Another interesting article (accompanied by twenty fascinating pictures from the New York Times Lens, this one: Toward Visual Paths of Dignity. The article shows how colonial powers used photography to distort views of Africans and create stereotypes.
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 (Slide 9 and below). 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.