Missions have used photographs in at least two ways: as a means of converting and teaching; and to raise funds and report their activities in a wider world. Mission archives, for instance those of the London Missionary Society, or the Basel Mission, are rich sources for understanding their organizations' agendas both in the field and at home.
Missionaries' exploitation of photographs continued a long tradition of using images as a means of articulating and propagating ‘truths’. Many were learning photography by the 1850s, and by the late 19th century the flow of photographs generated by mission work was enormous; British missions alone had some 10, 000 missionaries worldwide, almost all using the medium in some aspect of their work.
The case of William Ellis (1794-1872) of the London Missionary Society exemplifies some of the complexities involved. Ellis, a veteran of the South Seas, learned wet-plate photography in London (possibly from Roger Fenton) before travelling to Madagascar in 1853. His aim was both to make ethnographic and botanical pictures and to use photography (and an electric telegraph) as a kind of conjuring trick to impress the population. Significantly, Ellis's rival, the French Jesuit Marc Finaz, planned to outbid him by demonstrating the piano, hot-air balloons, and a daguerreotype outfit that reached him in November 1855; ‘I must work [with it] to gratify those people who will be useful to me, ’ he noted in his diary. But Ellis had already sent some albumen prints to his contacts in the capital, Antananarivo, explaining: ‘Each of them was taken with the sun and light in one minute. I can teach anyone in Madagascar to take a likewise [sic] with the sun in a minute if you would like anyone to learn.’ Both men, clearly, were using the camera to win influence in Madagascar's volatile political environment; and, like other missionaries, Ellis also used photographs to publicize his activities at home, in the process ensuring that the engraved versions used for publication were suitably adapted to his purposes.
The magic lantern was seen as a crucial piece of promotional and, indeed, social equipment; one missionary in Basutoland used lantern-slide shows as a rival attraction to ‘pagan dances’ in the next village. Lantern slides, perhaps the pre-eminent medium of 19th-century moral instruction, were used to inculcate the values of the mother country through informational shows, or to teach Bible stories and moral tales of sobriety, hard work, and self-improvement; the texts of hymns and psalms were also projected. Missions appealed for images, both photographic and non-photographic, that might be suitable for their activities, and sometimes exchanged them. At home, many societies created sets of slides that could be borrowed for educational use. Peripatetic preachers in Europe and North America would describe the work of their missions through lantern lectures in village halls and schools. In isolated communities these shows became an important means of forming views of the world. Some missions used carefully arranged or posed photographs to demonstrate the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of their efforts. In the 1890s, for example, the Marianhill Mission in Natal showed a pair of photographs: Heathen Kraal, showing dirt, nakedness, and disorder, and the positively contrasting Christian Kraal. Photographs, often juxtaposed with indigenous (‘savage’) artefacts, were also used extensively in exhibitions of missionary work.
By the end of the 19th century, with the development of cheap half-tone photomechanical printing, mission publications were often extensively and directly illustrated with photographs, and many missionaries learned photography specifically with the aim of creating this kind of documentation.
Missions also produced photographs for wider purposes. For instance, Marianhill Mission's photographs were both religiously and ethnographically motivated, and were collected by museums of anthropology in the late 19th century; as were those of the London Missionary Society's Revd W. G. Lawes in New Guinea, who sold them through King's Studio in Sydney. Conversely, ostensibly scientific work, like the Austrian missionary Martin Gusinde's photographs of the remains of ‘old religion’ in Tierra del Fuego, sometimes reflected missionary interests.
— Elizabeth Edwards
See also china.Bibliography
- Holland, L., Indians, Missionaries and the Promised Land (1980).
- Landau, P., ‘The Illumination of Christ in the Kalahari’,
Representations , 45 (1994). - Jenkins, P., ‘The Earliest Generation of Missionary Photographers in West Africa’,
Visual Anthropology , 7 (1994). - Peers, S., William Ellis. The Working of Miracles: Photography in Madagascar 1853-1865 (1995).
- Bottomore, S., ‘Projecting for the Lord: The Work of Wilson Carlile’,
Film History , 14 (2002)
