A photo essay by Jean-Philippe Dedieu in the NYTimes:
More hereIntroduced to the public in the mid-19th century, the photographic process was contemporary to the European imperial expansion. The medium was quickly appropriated by colonial administrations, and military expeditions were usually painstakingly documented. Striking pictures of deserts protected by forts, or soldiers hiking through forests, were particularly designed to be reproduced in magazines to legitimize imperial conquests among readers back home.
How Africans were shown in the pictures — especially in the early images — went a long way toward marginalizing them as “the Other.” The visual production of racial stereotypes itself was influenced by the pseudo-sciences of anthropometry and criminal anthropology that had been developed in Europe in order to compare and classify “human races.” Over the years, I found countless examples of photographs composed according to these pseudo-scientific frameworks. The Austrian explorer
Richard Buchta was one of many photographers who did mug shot-like front and profile views of his subjects against a neutral background. His images underscore his aesthetic and almost ethnographic obsession with his subjects’ haircuts, clothes and jewels, but he also pictured them in such total isolation from their political and social environment that they were reduced to mere ethnic types.
