nineteenth-century photographs not only captured whole the realities of little-
7 Towards a Conclusion
known places and peoples but allowed the Victorians to represent themselves
making history. Photography was thus seen to provide, as the photographer
John Thomson put it in 1892, 'a means of handing down a record of what we
are, and what we have achieved in this nineteenth century of our progress'.2
The confidence of photographers like Price and Thomson in their culture's
ability to make and record history is striking. In many respects the place of
photography in geographical discourses in Britain in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries is premised upon its 'exteriority': that is, upon the fact that
British explorers, artists, scientists, colonial officials and soldiers represented
Photography has already added and will increasingly tend to contribute to the knowl-
the world beyond Europe largely for and to themselves and a 'home' audi-
edge and happiness of mankind: by its means the aspect of our globe, from the tropics
ence.3 However, photography also collapsed the spaces of home and away,
to the poles its inhabitants... its cities, the outline ofits mountains, are made familiar
imperial metropolis and imperial frontier, on to one another.
tous.1
In 1913 Frederick Courteney Selous, the famous big-game hunter, naturalist
The capacity of photography to render the distant places and peoples of the
and Empire-builder, spoke before the Rugby School Natural History Society
globe to Victorian eyes, as noted in 1858 by the British photographer William
on 'Big Game Hunting in Africa'. He was a popular speaker, having had much
Lake Price, gave it a unique place in picturing the British Empire. Despite
experience in lecturing and showing his lantem-slides and being one of Rugby's
claims for its accuracy and trustworthiness however, photography did not so
most famous former pupils. He closed his lecture 'with some very fine slides of
much record the real as signify and construct it. Through various rhetorical
the Victoria Falls'.4 One slide from his collection shows the Victoria Falls
and pictorial devices, from ideas of the picturesque to schemes of scientific
Bridge over the Zambezi River with St Paul's Cathedral superimposed below
classification, and different visual themes, from landscapes to 'racial types',
(illus. 87). This image is worth considering in more detail as it seems to combine
photographers represented the imaginative geographies of Empire. Indeed,
many of the elements I have been discussing throughout this book.
as a practice of representation, photography did more than merely familiarize
Ever since Livingstone 'discovered' and named them after Britain's Queen
Victorians with foreign views: it enabled them symbolically to travel through,
in 1855, the Victoria Falls had long been a destination for painters and photo-
explore and even possess those spaces.
graphers. Indeed, on his second visit to the falls in i860 Livingstone himself
( ilearly, it is not possible to view nineteenth-century photographs precisely
made a detailed watercolour and pencil sketch, picturing and mapping the
in the ways in which they were seen at the time, if only because they elicited
extent and dimensions of this ultimate landmark of imperial geography.5 In
many responses then. Nevertheless, it is possible to situate photographs in
1862-5 the trader and explorer James Chapman spent months attempting to
the historical and cultural contexts in which they were made and displayed,
photograph the falls while his companion Thomas Baines undertook a series
to show how their meanings were framed by wider discourses. This is impor-
of sketches and paintings which he later published to great acclaim. One of
tant, since Victorian imperial visions borrowed from a well-established archive
the most ambitious attempts to survey the falls photographically was made sev-
of imaginative geographies of the European and non-European world, fash-
eral years later by William Ellerton Fry. As I noted in my discussion of
ioned through a variety of visual and textual media. The photographic
photography and campaigning, Fry was employed as official photographer, in-
representation of, for example, 'darkest Africa' or picturesque views of north-
telligence officer, meteorologist and assistant to Selous on the Pioneer Column
ern India inherited much of their aesthetic from eighteenth-century pictorial
expedition to Mashonaland in 1890. It was two years later that he made a series
traditions and imagery. Yet, while it was often based upon conventional ima-
of photographic views of the Victoria Falls (illus. 88). As the title of his photo-
gery, ideas and techniques, the unique mimetic capacity of photography to
graph suggests, his views were taken from marked points around the falls. This
capture in a two-dimensional image the play of light on objects placed before
was in order to facilitate their use in conjunction with a detailed map of the falls
I he lens made it a dramatically new means of representing the world. Suffused
Fry undertook for the Colonial Office. Together the map and photographs
with the nineteenth-century faith in both naturalism and positivism, both
amount to an attempt at a total visual survey of the falls and as such were parti-
artists and scientists were quick to seize upon photography as a natural process
cularly appreciated in institut ions such aslhe Royal ( ieographical Society.
which allowed the world to represent itself. Thus to their makers and viewers,
l ut l f f t l i i i TI ill", arm mnti ntutnc u/i \ i*" w 1 11 IMJ manv " ,.ci 1;
of natural scenery, their discovery and conquest amounting to the greatest of
manly geographical pursuits. Thus in ( i. A. Farini's account of his prospect-
ing expedition to Bechuanaland (present-day Botswana) in 1884 'with gun,
camera and note-book' shortly alter it had been taken over by Britain and the
Cape, he claimed not only to have proved that the Kalahari region would (with
the aid of irrigation and indigenous labour) make a healthy and wealthy British
colony but to have achieved 'the performance of the great gymnastic and
photographic feat of taking views of the largest and most inaccessible Falls in
the world - the Hundred Falls on the Orange River'.7 In a lecture to the RGS,
where the expeditionary photographs were also exhibited, Farini further
emphasized the intrepid nature of photographic exploration, noting, 'We had
to swim rapids, climb rocks, and descend precipices by ropes in order to take
these views.'
It is perhaps not surprising then that images of waterfalls should come to
dominate the walls of geographical societies and gentlemen's clubs. Indeed in
1915, during his presidency of the RGS, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, well
known for his enthusiasm for imperial interior design, instigated an extensive
hunt for photographs of the principal waterfalls of the world for a permanent
exhibition in the new Photograph Room of the RGS.
The Victoria Falls - certainly the greatest imperial falls in Africa - held a
H-Ą Victoria Falls Bridge over the Zambezi River with St Paul's Cathedral superimposed below,
particular iconic charge for Selous, as he had played a considerable part in
Frederick G>urtcney Selous lantern-slide collection.
helping Rhodes achieve his colonial dreams in this part of Africa in the 1880s
and 1890s, through prospecting explorations and by leading the British South
Africa Company's pioneer expedition to Mashonaland in 1890. Selous had
high hopes for Mashonaland, writing in 1893: 'that I may yet live to see that
far-off country . . . become a rich and prosperous portion of the British
Empire, is my most earnest desire.'9 The railway bridge, completed in 1905,
not only offered a new way of viewing and photographing the falls but, as a
British feat of engineering conquering nature, became a parallel icon of im-
perial progress. Indeed, the bridge formed the centrepiece of Rhodes's dream
of a Cape-to-Cairo railway line. Although this did not materialize, the bridge
was built and honoured Rhodes' famous wish that railway passengers should
pass close enough to the falls to see the spray on their carriage windows, creat-
ing a uniquely memorable experience for imperial visitors. As Jan Morris has
noted: 'Against the tremendous thundering background of the waterfall, its
rolling spray, its reverberating cannon-cracks, the seething mass of its water,
the bridge stood there defiantly, almost frail, with its slender arch curving
gracefully across the void.'10
Selous reproduced the magnificent sight of this single steel arch bridging a
350-foot gorge in his lantern-slide by superimposing a photograph of St
Paul's Cathedral under the bridge. The image is a topographical fantasy
88 William Ellerton Fry, 'Moose-oa-tunya (Victoria Falls) Zambezi taken from point D', 1892. partly in the tradition of the eighteenth century capriccio, such as St Paul's,
also collapsed and confused die spaces ol home with those of afar. As Samuel
Bourne's representation of Indian topography as 'English' landscape shows,
photography was a powerful means by which distant spaces were domesticated
and reconstructed in an image of home. In another respect, social explorers
and photographers of London categorized and represented the city's spaces
and inhabitants in the language and iconography of imperial exploration.
Images and ideas of racial and social 'types' at home and beyond were thus
interwoven in complex ways. More generally, as the bifocal structure of the
lantern-slide lecture scheme set up by the COVIC shows, the projection of
images of Empire was inexorably tied to the construction of sets of ideas con-
cerning citizenship and national identity within Britain itself.
Photography was a powerful means of classification and visualization of the
non-European world. Yet it would be wrong to exaggerate the coherence or
effectiveness of photography as a vehicle of imperial repression. Indeed, it is
rather too easy to fix photography, especially within the late-nineteenth-
century fields of criminology, medicine, eugenics and anthropology, as little
more than 'a mechanism of surveillance in the exercise of disciplinary
power'.1'' Certainly, some photographic projects, such as the India Office's
ethnographic survey The People of India (1868-75) provide evidence of the
8i) 'St Paul's Cathedral, London', The Queen s Empire, edited and with an introduction by
11, (). Arnold Forster(1902).
proliferating power of the nineteenth-century imperial state. Yet to see all
photography as merely imperial surveillance is to ignore important inconsis-
tencies and differences in both photographic practice and imperial discourse.
London, with the Grand Canal, Venice (c. 1795), painted by William Marlow
To begin with, a range of factors besides the requirements of imperial
(1714 1813), which pictured St Paul's in the landscape of Venice. During
government shaped the activity of individual photographers, whether ama-
t he nineteenth century, however, St Paul's had come to assume an increasing
teurs recording their experiences or professionals making commercial views.
importance within the representation of London as the capital of Empire. In
My focus on photography has tended, perhaps paradoxically, to demonstrate
his Imperial London (1901), for example, Arthur Beavan declared that St
its fractured status as a technical and historical practice. Not only was photo-
Paul's was now 'all but the exact middle of Greater London . . . the centre of
graphy doubly situated as an 'art-science' but its place within geographical
the world's capital'.11 Paintings such as Niels M. Lund's The Heart of the
discourse was also shaped by its technical requirements. As I hope I have indi-
Umpire (1904) projected both 'the power of the City and crowning glory of
cated, such technical dimensions, from the portability of cameras to the
St Paul's'.12 Similar views of'London as Capital of Empire' which focus on
exposure time required by different plates, impacted upon both the practical
St Paul's in photographs were used in Hugh Arnold-Forster's The Queen's
application and the symbolic meanings of photography within domains such
Umpire (1897), where St Paul's was described as 'the worthy and splendid
as exploration and natural history.
centre' of London (illus. 89), and Our Great City (1900).13 Indeed, the photo-
graph from the former resembles closely the image of St Paul's superimposed Although individual photographers, through their technical abilities, aes-
on Selotts's slide. thetic sensibilities and cultural prejudices certainly shaped their own images
as well as the wider body of work of which they were part, their precise role
Selous's photograph therefore maps the heart of imperial London and an
in constructing the meanings of their photographs is not easy to determine.
icon of colonial Africa on to one another. While clearly a montage, the image
For beyond their technical production, photographs took on a life of their
is nevertheless 'photographic' and carries with it an immediacy and veracity
own and could undergo serious alteration in the process.
associated with all photographs.'4 As a selective, symbolic projection of the
This occurred most vividly where photographs were considered not sym-
world, the photograph expresses the quality of much colonial photography in
bolic enough for effective promotion of Empire. Thus despite Hugh Arnold-
its ability to conquer space and time through visualization.
Forster's claim that the photographs in The Queen's Empire were 'all authentic
The imaginative geography of Empire constructed through photography
representations of I he realities of lile and sccnci \ , ol MM I I and manners, of the
works of man and the wonders of Nature throughout the empire',1 the photo-
graphs were often retouched and, in a number of cases, dramatically altered.
'Treaty Making in East Africa' (illus. 90), for example, reproduced in an
issue on 'The Government of the Empire', used a photograph made by the
explorer and prospector Ernest Gedge in 1889, but transformed it into an
image more suitable for the message of The Queen's Umpire. Gedge's original
photograph (illus. 91), made while exploring in Last Africa with Frederick
Jackson for the Imperial British East Africa Company, presents an informal
portrait of the invariably chaotic process of British exploration and treaty-
making in Africa. The image used in The Queen's Empire has been recomposed
entirely. Untidy details, such as unsightly posts, have been erased. More im-
portantly, the focus of the photograph has been displaced from Chief Kamiri
to the white, pith-helmeted figure (originally that of the trader and traveller
James Martin) who, surrounded with the added paraphernalia of colonial offi-
cialdom, appears now to be dictating the treaty demands to the African chief.
The retouching of images such as 'Treaty Making in East Africa' shows
TREATY-MAKING IN EAST AFRICe
how colonial photographs were, by themselves, often too ambiguous to
fompnny engaged in the week nf trentyinnkini ilh the chiefs of tin- ilistrki of Kikuyti. The process o
Ą" ereset: the oflivials of the Imperi
i, anil the recognised officials nf llie State may he truste
lie past, hut n happier stale of tilines now pen
making wiili natives lt.it. "'"'-" 1'
convey a single, simple message. Indeed, the very abundance of information e anil a higher civilisation than their own. The Brit
i are so often at the mercy nf superior IiilelHg.
justly in their rlĄĄ.!"fi.'iti. ikeilin
and though the linsl Africa Comp
dthough
Africa Company 1ms locality i:i
that llie direct rcsponsihility of the British Government has superseded that of private persons.
in photographs, invariably well in excess of that intended by the photographer, a gond specimen ni ils class, tin
( Ąpens them to a multitude of uses and meanings. Photographs were thus made 90 'Treaty Making in East Africa', The Qtteen 's Empire, edited and with an introduction by
H. O. Arnold Forstcr (1897).
into pictures of Empire not only through cropping and retouching but
through the addition of titles and descriptive captions. Arnold-Forster's cap-
lion to 'Treaty Making in East Africa' thus fixes the photograph in terms of
the imperialist rhetoric of the Queen's Empire. More generally, much of the
picturing of Empire depended on the interweaving of photography with dif-
ferent kinds of texts, including maps, paintings and various kinds of writing.
The use of photography in the promotion of imperial geography education by
the CO VIC as a form of'visualization', for example, depended not just upon
visual techniques but upon the cultural boundaries between pictures and
words. As I have suggested, Fisher's photographs for the CO VIC were disci-
plined by the words and narrative sequence imposed upon them by
Mackinder. However, many of the photographs made by Fisher - a painter
by training and inclination - simply contained too much information to be
successfully contained by the frame the COVIC's lectures intended for them.
'Phis sense of intertextuality is also important in stressing that photographic
meaning is not found lurking deep within the image, but is more akin to a pro-
jection flickering on a surface.'7 While photographers, publishers and editors
might attempt to condition the consumption of photographs through their
books and lectures, they could neither determine fully nor limit the meanings
which might be projected on to their images by their audience. Photographs
were displayed through a wide range of viewing formats, including scientific 91 Ernest Gedge, 'Treaty Making in Kikuyu, 11 August 1889'.
lectures, private albums, stereoscopic viewers, illustrated books, lantern-slide
shows and exhibitions. Photography was thus expel leni evariety of visual techniques, not simply reducible tOfl model ol 'surveillance'.lS
I5y purchasing one of Samuel Bourne's cabinet photographs, for example, an
individual could quietly peruse the Indian Empire, perhaps even with the help
of a magnifying glass. In contrast, someone attending one of the COVIC's
lantern-slide lectures would have sat in a darkened room among a large
audience, viewing photographs in a sequence controlled and interpreted by
the lecturer. While Bourne's view offered contemplative aesthetic pleasures
to the individual, the COVIC's lectures produced a collective visual experience
akin to the modern cinema. Moreover, although the effect of such shows on
I heir audiences is little researched, we should not assume either that audiences
were passive or that such technologies did not have their radical uses.ItJ
Empire was never without its critics and the currency of photography as a
truthful witness made it a powerful weapon in campaigns against colonial
92 Alice Hams (?), 'Natives of Wala Nsongo District with hands of their murdered relatives.
regimes.20 For example, photographs were used to great effect by British
White men arc Mr Harris and Mr Stannard' (1904).
humanitarians and missionaries in the campaigns which developed in Britain
in the early twentieth century against the Congo Free State. John and Alice
lantern-slide lectures, leaflets and articles. Thus one of John Harris's 1906
I larris, missionaries in the Congo from 1898 to 1905, made extensive photo-
Congo Reform Association pamphlets, titled 'Rubber is Death', used a dozen
graphic records of their travels and missionary work. In addition, they
photographs to tell the fateful story of the Congo rubber collectors.23 Photo-
recorded the aftermath of brutal attacks by the administrators and soldiers of
graphs of'Congo atrocities' were also used in Edmund Morel's articles in the
King Eeopold IPs Congo Free State on Africans who had failed to meet exact-
West African Mail?4 the illustrated weekly journal which he edited, and in
ing rubber production levels. One of their many photographs shows three
several of his books. The same photograph (see illus. 92) was used by Morel
Africans from the Wala Nsongo District with the severed hands of two of
in King Leopold's Rule in Africa (1904), his largest, most graphic account of
their relatives murdered by rubber sentries in May 1904 (illus. 92). The inclu-
the brutalities of the Congo regime.25
sion of Mr Harris and Mr Stannard, both of the Congo Balólo Mission at
Of course, John and Alice Harris were not opposed to all European coloni-
I tolinga, on either side of the African men was designed to lend further
alism in Africa. Indeed, they were missionaries who believed that Africans
credence to the veracity of the photograph.
needed to be protected from the brutal exploitation of regimes such as that of
From the 1890s increasing reports had reached Britain of the stranglehold
Leopold II by the help of Christian missions and British colonial rule.2 ' More-
exercised on the Congo Free State by Leopold II, King of the Belgians, with
over, the imagery that was deployed in the campaigns against the Congo Free
brutal coercion and forced labour being exacted from the African population.
State, with tales of cannibalism and bestiality, reinforced the image of Africa as
Philanthropic groups such as the Aborigines Protection Society, under the
a place of darkness and savagery as much as it exposed the brutality of coloni-
leadership of Henry Fox Bourne, launched protests against the Belgian
alism in the name of philanthropy undertaken by Leopold II. Nevertheless,
authorities21 and missionary organizations such as the Baptist Missionary
the campaigns forged new kinds of radical uses of colonial photography, parti-
.Society - who had mission stations in the Congo - gradually joined a swell of
cularly within anti-slavery campaigns and in journalism. John Harris
opinion against Leopold IPs rule.
continued to use photography in his campaigns as Secretary of the Anti-Slav-
This movement was undoubtedly boosted by the return of John and Alice
ery Society (which amalgamated with the Aborigines Protection Society in
Harris to England in 1905, whereupon they joined Edmund Morel's Congo
1909) from 1910 until his death in 1940. Indeed, one reporter looking back
Reform Association, which had been launched a year earlier, devoting all
on John Harris's career noted: 'It used to be said in Fleet Street in the old
their energies towards raising the public profile of the Congo so as to bring
days that there was no atrocity in any part of the world that John Harris
greater political pressure on the Belgian authorities.22 Photographs played a
hadn't got a photograph of.'27
central role in this process, particularly in the Harrises' nationwide scheme of
While it was John Harris who got much of the credit for the campaigns
Empire, ii is difficult toseled 'typical1 photographi "Mb which to sum up the
against atrocities in the Congo and his later work foi the Ann Slavery Society,
totality of Empire. Indeed, to do so belli I tht varii itj and complexity of the
resulting in a knighthood in 1933, his wife Alice took in equal share in much of
imperial photographic archive as well Empire itself, For, as I hope I have
this work. Moreover, although the photographs of the Congo tend to be
shown, far from fulfilling the posilivisl fantasy of an imperial geography
credited to John I larris, it is likely that many were taken by Alice particularly
united by photographs, the collection of photographs into the imperial archive
the scenes where John Harris is shown in die photograph (see illus. 92).
through institutions such as the IU fS resulted in the proliferation and endless
Indeed, Alice was as talented a photographer anil as skilled a lantern-slide
expansion of the world. Moreover, since much faith in the certainty of photo-
lecturer and anti-slavery campaigner as her husband.
graphic representation was held together by this apparatus of institutions,
This example is perhaps a good way of signalling that a further aspect of the
technologies and viewing spaces, the currency of the photograph was always
uses of photography in picturing Empire is to be found in the different ways
less stable than was supposed.34
British men and women utilized the technology, for although I have noted the
Thus, while I have focused on photographic images and practices, I have
importance of codes of masculinity in much photographic practice - particu-
been concerned to show how the imaginative geographies of Empire which
larly when it related to hunting, campaigning and exploration - women were
were projected through them were produced not in isolation but in interaction
also, as I have noted, wielding the camera on similar kinds of colonial
with other media, including travel-writing, cartography and painting. It is this
endeavours. The role of photography specifically in the work of women such
narrative component of photographs; their relation to other images and texts,
as Alice Harris and Mary Kingsley, particularly in the fields of missionary
both visual and verbal, just as much as their contents, which determines their
work, medicine, travel and anthropology, would thus repay greater examina-
meanings. In this way, as much as they seem to fix the truth of the past, photo-
tion than has been possible here.28
graphs unsettle the certainty of history and render it more contestable.
Much of my discussion in this book has presented fragments from a wider
The photographs I have discussed and reproduced here do not therefore
narrative of the development of the imaginative geographies of Empire
represent merely captured moments whose individual meanings are frozen in
through photography. I hope it has at least indicated further possible avenues
time, to be unlocked only with the correct analytical tools. Rather they repre-
of inquiry into the uses of photography - in the making of colonial subjectiv-
sent dynamic objects with entangled histories whose surfaces reflect different
ities as well as the objectification of colonial vision - within other related fields:
meanings within different historical and cultural settings. This is true in the
for example, in missionary work, advertising, colonial settlement and medi-
case of colonial photography if only because Empire and its signs have con-
cine.29 More detailed accounts of specifically anti-colonial photography, such
tinuously been transformed. While the Victoria Falls Railway Bridge might
as that undertaken by John and Alice Harris early this century, would also
have conjured up the wonders of the Empire in Africa to schoolboys at
complement such work. Moreover, while my focus has been primarily on the
Rugby School in the early 1900s, it had, as Jan Morris has noted, acquired
uses of photography by British photographers, explorers and soldiers, it is
altogether different meanings by the 1960s, when it divided white-controlled
important not to forget the complex ways in which photographs and cameras
Rhodesia from the black republic of Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia.
were appropriated by colonized peoples and used as a means of self-
Indeed, when the South African Prime Minister met the President of
expression. Indeed, from its earliest operations within the colonial encounter,
Zambia in 1975 they conducted their negotiations in a railway carriage half-
photography became part of indigenous poetics and counter-discourse.30 All
way across the bridge.35
this is quite apart from the work to be done in addressing the ways in which
Similarly, even a single photograph can provoke multilayered insights into
historical photographs of Empire have today become rediscovered as part of
the life of an individual and the ethos of an age, as Jan Morris's eloquent evoca-
the iconography of Britain's national past and fodder for colonial nostalgia.31
tion of her Victorian imperial hero, Jack Fisher, inspired by his photographic
More generally, the legacies of imperial representation may also be traced in a
portrait, shows so well.36 Here too lies the fascination of family photographs,
range of contemporary cultural domains, from travel and tourist photogra-
which provide such a powerful starting point for wider investigations of how
phy32 to popular geographical discourse in magazines such as National
the everyday narratives we construct for them are shaped by currents of cul-
Geographic?^
ture, ideology and history.37
The photographic construction of Empire operated on a variety of levels: as
a means of exploration and surveying; as an 'art'; as a witness to 'progress'; and
as a symbol of personal memories. Despite my attention to particular images
and my attempt to identify major themes of the photographic visualization of