History of Photography

ISSN: 0308-7298 (Print) 2150-7295 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/thph20

Colonialist photography

Natalie Adamson

To cite this article: Natalie Adamson (2004) Colonialist photography, History of Photography,
28:1, 89-92, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2004.10441293

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2004.10441293

Published online: 19 Jan 2015.

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 Reviews

Even if Didi-Huberman had not thanked Foucault in his acknowledgments, scholars

trained in post -1960 theory would immediately recognize their shared critiques of enlight-
ened thought, medical progress, and the normalization processes imposed by new technolo-
gies. Like Benjamin and Barthes who are often cited in his notes, Didi-Huberman explores
the anxiety aroused by photographs through notions of realism, memory, identity, and
performance, the latter, in the veritable 'spectacle' performed at the Salpetriere clinic that
calls to mind the work of Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle, 1994). Only occasionally
does Didi-Huberman stray from his principal inquiries into human motivation and action
when he refers to 'photography' or 'the history of photography' as having wills and desires of
their own, rather than of any individual operators.
Freud is a strong presence, both historical and methodological, in this book. Freud
studied in Paris (1885-1886), published on hysteria in French (1888), translated Charcot's
Lerons du mardi (1892-1894), and wrote a laudatory obituary upon Charcot's death (1893).
If one can propose historical intersections between Freud, Charcot, and hysteria, and thus,
neurology, photography, and psychiatry, Didi-Huberman is uninterested in pursuing cause-and-
effect relationships or teleological developments. He considers Charcot's clinical practices
and his patients' testimonies from a Freudian perspective, from the male gaze to the erotic
nature of the mutually exploitative performances.
By the later 1970s and 1980s, art historians began examining the implications of such
medical terms as hysteria and neurasthenia on visual imagery during the late nineteenth
century. Two examples of this direction in scholarship include Filiz E. Burhan's 'Visions and
Visionaries: Nineteenth-century psychological theory, the occult sciences, and the formation
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of the Symbolist aesthetic in France' (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1979) and
Deborah L. Silverman's Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style
(1989). With the early 1990s, further critical studies of Charcot's methods and aims were well
under way. Douglas Fogle (Fotogeschichte 13:49, 1993) addressed the lack of photographic
evidence for male hysteria and the role of male doctors and technicians in Charcot's clinic,
by way of Freud's theory on fetishism. In the following two years, Ulrich Baer (Yale Journal
of Criticism, Spring 1994) investigated the impact of flash photography on the Salpetriere
images, and Sigrid Schade (Art History, December 1995) exposed Aby Warburg's critical
blindness to Charcot's manipulative means. During the past fifteen years, publications too
numerous to detail have addressed the broader cultural and political meanings of scientific
and medical imagery, much of it photographic. This literature includes several exhibition
catalogues, such as Duchenne de Boulogne (Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts, Paris,
1999) and Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000 (Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, 2000), a sign that museums, once wary of privileging ideas above
aesthetics, had entered this critical discourse.
Anglo-American readers accustomed to cohesive scholarly narratives and language that
pretends to transparency may be troubled by Didi-Huberman's conversational tone, inter-
spersed with forays into the etymological associations of specific words, and his long chapters
broken up into one- or two-paragraph sections by subheadings. His word choices underscore
the thickness of language, and the translator sometimes leaves the original French, usually
with an English equivalent and a footnote, to call forth the rich associations on which he
plays. (Although this reader found the translation highly readable, considering the original
French, many errors, probably typographical, crop up.) This is not easy conversation, but in
the best sense of the noun, it engages the reader to respond, by thinking actively rather than
passively receiving the author's argument. However, to be honest, this reader was frustrated
by the lack of identification for many of the frequent quotations. The appendices contain
publications, some of which are excerpts, by Charcot and his contemporaries, such as
Bertillon's description of forensic photography.
Whether inspired directly by Didi-Huberman's book or participating in a broad interest
in the nexus between medicine, photography, and psychology, the ever growing number of
related scholarly studies, from various approaches and methods, suggests that his lines of
inquiry continue to stimulate intellectual work and debate. What more [pace Freud] does a
scholar want?
Alisa Luxenberg

Colonialist Photography

Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place

Edited by Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson. (Documenting the Image Series, number
9). Routledge, London & New York 2002. 328 pages, with numerous black & white
illustrations. Hardcover £60.00, ISBN 0-415-27495-8.

The manipulated title of Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place suggests a dual
function on the part of photography: the camera, on the one hand, captures and displays the
appearance of the peoples and places under colonial control. But this claim to documentary
truth comprises only half the story. Photography, the title implies, is also a tool and a catalyst for
the pictorial imagination, producing phantasmatic visions that participate in the construction

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of the ideologies of colonialism and contribute, just as much as scientific facts and military
conquests, to the building of a 'colonial culture'. Colonialist Photography responds in a
concerted and detailed fashion to Nicholas Thomas's demand for localised and historically
specific accounts of 'a pluralised field of colonial narratives, which are seen less as signs than
as practices, or as signifying practices rather than elements of a code'. (For the development
of this notion, see Thomas's work of 1994, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and
Government.)
As a signifying practice, photography was immediately and energetically put to work
recording and establishing the social, political, and cultural structures of Western colonialism
all over the world, demonstrated by daguerreotypes such as the portrait of a Kanak child and
French missionaries taken by Andre Chapuy in New Caledonia in December 1849. (This
image is reproduced in Serge Kakou's volume of 1998, Decouverte Photographique de la
Nouvelle Caledonie 1848-1900.) The complicity between colonialism and photography
created an inexhaustible archive of images. The book edited by Hight and Sampson examines
photographs produced in Japan, Equatorial Africa, India, Algeria, Turkey, Australia, Hawai'i,
the South Pacific, Puerto Rico and Egypt.
The editors of Colonialist Photography, Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson, have
brought together a collection of essays predominantly authored by established academic
scholars in the history of photography, some of whom participated in a College Art
Association session in 1998 which aimed to examine 'how photography functioned as a
cultural and political medium intricately tied to the establishment and support of colonial
power'. The historical scope of the essays focuses on the century of photography running from
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the 1840s to the 1940s. The period following World War II, with its violent anti-colonial
independence struggles, is excluded from analysis. This makes sense, given that discussion of
the post-war period would require a revised theoretical and historical stance capable of
describing photography's participation in the postcolonial 'provincialisation of Europe' as
well as its diverse applications in the post-war world of globalised capital and developments
in digital technology. (The phrase 'provincialization of Europe' is derived from Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2000.)
The thirteen essays reveal photography produced in countries under colonial rule as a
practice possessing the instability and differentiation of colonialism itself, as well as its
confidence and power. Buttressed by a select bibliography which refers not so much to the
history of photography as to the postcolonial theoretical underpinnings of the book as a
whole, the editors' introduction assumes an informed reader who understands the signifi-
cance of the photograph as an indexical object which operates within the structure of a
'dynamic rhetoric' indicating racial and ethnographic difference.
Some of the essay authors, for example Michael Hayes in his analysis of tourism and
photography in the context of the Pacific Cruise, overtly deploy the terms and constructs of
postcolonial and poststructural theory derived from authors such as Michel Foucault and
Edward Said. Hayes demonstrates how photography participates in the representational
construction of the Pacific Cruise, which in the mid-1880s crystallised a set of social,
economic and colonial desires into what Geoffrey Batchen, following the work of Foucault,
has called a 'social imperative'. As demonstrated by the work of the photographer Alfred
Burton, on board a Pacific Islands leisure cruise in 1884, the result is a photographic practice
which creates and catalogues the body of the Pacific 'savage' as a stereotype which may be sold
and distributed as both a souvenir of the voyage and as commercial publicity. Oscar E.
Vazquez's essay, '''A Better Place to Live": Government agency photography and the trans-
formations of the Puerto Rican !ibaro', also emphasises the methodological stakes of his
analysis of photographs taken by government-commissioned photographers in Puerto Rico
during the 1940s. Vazquez argues that the constructed category of the FSA archive has
produced an emphasis on singular iconographic types, for example, the labourer's shack, at
the expense of the 'particulars of the where, who, and how of the photographs' origins,
function, and circulation'. The essay then lays out a detailed contextual grounding for the
representation of the bohi6 (the worker's shack) and the jibaro (rural labourer ) during a time
of political and economic modernisation. It simultaneously provokes a re-examination of the
methods whereby an archive is constituted as a 'strategy of proof that shuts out variant
interpretations and works on behalf of a paternalistic, colonial power. Rather, Vazquez argues
that the archive is an unstable field of images necessitating a highly specific analysis.
Other authors are less overt in their theoretical freighting, but their essays nonetheless
bear down upon the ways in which photography was inextricably implicated in the colonial
project of expansion and domination at every level: commercial, administrative, scientific,
ethnographic and aesthetic. Several essays focus upon the function of the camera as a
descriptive, classificatory tool used to establish racial difference. John Falconer examines the
publication history of the eight -volume work by Watson and Kaye, The People ofIndia (1868-
1875) which was a major work of ethnographic documentation containing 480 photographic
portraits and accompanying written descriptions of Indian races, castes and tribes. Falconer
argues that photography in India performed a double task, visually salvaging India's material
heritage in addition to recording a perceived decline in Indian civilisation that justified British
rule. Ayshe Erdogu's essay discusses the late nineteenth-century commerce in picturesque
portrait 'types' depicting Ottoman men in exotic, sensualised, passive poses or as marginal

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workmen engaged in antiquated modes of production. Such images institutionalised a

'scientific' knowledge of the Ottoman Empire as a degenerate regime in need of guidance
from the West. In a further example, the essay by Andrew D. Evans analyses how the
structures of anthropological classification were geared to the ideological machine of total war
when anthropologists photographed foreign prisoners of war in German and Austrian POW
camps during World War 1. Evans describes how a 'racialised' view of the enemy, depicting him
as physically different from a powerful and unified German race, was delineated through the
application of modes of visual categorisation derived from 'type' and criminal photography.
Although the connections between race and nation were acknowledged to be unverifiable,
the photographs published in the press effectively 'documented' the difference between the
'savages' from the colonial troops, as well as Russian Jews and Gypsies, and a gradually
coalescing notion of pure 'Germanness'.
The essays in Colonialist Photography function as parables in the visual history of a
century in which historicist and universalist assumptions legitimated a world-view where
Europe was positively compared to 'elsewhere' and a chiasmic cultural distance between West
and non-West was continually enacted. The images discussed in Colonialist Photography
function as collodion and silver gelatine-coated capsules of historical time in which portraits,
processions, cruises, views and bodies allow their phantasmatic ideological burden to seep
through alongside revealing crucial details of production, consumption and reception. Gary
D. Sampson's analysis of Samuel Bourne's photographs of Barrackpore Park, with Govern-
ment House set amid manicured, English-style gardens, 'unmasks' the workings of the
'colonial picturesque'. Behind the subtle light effects, pictorial unity and calming landscape
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of Bourne's suite of views lies a negative comparison to the wild, stark and overwhelming
landscape of the Himalayas. By rigorously excluding anything savage and unsightly from
Barrackpore Park, the tranquil setting disguises its violent recent history as a site of mutiny
in 1857 and establishes India as an effective extension of Britain's domestic realms. The
ideological purposes of different kinds of photographic images are highlighted in the analysis
by Kim Sichel of the collaboration by photographer Germaine Krull with the filmmaker
Franc,:ois Villiers on a propaganda film titled L'Amite Noire. Krull, the head of the Free French
photographic service in Brazzaville from 1942 to 1944, produced photographic stills of the
sites and tribal peoples of French Equatorial Africa which underpinned Villiers's seventeen
minute motion picture. The goal was to persuade the Allies to continue funding Free French
industries on unoccupied soil. However, in the post-war period, the film was hailed as an
aesthetic masterpiece oflyrical ethnography whilst simultaneously working to 'whitewash the
sacrifices imposed upon Africans during the war and framing the population of French
Equatorial Africa so that it can continue to be admired and visually possessed or controlled
by Frenchmen'.
Several essays take as their focus the prevalent manufacture of sexualized images of
women in colonialist photography. Eleanor M. Hight's 'The Many Lives of Beato's "Beauties'"
examines the role of scopophiliac desire in the production and distribution of images of
Japanese women during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Felice Beato's photographs
of Japanese 'beauties' were part of a thriving commercial transaction between Japan and the
West in which submissive models drawn from the prostitution quarters in Yokohama were
presented to Western eyes as sexually alluring and available for consumption. For European
collectors, the photographs memorialised an 'old' Japan of pleasure and beauty, previously
depicted in Ukiyo-e prints, whilst also supplying a visual souvenir of the women whose services
had been purchased during visits to Japan. Pictorial traditions from both high art and popular
culture also informed the elaboration of travel advertising photography in the 1930s, analysed
by Patricia Johnston in her essay on the work of Edward Steichen, Toni Frissell and Anton
Bruehl for glossy magazines which sold the image of Hawai'i as an Edenic land of sensual
pleasure and Polynesian hula girls. This was a photographic strategy pitched at women
consumers, for whom Hawai'i had to be rendered safe but enticing. In this case, racial
difference functioned as a positive factor, but the customary advertising ploy whereupon the
viewer projects her identity onto the model had to be adapted in order to encourage 'the
viewer to objectify the native woman as part of a travel experience the consumer might
possess'.
However, the putative visual mastery offered by the camera was by no means totalising.
Despite what often seems an overweening aggression, the visions offered by colonialist
photography were characterised by incompleteness and fragmentation rather than an encom-
passing purview. As the editors note, the chapters are 'bound together by recognition of the
uneasy encounters between the photographers and their subjects, and of the complex and
varied circumstances under which the resulting photographs were and continue to be received
and interpreted'. Julia Ballerini argues that the uneasiness of the cross-cultural encounter is
made manifest in the differing ways in which the writer-photographer Maxime Du Camp
inscribes the figure of the Nubian man Ishmael within his photographs of Egyptian ruins and
in the texts resulting from his travels in 1849-1850. The figure ofIshmael signifies Du Camp's
'cultural hypochondria': his living flesh is in turn immobilised and dehumanised as an
architectural yardstick or made emblematic of the camera itself with his one-eyed vision and
servile status. By inserting Ishmael into the photographic and textual narrative, Du Camp
compulsively displays the symptom of his racial unease and at the same time animates the
breach between the ruins of the past and the present in which he is travelling.

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The rift between past and our present is made the subject of Brenda Croft's personal
reading of nineteenth-century portraits of the indigenous peoples of Australia. Titled 'Laying
Ghosts to Rest', Croft's essay meditates on the capacity of the photograph to withhold
information as much as it may bequeath it to today's viewer: what then is the nature of the
historical record and its 'place' and 'time'? The identity of the people depicted in photographs
taken by Kilburn, Foelsche and Lindt remain in shadow. This essay points, as all the
contributions do, to the need for further work in the field to uncover details about both the
subjects and the practitioners and viewing public of these photographs.
In a rare daguerreotype taken in 1847 by Kilburn of a group of three Victorian Kooris,
Croft reads a 'fighting back' on the part of the emphatic, unsmiling gaze of the elder man
and the cheery, alert attention of the youth at back. Evans notes that despite their powerless
status as POWs, German and Austrian photographers' records testify to insubordination on
the part of their subjects, ranging from the giving of false information to refusing to act the
part of a composed racial type. In the case of The People of India, Falconer shows how it was
a difficult and badly organised project relying on volunteer photographers who were reluctant
to venture into the remoter regions. Their subjects were often alarmed at what was going on
with the camera and would not sit still. Other sitters were antagonistic to the aims of the
photographer or manipulative of the photographer for their own class or status-based agendas.
These problems were compounded by the heat, running out of chemicals and travel-damaged
equipment. Only a few images were shown at the International Exhibition in London in
1862 and the published works received an indifferent reception. In contrast, as Rebecca
DeRoo shows in her essay 'Colonial Collecting: French Women and Algerian cartes postales,'
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the reception of Algerian postcards depicting belly dancers and harem women was both
enthusiastic and more complex than a unilinear critique of orientalism would permit.
Without ignoring their role in the depiction of racial hierarchies, DeRoo demonstrates that
the postcard images were used to convey intimate and erotic messages, allowing the French
women who collected, sent and received the postcards to subvert the conventions of
bourgeois femininity.
In the introduction, the editors rightly warn against the danger of reading the photo-
graphs as one-dimensional' embodiments of racial prejudices', suggesting that the variety of
methodological tools informing the essays aids in avoiding the reiterative stereotyping of the
subjects. The photographs provide glimpses of frailty, resistance and alternative readings amid
the aggressive maintenance of 'structures of domination' to which photography contributes
wholeheartedly. The photograph exists as a dual kind of evidence, documenting the frighten-
ing compatibility of its technologies with the institutions and goals of Western colonialism
even as it simultaneously presents evidence of cross-cultural encounters which were explora-
tory and potentially open-ended in their ramifications.
The essays in Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place are thus an important
contribution to the nuanced elaboration of Edward Said's influential critique of Western
cultural imperialism made in Orientalism (1978). Furthermore, the photographs, their
context and the historical analysis afforded by these essays contains resonant connections to
the present time. Oscar Vazquez's essay concludes with a brief description of the contempo-
rary casitas movement in New York City, where small shacks are being built by the immigrant
Puerto Rican community as a 'mnemonic sign' and 'an articulation of cultural solidarity'
during a time when the status of the island continues to be determined by exterior forces.
The task remains to continue the exploration of the role of photography in 'colonialism's
culture' and to link this history to the photographic representation of the post-World War II
world when anti-colonial demands for democracy and independence transformed, to use
Chakrabarty's temporal terms, the 'not yet' time of colonial dependency into the 'now'.
Natalie Adamson

Revisiting American Civil War Landscapes

Killing Ground: Photographs of the Civil War and the Changing American Landscape
John Huddleston. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 2002. 200
pages, with 86 black and white and 77 colour illustrations. Hardcover US$35.00, ISBN 0-801-
86773-8.

Traditional Civil War buffs might find John Huddleston's Killing Ground: Photographs of the
Civil War and the Changing American Landscape disappointing. Aficionados of the popular
'Then and Now' series by Thunder Bay Press will certainly not find what they are expecting.
Part of a very different series from The Johns Hopkins University Press, Creating the North
American Landscape (Gregory Conniff, Edward K. Muller, and David Schuyler, consulting
editors; George F. Thompson, series founder and director), this photo-essay is successful
precisely because it makes the reader think past the level of superficial visual comparisons.
Huddleston's project is a search for both the physical and spiritual remains of this period of
violence that transformed the United States. In pairing historical photographs with his own,
he discovers in the changing landscape a metaphor for American society.
The author's initial explanation of his quest might mislead the reader into the expectation
of a more conventional approach. Armed with historical views, he travelled to the sites of

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