Art History

The late nineteenth century witnessed a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the first mass-produced cameras became available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and project an image of supremacy across the world. Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers' personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, The violence of colonial photography offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades before the First World War. It explores the ways the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, the book reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression.

The succession of political regimes in post-1848 France was experienced in similar ways in post-conquest Algeria. The political, social and cultural ideologies that emerged during this period were mirrored in the North African départements, and therefore it is perhaps not surprising that connected events happened simultaneously in the métropole and Algeria. It was not only through its common events and political principles that the Algerian territories became French, but undoubtedly also as a result of the emergence of new cultural media and cultural political attitudes. Taking and viewing photographs were aligned with the new French paradigm of the modern Nation, its identity construction, and interconnection with Algeria. Up to the beginning of World War I there were two moments that connected the photographic visual imagery of Algeria as part of the creation of lieux de mémoire within the Second Empire and Third Republic regimes; the 1850s with its ‘cataloguing’ of the newly established French Algeria and the 1880s-1900s with its portraiture of ‘consumptions and ideologies’ of a French Republican Algeria.

Looks at the development of photography from the beginning and traces its uses in Indonesia from its invention to the present day. The Dutch colonial government first brought the medium to the East Indies in the 1840s and immediately recognized its potential in serving the colonial apparatus. As the country grew and changed, so too did the medium. Photography was not only an essential tool of colonialism, but it also became part of the movement for independence, a voice for reformasi, an agent for advocating democracy, and is now available to anyone with a phone. This book gathers essays by leading artists, scholars, and curators from around the world who have worked with photography in Indonesia and have traced the evolution of the medium from its inception to the present day, addressing the impact of photography on colonialism, independence, and democratization.

Colonialist Photography is an absorbing collection of essays and photographs exploring the relationship between photography and European and American colonialism. The book is packed with well over a hundred captivating images, ranging from the first experiments with photography as a documentary medium up to the decolonization of many regions after World War II. Reinforcing a broad range of Western assumptions and prejudices, Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson argue that such images often assisted in the construction of a colonial culture.

An effective tool for reading postcolonial con/texts, ideology also provides a matrix to grasp the world, enabling collective political action. This interdisciplinary volume reflects that each position is subject to asymmetrical power relations, with critiques of ideological manifestations occurring in intersecting cultural, social, and political configurations.