Colonialism and photography have had a close and, from a modern perspective, troubled relationship. The development of mass-circulation photography and the heyday of colonial expansion were contemporary with one another. Photography was integral to those processes, being used to map and control, creating positivist knowledge of both peoples and places. Photographs were part of the vast flow of information on which the colonial project depended. Often colonialism and photography operated in mutually sustaining ways, the latter creating images of vacant space for settlement, ‘primitive’ lives to be civilized, and racial categories to be ordered.
There are many strands to colonial photography, embracing exploration, anthropological investigation, missionary activity, big game hunting, and the recording of infrastructural projects such as the building of hospitals, roads, and railways, the management of plantations, and the control of disease and criminality. While individual images in collections from different empires may vary, the narrative of orderly plantations or mines, with a compliant and healthy labour force and a supporting infrastructure of hospitals, ‘native’ schools, and churches, is constant. To a degree this is also true of private colonial albums, containing snapshots of gardens, servants, sports, local friends, official duties, and exotic pets. These are now important documents of cross-cultural relations in the colonies, giving an insight into power relations and hierarchies at a local level, as experienced by people.
Exploration and mapping integral to the annexation of territory, e.g. the ‘scramble for Africa’, was carried out not only by cartographers but also by photographers. Earlier, David Livingstone's famous incursions in the Zambezi region in 1859 had been depicted by John Kirke through maps, sketches, and photographs, the latter suggesting an impenetrable ‘darkest Africa’. Military campaigns were also photographed, for instance the British expedition to Benin in 1897, and operations along the frontiers of India. Such photographs were often disseminated as engravings in journals such as the Illustrated London News and later as half-tones in papers like the French L' Illustration. Political events were also photographically recorded, such as the handsome volume of 35 tipped-in albumen prints by Augustine Dyer of the New South Wales Government Printer's Office, published to mark the annexation of New Guinea in 1884.
Colonial landscapes were absorbed into a Western aesthetic, and peoples into photographic styles which, if not precisely anthropological, were inflected with categories of race and culture. J. W. Lindt's photographs of Australian Aboriginal peoples and the landscape photographs of Samuel Bourne (India) and John Thomson (China) are typical of these processes. They made the colonial simultaneously familiar and contained whilst remaining exotic.
Governments were particularly interested in the recording of infrastructure. In 1869, for example, the Colonial Office in London circulated all British colonies with a view to having albums made showing all the principal buildings of each colony. An album in the French Foreign Ministry chronicles the development of communications in Tunisia, from demonstrations of new letterboxes (carefully staged for the camera) to views of telegraph offices. At the same time the geographical societies of the colonial powers increasingly used photography in the process of recording topographical features, flora, fauna, and visible mineral resources. Missionary organizations recorded their activities, often using the photographs to create lantern-slide sets for fund-raising and informational purposes. Both kinds of images, the official and the semi-private, played a major role in education about the colonies and the economic and moral advantages to be gained through colonial endeavour. Many featured in the popular colonial exhibitions held in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and were used to illustrate colonial literature aimed at both adults and children. In Britain, at a more formal level, the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee developed an empire-wide scheme of illustrated textbooks and slide shows to inspire colonial sentiments at home and to teach colonial subjects about the ‘motherland’.
The photography of colonialism not only reflects the problems, injustices, and assumptions of the colonial enterprise, but was an integral part of it. From the late 20th century it attracted extensive critiques, which also revealed some of the alternative histories recorded in colonial photographs.
— Elizabeth Edwards
Featured article: Dutch Colonial Presentation Photographs.
— Janneke van Dijk
Bibliography
- Groeneveld, A. (ed.), Toekang Potret: 100 jaar fotografie in Nederlands Indië 1839-1939 (1989).
- Groeneveld, A. (ed.), Fotografie in Suriname 1839-1939 (1991).
- Wachlin, S., Woodbury & Page, Photographers in Java (1994).
- Knaap, G., Cephas, Yogyakarta: Photography in the Service of the Sultan (1999)
Bibliography
- Ryan, J., Picturing Empire (1997).
- Fournié, P., and Gervereau, L. (eds.), Regards sur le monde: trésors photographiques du Quai d'Orsay 1860-1914 (2000).
- Hight, E., and Sampson, G. (eds.), Colonialist Photography (2002).
- Landau, P., and Kaspin, D. (eds.), Images and Empire (2003)
