travel Writing, 1888–1894 by Carla Manfredi Chris Thomas (bio) Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific Impressions: Photography and Travel Writing, 1888–1894, by Carla Manfredi; pp. xviii + 256. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, $89.99, $69.99 ebook. Two years into his tour of the Pacific Islands, Robert Louis Stevenson declared, in a letter to the French author and translator Marcel Schwob, that he was "waist-deep in his big book on the South Seas: the big book on the South Seas it ought to be and shall" (The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson: Vol. 6, August 1887–September 1890, edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew [Yale University Press, 1995], 401). Photography was to be an essential part of it, but "the big book" never quite came to be, only posthumously published, sans photographs, as In the South Seas (1896). Carla Manfredi's Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific Impressions: Photography and Travel Writing, 1888–1894 captures Stevenson's initial ambition, providing a well-researched, nuanced account of Stevenson's Pacific travel and, ultimately, his and his family's settling in Samoa. While the Stevenson family's photography is the star of the archival show, Manfredi also analyzes Stevenson's unpublished manuscripts, his politically inflected and poorly received account of the contemporary Samoan Civil War A Footnote to History (1892), his discarded textual-photographic collaboration with Joseph Strong "A Samoan Scrapbook," and Fanny [End Page 128] Stevenson's The Cruise of the Janet Nichol (1914), which, Manfredi notes, was the only published "photo-text" that came out of the Stevenson family's Pacific travels (158). But Pacific Impressions also reverses the gaze of the Stevenson party, focusing especially on "moments when Islanders influenced the outcome of a photographic event" (19). In doing so, Manfredi reads Stevenson's Pacific Islander sitters not as passive subjects but rather as active participants, an approach that allows Manfredi to produce a single-author study that does not fall into the trap of dwelling solely on that author. Instead, Stevenson's photographic endeavors become a lens through which to better understand Victorian-Oceanian relations. This is perhaps best exemplified in the second chapter, where Manfredi reads photography in the Marquesas in relation to Western discourses of supposed cannibalism, drawing on both cotemporaneous historical accounts and more recent anthropological studies. Rather than try to tease out the veracity of these (at the very least, exaggerated) claims, Manfredi instead focuses on Marquesan Islanders' awareness of them, which led the Islanders to "reenact colonial tropes of 'savagery' as a form of counterviolence, anti-colonial resistance and intra-political gamesmanship" (30). No doubt, Manfredi argues, Stevenson's Marquesan sitters were aware of the power of the camera in this context. Manfredi illuminates this point through close reading a set of photographs featuring rival Marquesan chiefs Paaaeau and Moipu, the former highly Europeanized and the latter embodying what Stevenson frames as "savage" characteristics (49). Reading Stevenson's photographs alongside his published and archival writing, Manfredi shows how Moipu pushed back against Stevenson's staging, performing the role of the cannibal not for Stevenson but to "advertise a certain Marquesan identity and resistance to [European] collaborators like Paaaeau" (53). Where most postcolonial scholars would read these photographs as sites of colonial imposition, Manfredi convincingly reads them as sites of colonial resistance. At the same time, Manfredi does not over-rely on interpreting colonial photography as a contested space, adeptly locating moments of productive cultural exchange. In the spirit of recent British-Oceanian scholarship such as Vanessa Smith's Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (2010), Manfredi acknowledges the significance of cross-cultural friendships. In analyzing a photograph of Stevenson's stepson and main photographic collaborator Lloyd Osbourne performatively posed and dressed as a Marquesan chief, Manfredi turns the typical postcolonial reading on its head. She observes the way that Osbourne's outfit resembles that of his friend Moipu, with whom Osbourne engaged in a Marquesan ritual of name exchange. Without this context, critics might be quick to read this as cultural appropriation or cultural cross-dressing. However, to do so, Manfredi argues, is to dismiss the value...

The Trophy and The Appeal: Colonial Photography and the Ghosts of Witnessing in German Southwest Africa

To work with images of atrocity is a fraught project. Sedimented constructs shaped through racist and settler colonial violence continue to define the production and consumption of the visual, as well as memory practice and scopic politics. These retinal sedimentations must be looked at plainly and addressed openly, to name the ways in which history and identity shape the function of the eye. I turn to the understudied visual archive of German colonialism in South West Africa, with an emphasis on colonial photography, with the aim of tying the visuality of colonial violence in German South West Africa to broader studies of colonial photography, images of racial violence, and the ways in which these images circulated as discourse. I am particularly concerned with the location of witnessing, and the ways in which things look differently from different positions—what I refer to through the concept of parallax—and the effects of this on visual consumption. Images of violence travel, through a visceral witnessing that can be grotesquely pornographic—in the words of Claudia Rankine, “the dead body as an object that satisfies an illicit desire”—or evidentiary. I use viscerality in this context to think about a methodology of witnessing that attends to embodiment, experience, and feeling. The resignification of images, however didactic and captioned, depends on the eye and the gut of the viewer—the transhistorical viewer is not a passive or innocent witness. This is especially important in the context of the pornotroping tendency of white supremacist culture to fetishize the image, particularly of Black injury and death, and the ability of images of violence to re-traumatize survivors.

Water, Air, Light: The Materialities of Plague Photography in Colonial Bombay, 1896–97

This essay examines the ways in which the third plague pandemic was documented and visualized in relation to rapidly evolving ideas about disease, medicine, and the environment by engaging with a set of photo albums produced in late nineteenth-century Bombay. As one of the first examples of epidemiological photography, a new genre of photography that had developed at the turn of the century in the wake of the bubonic plague epidemic, the photo albums serve as a significant archive of late nineteenth-century colonial epidemiological, visual, and urban practices. Through my analysis of the Bombay photographs, I aim to foreground the environmental and biological contexts of cultural practices, focusing on the multiple ways in which nonhuman materials such as water, air, light, and microorganisms can drive and effect image-making. I thus propose an epistemological shift in our reading of colonial photography that foregrounds the dynamic materiality of the natural world.

Unveiling the Colours of Cellulose Nitrate Black and White Film-based Negatives in Colonial Photography

ABSTRACTAiming at contributing to the preservation of black and white (B&W) film-based negatives held by Portuguese archives, four photographic collections from the first half of the twentieth century were selected for study. During the macro assessment of the collections the preservation condition and hues found in photographic negatives from the Elmano Cunha e Costa (ECC) were noticed, distinguishing this collection from the remaining ones. Additional attention was given considering that the ECC collection was formed in a colonial context in the 1930s, while the others were formed on the Portugal mainland. The ECC collection results from an ethnographic survey of Angolan tribes recorded with B&W film-based negatives. In this collection, sets of negatives with pink, lemon yellow, greenish, orange brownish, and red brownish hues were found. To identify the origin of such hues, the image layer was analysed by microscale energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence (μ EDXRF) and scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX). Additionally, to assess the base decay and its effect on the formation of hues, the plastic supports were characterized by Fourier transform infrared microscopy (μ FTIR). To complement the assessment of the film-base decay, pH was measured by using combined microelectrodes. The identification of mercury, iodine, chromium, and iron by μ EDXRF allowed correlation of the hues found in the negatives with chemical corrective treatments performed to improve the image quality. SEM-EDX confirmed those results and proved that the elements found were in the photographic emulsion layer. The results obtained are relevant since the hues identified may now be used as markers to indicate the technical work performed on colonial photography. Additionally, the visual and molecular assessment of the negatives’ supports (good to fair condition) allow proposing that the original storage conditions may have had a beneficial contribution to their present condition.

Photo History by Numbers: Charting the Rise and Fall of Commercial Photography in Cameroon

In this paper I provide baseline estimates for the scale of black-and-white photography as a locally run, commercial undertaking in Cameroon both before and after independence. In categorizing, starting with short 19th and 20th centuries, I end by suggesting a better division is between an era of Colonial Photography (roughly 1865-1955) and a shorter period of larger-scale Administrative Photography (1955-1985), the so-called “Golden Age of the Studios.” I estimate that the number of commercial photographers there had grown to approximately 1,400 by 1985, with a cumulative total of more than 3,500 photographers. These figures provide a context for the detailed discussion of any one photographer, where it is important to know, for example, whether he/she was one in ten or one in a thousand.

An Eye for an Eye: the Hapticality of Collaborative Photo-Performance in Native Women of South India

This article examines the haptic politics of the Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000–2004) ‘theatre museum’ composed by Indian performance artist Pushpamala N. and British photographer Clare Arni. Through a transnational collaboration, Native Women re-creates a visual genealogy of ‘popular’ Indian women images, reckoning with legacies of colonial and photographic studio photography. The article focuses on the engagements of Native Women with colonial representations of ‘the native’ (woman) in particular and asks: How does a transnational project resituating colonial ethnographic practices inform feminist performance methodologies? How does this photo-performance develop a haptic attempt at transnational solidarity? In what ways do haptic entanglements with photo-performance constitute new imaginations for collaborative practices? The article repositions Native Women as a performance work that reflects collaboration as a process of political intimacy.