Enfolding history: identities, performances, and contexts in an early ethnographic album from Natal, South Africa

Journal article

The histories of anthropology and photography are closely entwined, and nowhere more so than in southern Africa, where new European settler colonies emerged at around the same time as technology transformed people’s ability to represent the places and people they encountered. This article explores the early ethnographic photography of the settler colony of Natal, South Africa, through the identities and contexts of one mid-1860s album. The article reveals a rich and burgeoning photographic culture in the colony, with numerous practitioners creating and copying images of African people for a variety of colonial audiences. One hitherto overlooked photographer in particular emerges from this story, who I here argue was probably the resident border agent Capt. Joshua Walmsley, whose racial ‘type’ images of Natal Africans were collected and published in many European scientific circles in the period. The album thereby constitutes what might be described as an incunabulum of the nascent sub-discipline of visual anthropology, a document that enfolds many interrelated histories that help us understand how European anthropology came to visually create its subject.

Authors: Morton, C

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis
• Journal: History of Photography
• Volume: 47
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 185-202
• Publication date: 2024-06-28
• Acceptance date: 2024-05-21
• DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2024.2366048
• EISSN: 2150-7295
• ISSN: 0308-7298
• Language: English
• Keywords: ethnographic photography; carte-de-visite; visual anthropology; KwaZulu-Natal; South Africa