The violence of colonial photography 9781526163325

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The violence of colonial photography

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The violence of colonial photography

Daniel Foliard

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Éditions La Découverte 2020 The right of Daniel Foliard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Éditions La Découverte 2020 First English-language edition published in 2022 by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk This work has benefited from a contribution from the ANR as part of the Programme d’Investissement d’Avenir (ANR-17-EURE-0008) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 6331 8 paperback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not ­guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Front cover image: Raymonde Bonnetain, ‘Renée Bonnetain with the skulls of Samory’s sofas’ © Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris Cover Design: Fatima Jamadar

Typeset by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

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Contents List of figures Foreword by Kim A. Wagner Acknowledgements Note on translation

vi xv xviii xix

Introduction 1 Repulsion, erasure, and loss of contrast 2 Photography as power: force and counterforce 3 Depths of field: darkrooms and conflicts prior to the 1890s 4 Conflicts in the lens: from the 1890s to the First World War 5 The public and the private: regimes of visibility 6 Subversion, denunciation, and manipulation 7 The enemy’s body 8 Paper cemeteries 9 Invisible wars? Reflections of extra-European conflicts in France and Britain Conclusion: ceci n’est pas une illustration

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Notes Selected bibliography Index

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List of figures 0.1

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John Henry Godfrey, ‘Village scene, anywhere’, aristotype, 9.5 cm × 31 cm, from an album entitled HMS Bramble, China, 1910–1912 © National Maritime Museum (GOD/113). Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of John H. Godfrey’s estate. John Foster Fraser, Pictures from the Balkans (London, Cassell: 1906), 12. Author’s collection. Anon., ‘After the battle of Atbara, in the enemy’s trenches’, engraving from a photograph by R. V. Webster, The Graphic (28 May 1898), 13. Author’s collection. Edgard Imbert, ‘Tanala venant rendre les armes, on leur montre le Vérascope’, 1902 (October?), aristotype, 4 cm × 4.5 cm, Imbert collection, ECPAD, album no. 10, view no. 164. © ECPAD/Défense. https://www.ecpad.fr/presse. André Salles, Cochinchina, ‘Trinhvan – De, Tonkinois de Hanoï, trente-trois ans (43m/m), cinq ans de prison pour voies de fait envers un supérieur, no. 10: Phan-van-Chan, Cochinchinois de Cần Thơ, trente-cinq ans (35m/m), cinq ans de réclusion pour faux en écriture’, glass plate 13 cm × 18 cm. © Société de Géographie (SG XXCM-418). Anon., ‘À leur arrivée à Saïgon, les immigrants chinois sont « bertillonnés » comme des criminels’, engraving from a photograph, La Vie illustrée, 25 August 1905, 1. © Bibliothèque nationale de France. Jules Lavée, ‘Ce fut un sauve-qui-peut général’ (It was a general run for your life), engraving from a photograph in Paul Lamy, ‘Souvenirs de la Côte d’Ivoire’, Le Tour du monde, 11 February 1905, 71. © Bibliothèque nationale de France. Anon., ‘The photograph that caused the child’s death’, engraving from a photograph by Arnold Henry Savage Landor taken in 1897, in Arnold Henry Savage Landor, In the Forbidden Land, vol. 1 (Heinneman, London, 1898), 141. © Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne, fonds Robert Fazy, FZA 503.

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Frederick Bailey, ‘M. I. with Tibetan prisoners. The man on the left thought the camera was a pistol, hence his face’, silver print mounted in a private photo album linked to the British expedition in Tibet (1903–04). © The British Library Board, photo/1083/11 (83). D. H. Gifford, ‘Abors in Dosing Village’, silver print mounted on card, each image 9.8 cm × 7.2 cm, private album of the Abor Hills (1911). © National Army Museum, NAM 1965-04-60. Émile Coquibus, ‘Le capitaine Dauvilliers photographiant un fils de Samory’, 1 January 1904, gelatin silver bromide photograph on glass, 6 cm × 6.4 cm. © ECPAD/Défense, D180-4-1. https:/www.ecpad.fr/ presse. Jean Geiser, ‘Béhanzin, ex-King of Dahomey, his family and his suite’, c. 1906, postcard, Algiers. Author’s collection. Anon., photographs of victims of whipping, half-tone engraving, in Egyptian Delegation to the Peace Conference (Paris: 1919), 187. © Collection La Contemporaine. Captain Péri, ‘Ba-Bieu, lieutenant du Đề Thám exposé après sa mort pour être reconnu (colonne du Phuc-Yen 1909)’, 1909, published as a postcard by Pierre Dieulefils, Hanoi. Author’s collection. Anon., ‘The Attack on Mhunnah-Ka-Dhunnah’, 1868, albumen print from a collodion glass negative, Alexander Dudgeon Gulland album, Princeton University Library, Rare Book Collection (Oversize 2009-0016). Courtesy of the Princeton University Library. Jules Couppier, ‘Cimetière de Melegnano, le lendemain de la bataille (8 June 1859)’, stereoscopic view, albumen print, 13.6 cm × 6.9 cm, Musée de l’Armée (Dist. RMN-Grand Palais), inventory number 2011.10.1. © Paris-Musée de l’Armée, dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Fanny Reynaud. Comparison of an original photograph by Alfred Sarrault and its engraved reproduction in L’Illustration. @ Société de Géographie – all rights reserved. ‘Ascent of Djedda (sketched by Mr. Simpson)’ and ‘North scarp of Djedda’, engraving and albumen print, 16 cm × 24 cm and 20 cm × 27 cm, respectively, in John Harrold et al., Photographs from Abyssinia, 1867–1868, by the Photographers of the 10th Company, Royal Engineers. Courtesy of Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Winterton Collection, Northwestern University. James Lloyd, ‘Zulu remains on Gingilivo battlefield’, 1879, albumen print, 21 cm × 12.3 cm, view no. 29 of George Froom’s album

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List of figures (Major, 94th Regiment of Foot). © National Army Museum (NAM 1951-04-22). 70 Édouard Hocquard, ‘Abords de Sontay le soir de la prise’, Woodburytype, 10 cm × 16 cm, in E. Hocquard, Le Tonkin, vues photographiques prises par M. le Dr Hocquard, médecin-major (The Tonkin Campaign, photographic views taken by Mr. Dr Hocquard, medical officer) (Henry Cremnitz, Paris: 1886), plate no. 115. © Bibliothèque nationale de France. 72 Willoughby Wallace Hooper, ‘Execution at Mandalay’, print from a glass plate negative, 15 January 1886, 15 cm × 10 cm, The British Library, India Office Archives, Photo 447/8 (1). © The British Library board. 74 Émile-Louis Abbat, ‘At halt during the burning of the village of Kalagaga’, 15 November 1897, gelatin silver print from a glass negative, 7 cm × 10.8 cm. Courtesy of Catherine Abbat. 79 Advertisement for the photographic company Comptoir photographique colonial, La Dépêche coloniale illustrée, 15 June 1907, 150. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 82 Anon., ‘Cadavres de 16 marocains tués le 13 au soir, par le même obus à la mélinite’ (Corpses of 16 Moroccans killed on the evening of the 13th by the same Melinite shell), half-tone print, in Sud-Oranais. Album de la 1re Colonne du Haut-Guir, mars-avril-mai 1908 (Algiers: Geiser, c. 1910), 18. Author’s collection. 87 René Bull, ‘Firing a shell rocket from Karuppa Camp’, half-tone print, in René Bull, Black and White Albums, The Tirah Campaign (London: Black and White, 1897), 16. Author’s collection. 90 Anon. ‘The Dahomey Expedition – Cremation of Dahomean corpses after the Battle of Dogba’, engraving based on a photograph, L’Illustration, 19 November 1892, 1. Author’s collection. 95 Francis Gregson, ‘September 2, 6 a.m.: the grenadiers during the fight’, 2 September 1898, gelatin silver print mounted on cardboard, 7.5 cm × 7.5 cm, Royal Collection Trust, London, RCIN 2501833. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 99 Engraving based on a painting by Richard Caton Woodville, ‘The charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, September 2, 1898’, The Illustrated London News, 24 September 1898, centre leaflet. © LARCA. 100 René Bull, Black and White War Albums: Sudan no. 1 (London: Black and White, 1898), 26. Author’s collection. 101

List of figures 4.9

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Anon. ‘Ghastly war picture from Tripoli’, half-tone engraving from a photograph provided by the Topical Agency, Leeds Mercury, 4 November 1911, 12. © The British Library Board, rights reserved, courtesy of The British Newspaper Archive. Anon., ‘Dossier of the massacres of hostages by the Bulgarians’, halftone engravings based on photographs by Jean Leune, L’Illustration, special issue, 2 August 1913, 1. Author’s collection. Joseph or David Barnett, ‘Shooting Matabele spies at Mangwe Fort’, 1896, silver halide print from a glass negative, size unknown, Barnett Collection/The Star, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, 1896-ZA HPRA A3311 RHO54. © African News Agency/ANA. Anon., ‘Matabele murderers and spies awaiting trial at Fort Mangwe. Four were afterwards shot’, halftone print produced from a photograph from the Barnett studio, The Review of Reviews, vol. 14, 1896, 107. Author’s collection. William Rausch (?), ‘The hanging of Matabele spies’ (also appeared with the title ‘From a photograph’), halftone print produced from an anonymous photograph taken in May or June 1896, frontispiece of the first edition of the book by Olive Schreiner, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (Unwin, London, 1896). Author’s collection. Anon., ‘Toilette d’un Boxer condamné à mort’, c. 1900, gelatin silver developing-out paper, 10 cm × 8 cm, album Goi. © Paris-Musée de l’Armée, dist. RMN. Frank G. Smith, full page from his personal album, various silver prints and dried plants stuck on cardboard, c. 1902, National Maritime Museum, London, Frank G. Smith Papers, SMH-4 (S9429). © National Maritime Museum. Edgard Imbert, page 10 of Indochina album, 1905–08, five aristotype prints, pictures no. 606–610. © ECPAD/Défense. Edgard Imbert and anonymous, ‘Au marché’, Madagascar, 1900–02, silver chlorobromide glass plate, 6 cm × 13 cm. © ECPAD/Défense. Anon., ‘Sur le terrain de combat de Menabba, 16 Avril 1908’, silver print from a glass negative mounted in an album entitled Béchar GuirZousfana Saoura, Lyautey papers, Archives nationales (France), 475AP/318. Charles Foulkes, ‘Real Boer, battle of Driefontein’, c. 1899–1900, silver halide print, 9.8 cm × 6.2 cm, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives,

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List of figures King’s College London, GB0099 KCLMA Foulkes, 3/3. Courtesy of The Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives. Anon., ‘Ensevelissement des cadavres marocains, tués aux combats de Beni-Ouzien et Bou-Denib’ (Burial of Moroccan corpses, killed in combat at Beni-Ouzien and Bou-Denib), 1907–08, postcard, Geiser, Algiers, private collection. Author’s collection. Charles Mangin, albums of pictures of the campaign in Morocco from 1912–13, postcards mounted on cardboard, folio no. 44, QE-1035-PET FOL. © Bibliothèque nationale de France. Joannès Barbier, untitled, aristotype print from a negative taken in January 1891, 10 cm × 14.5 cm. © Paris-musée de l’Armée, inv. 2015.10.4, dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Fanny Reynaud. Henri Thiriat ‘Indigène venant d’apporter à Bakel des têtes de prisonniers capturés parmi les fuyards des bandes d’Ahmadou’, (Native who has just brought to Bakel the heads of five prisoners belonging to Ahmadu’s bands, caught while fleeing), engraving based on a photograph by Joannès Barbier in L’Illustration, 2511, April 1891, 312. Author’s collection. Anon, ‘The punishment of Egyptians at Denshawi’, The Sphere, 14 July 1906, 35. © LARCA. A. H. Zaki, ‘The modern civilization of Europe’, lithograph published as a supplement of Al-Siyasah al-Musawwara, 1908. © Library of Congress, LOT 8196. Anon., ‘Notre civilisation au Maroc’ (Our civilisation in Morocco), L’Humanité, 21 June 1913, 1. © Bibliothèque nationale de France. Basile Cargopoulo, ‘Blessés turcs et leurs médecins’ (Wounded Turks and their doctors), engraving based on a photograph misattributed to the Abdullah studio by Le Monde illustré, 3 February 1877, 6. © Bibliothèque nationale de France. Henri Gaden et al., four pictures taken before the capture of Samory Touré, September 1898, printed on baryta paper from negatives on glass plates (top left: 8 cm × 9.8 cm; top right: 7.2 cm × 11.5 cm; bottom left: 7 cm × 9.4 cm; bottom right: 7.8 cm × 9.4 cm), page 12 of an album belonging to Major Lartigue, Service historique de la Défense, GR 2 K 194. © SHD. Knight Brothers, ‘Russo-Japanese peace conference’, c. 1904, postcard, Underwood and Underwood, Leonard A. Lauder. Collection of Japanese Postcards. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2002.5526.

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Anon., ‘Are wounded Natal rebels properly treated by the British?’, halftone print, Illustrated London News, 21 July 1906, 99. © LARCA. 6.10 René Bull, ‘A Gurkha outpost attacked’, 1897, print on baryta paper from an album owned by Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton (1853–1947), 9.5 cm × 7 cm. Courtesy of The Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, 18/8/1-2. 6.11 Frederic Harvey, ‘Battle of Botha’s Pass,’ 1900, photomontage and drawing, 20.4 cm × 12.6 cm (drawing) and 17.5 cm × 9.2 cm (photomontage). © National Army Museum, NAM 2010-11-12-10. 6.12a Abraham or Élie Benichou, ‘Oujda: les remparts, les têtes coupées coupées’ (Oujda, the ramparts, the decapitated heads), c. 1907, postcard, photomontage. Author’s collection. 6.12b Frères Neurdein, ‘Destruction des fermes boers’ (Destruction of Boer farms), c. 1900, postcard, photomontage. Courtesy of Gilles Teulié. 6.12c J. Vitou, ‘Jeune guerrier achevant les blessés’ (Young warrior finishing off the wounded), in Frédéric Schelameur, Souvenirs de la campagne du Dahomey (Paris: Charles Lavauzelle, 1896), 137. © Bibliothèque nationale de France, 8-NF-26445. 7.1 Robert Baden-Powell, ‘The biter bit’, photoengraving, in Robert BadenPowell, The Matabele Campaign, 1896 (London: Methuen, 1897), 61. Author’s collection. 7.2 Crewes and Van Laun Studio, photograph of Cetshwayo on board the HMS Natal, September 1879, albumen print, 12.7 cm × 9.0 cm, from an album compiled by W. S. Anderson between 1879 and 1915. © National Army Museum, NAM 1974-10-170. 7.3 Rev. G. H. Lusty (?), ‘Birsa Munda’, photoengraving, in Sarat Chandra Roy, The Mundas and their Country (Calcutta: Asia Publishing House, 1912), 106. Author’s collection. 7.4 Anon., ‘Le beau-père du Dé-Tham et têtes de pirates des bandes du Dé-Thám’ (Dé-Tham’s father-in-law and heads of Dé-Tham pirates), in L’Illustration, 26 June 1909, 443. Author’s collection. 7.5 Anon., ‘Feu’ (The gunshot), 15 October 1896, baryta paper mounted on cardboard, 10.9 cm × 8.3 cm. Album from Thomas Jørgensen (1900). Mission and Diakonia Archives, VID (collection A-1045). 7.6 Anon., ‘15 octobre 1896: exécution de Rainandriamampandry’ (15 October 1896, execution of Rainandriamampandry), albumen print on cardboard, 8.5 cm × 11 cm, from André Savoie’s album, FR ANOM 8Fi517/66.

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7.8

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List of figures Rahmizade Bahaeddin (?), photograph showing the execution of the murderers of the British vice-consul on Crete, 10.7 cm × 14.6 cm, silver print on cardboard from John Archer’s photographic album (1871–1954). Courtesy of The Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, Photo album 1897–1929. Anon., ‘Under the British Broad Arrow in China’, photoengraving, Black and White Budget 4, no. 76, March 1901, 773. Author’s collection. Anon., ‘La tête de Rabah d’après une photographie rapportée par la mission Gentil’, L’Illustration, 9 March 1901, 1. Author’s collection. Anon., ‘La tête de Rabah’ (The head of Rabah), silver print from a negative produced in April 1900. © CHETOM, Cointet Papers, 17 H 35. Reginald Wingate (?), ‘Bodies of the Khalifa Abdallahi and the Amir Ali wad Helu’, 24 November 1899, silver print mounted on card. © Durham University Library, Sudan Archive, SAD.621-006-002. Jan van Hoepen, ‘Spions Kop, Natal, January 26th 1900’, gelatin silver bromide print, 22.4 cm × 16.1 cm, included in an album containing 165 photographs of the Boer War compiled by lieutenant-colonel Frederic Harvey, Royal Army Medical Corps. © National Army Museum, NAM 2010-11-12-10. Anon., ‘A modern ghoul’, photoengraving, in Frederic William Unger, With ‘Bobs’ and Krüger, (Philadelphia: H. Coates, 1901), 77. Author’s collection. W. Gregory, ‘What they have suffered for England’, The Sketch, 6 April 1898, 1. Author’s collection. Anon., ‘The wounded from the Sudan’, Army and Navy Illustrated, 24 December 1898, 340. Author’s collection. Anon., ‘Au blockhaus de Mo-Trang: les blessés du combat de DongDang’ Dang’ (In the blockhouse in Mo-Trang: the wounded from the battle of Dong-Dang), halftone print, L’Illustration, 26 June 1909, p. 345. Author’s collection. Bruce Forbes, ‘Upper third of the right femur of an officer of the Imperial Light Horse’, in Samuel Monell, A System of Instruction in X-ray Methods (New York: Pelton, 1902), plate 112. Author’s collection. Xavier Brau de Saint-Pol Lias, ‘Lieux historiques du Tonquin’ (Historic sites in Tonkin), 1885, silver halide print in an album containing 38 pictures, picture no. 36. © Société de géographie, WD78.

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Charles Foulkes, ‘Paul’s grave’, c. 1899–1900, print on baryta paper stuck on card, 9.8 cm × 6.2 cm. Courtesy of The Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archive, GB0099 KCLMA Foulkes 3/3. J. B. Martial, ‘Combat d’In Rhar, 9 h 47 matin. En arrière des pièces, aux coffres à munitions: le canonnier Gos rend le dernier soupir’ (The battle of In Rhar, 9:47 in the morning. Behind the artillery line, by the munitions chests: gunner Gos draws his last breath), 19 March 1900, photogravure, in J. B. Martial, Souvenir d’In-Rhar (Algiers: Geiser, 1901), 32. © University of Tübingen, 17B1701-8. René Bull, ‘The Northampton disaster, burying the dead’, halftone engraving, in René Bull, Black and White Albums. The Tirah Campaign (London: Black and White, 1897), 27. Image © Daniel Foliard. L’Excelsior, 25 May 1913, 5. © Bibliothèque nationale de France. Anon., ‘Our Advanced Posts on the Nile’, halftone prints, Army and Navy Illustrated, 17 December 1898, 291. Author’s collection. Occurrences of the expression ‘war pictures’ in the British press between 1880 and 1914, according to the Britishnewspapers.com database (accessed in May 2019). Author’s collection. Advertisement for The King magazine published in the London Daily News, 2 February 1900, 2. Author’s collection. Anon., ‘“Methods of Barbarism”: A Photographic Proof’, retouched halftone print, The Bystander, 27 February 1907, 435. Author’s collection. James Ricalton, ‘After a fierce assault – every man killed’, 1905, stereoscopic picture published by Underwood and Underwood. Author’s collection. Comparison of occurrences of the Russo-Japanese War, the Balkan War, and all occurrences linked to British colonial wars (‘Ashanti war/campaign/expedition’; ‘Sudan war/campaign/expedition’; ‘Tirah campaign/expedition’; ‘Benin Expedition’; ‘Matabele War’; ‘Afghan War’; ‘Zulu War’; ‘Burmese war’; ‘Battle of Omdurman’; ‘Egyptian campaign’), from data available at Britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk, accessed January 2019. Author’s collection. Occurrences of the expressions ‘Ashanti war/campaign/expedition’, ‘Tirah campaign/war’, ‘Matabele war’, ‘Benin expedition’ and ‘Egyptian campaign’, from data available at Britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk, accessed January 2019. Author’s collection. Occurrences of the terms ‘expédition/campagne/guerre de Madagascar’, ‘guerre russo-japonaise’, and ‘guerre du Transvaal/des Boers’ in

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List of figures L’Aurore, Le Cri du peuple, La Croix, Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, L’Humanité, Le Journal, La Justice, Le Matin, Le Petit journal, Le Petit Parisien, and Le Radical, from data at Gallica.fr, accessed January 2019. Author’s collection. 255 Raymonde Bonnetain, ‘Mlle Renée Bonnetain (1894–95) jouant avec les crânes de sofas (soldats professionnels) de Samory, fusillés outre-Niger, après d’inutiles combats, pour la plus grande gloire – gloire & profit – de l’artillerie de marine’ (Mlle Renée Bonnetain [1894–5] playing with the skulls of Samory’s sofas [professional soldiers], shot in the outreNiger region, after some pointless battles, for the greater glory – glory & profit – of the marine artillery), albumen paper, 16.5 cm × 11.2 cm. © Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris (cote 099 B 83). 267 Henri Gaden, ‘Portrait d’enfant’ (Portrait of a child), between 1900 and 1901, print on baryta paper, Zinder. © Archives nationales d’outre-mer, FR ANOM 27Fi 739. 270

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Foreword At the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan in September 1898, the Anglo-Egyptian force under the command of Major-General Kitchener deployed and tested the very latest military technology against the numerically superior Mahdist forces under Abdullah al-Khalifa. As thousands of Mahdists launched a mass assault over open ground against the Anglo-Egyptian lines, they were met by a deadly hail of Lyddite shells launched from rapid-firing artillery, and expanding bullets fired from Maxim machineguns at a rate of 600 per minute. Altogether, Kitchener’s troops expended more than 200,000 rifle rounds, and the Mahdists never made it closer than 1000 yards; an estimated 11,000 were killed and 16,000 wounded. The combined British and Egyptian forces suffered just 28 killed and 148 wounded. Once the dust had settled, dozens of camera-wielding officers and correspondents dashed onto the battlefield to capture the effects of the carnage. Although it was paintings and engravings of the blatantly anachronistic charge of the 21st Lancers that came to dominate the public narrative, photos of the corpse-strewn battlefield of Omdurman were subsequently published in newspapers, magazines, and memoirs. The fact that wounded Mahdists had been left to die, and that Kitchener was rumoured to have disinterred the Mahdi’s body and kept the skull as a trophy, initially caused a minor scandal back in London. Yet the criticism never amounted to much during an age when it was generally accepted that this level of violence was a necessary feature of colonial warfare – as was its photographic documentation. By the end of the nineteenth century, as Daniel Foliard argues in this important book, the camera had become an essential part of the colonial toolkit and the photograph the paramount trophy of imperialism. The grainy images from Omdurman represent just a few examples of the thousands of photos that were produced during the Scramble for Africa and relentless Western imperial conquests around the world in the decades around 1900. Apart from the aftermath of battles and massacres, this well-established repertoire included scenes of punishment and executions, as well as portraits of captured rebels and other prisoners. Taken by professionals and amateurs alike, some of these images were carefully staged tableaus, emulating the composition and conventions of formal paintings. Others were blurry snapshots captured in the spur of the moment. The visual economy of colonial photography was underwritten by the same double-standards of the

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Foreword

imperial project more broadly: the racialised logic that required the unlimited use of force against so-called ‘savages’ also justified photographing their dead and dying in ways that would have been unthinkable in conflicts between ‘civilised’ people. Photography thus produced colonial violence as a spectacle to be consumed back home in the imperial metropoles. The Violence of Colonial Photography is a brutally honest and radically innovative history of British and French imperialism, one that is entirely shorn of exceptionalist bluster and the euphemisms of the ‘savage wars of peace’. Foliard traces the transimperial and global trajectories of photographers and their photographs across multiple conflicts – both famous and forgotten – throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. With more than eighty photos, ‘extracted from an ocean of images’, and based on extensive research in public and private collections, this is a genuine work of historical excavation – literally and figuratively. In some of the book’s most powerful sections, Foliard examines lost images: photographs described in contemporary sources but which no longer exist. The sense of historical erasure is palpable, yet in order to salvage something of this lost visual world, and to recover what photography might have meant to its authors and its audiences more than a century ago, Foliard relies on the written word as much as the image. The two, we are reminded, were always co-constitutive. Despite the popular notion that photos somehow ‘speak for themselves’ or are ‘worth a thousand words’, images of colonial violence were never self-explanatory and the stories they told never uncontested. What determined the meaning and significance of a photo was not simply what it depicted as much as the way its subject was depicted, as well as the manner in which it was framed, captioned, and presented for different audiences. Just as a hunt would not be the same without a trophy, so too would the defeat of indigenous people not be the same without a photo of colonial soldiers posing with the bodies of their slain enemies. Depending on the specific circumstances, however, such an image could be a dirty secret shared only with fellow veterans of colonial wars, or it could be proudly displayed on the mantelpiece in the gentleman’s smoking room. It might even be published in a newspaper to celebrate colonial heroism or, conversely, it could end up as evidence of atrocity and deployed in the cause of anti-imperialism. This is why, Foliard asserts, colonial photography cannot simply be examined as a two-dimensional image on a piece of paper but must be understood as an act and as an ongoing process. The book furthermore offers a rare glimpse into the private world of European officers and soldiers who used photo albums to curate their memories and craft personal narratives of their experiences on the colonial battlefields of the time. Commercial postcards of landscapes and local women, equally exoticised, were imbued with personal significance when inserted among private snapshots – at times even inscribed with personal notes, thus turning stock images into intimate souvenirs.

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Deeply attentive to the materiality of photographs, Foliard reveals the ways in which the significance of images changed as they circulated locally and globally, between periphery and metropole, and between the public and the private. As assemblages of personal memories, the content of colonial photo albums is both shocking and deeply illuminating: images of domestic bliss (settler-style), with European children playing with their native servants, can thus be found right next to horrific photos of death and destruction. As the book’s cover shows, these seemingly incompatible scenes were sometimes combined within the very same photo – a visceral testament to the normalcy of extreme violence as a ubiquitous feature of Western imperialism at the dawn of the twentieth century. Atrocity photography and the visual reproduction of racialised violence is a fraught and inarguably challenging topic. In the hands of a less-accomplished scholar a project such as this might easily be accused of reproducing the very power dynamics of the colonial gaze that it seeks to expose. Yet Foliard handles the subject matter with great sensitivity, taking the time, as every responsible scholar should, to prepare and guide the reader through this sepia-drenched realm of visual horrors. His careful reading of colonial photography reveals new meanings in familiar images and finds agency, for instance, in the dress and gestures of captured ‘rebels’ who, even in their moment of defeat, still managed to subvert the humiliation of the colonial camera (however subtly). The colonial archive, as the book demonstrates, is far from exhausted and still contains the means by which new narratives can be written  – against the grain and against the gaze. In a time of resurgent imperial nostalgia, as sustained efforts to whitewash the past are well under way in both Britain and France, this book is an indispensable, if harrowing, reminder of what the so-called ‘civilising mission’ really entailed. It becomes abundantly clear that iconic depictions of the violence of empire – including the imagery of heads on sticks or dying workers in the ‘grove of death’ in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – possess a greater degree of authenticity than is usually assumed. All of these practices actually happened, and, moreover, they were photographed. The images presented by Foliard make for grim and often uncomfortable viewing. Yet, if we are to understand the deadly logic of Western imperialism, which both dictated and justified extreme violence in the name of progress, and if we are to have an honest reckoning with the past, we can hardly afford to look away. Kim A. Wagner London, March 2022

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Acknowledgements I am grateful for Pierre Singaravélou’s time and encouragement from the early stages of this project onwards. My thanks also go to my colleagues Benjamin Brower, Isabelle Surun, Gilles Teulié, Sylvie Thénault, and Mélanie Torrent, whose advice was invaluable. The translation and revision of the book could not have been achieved without Jennifer Sessions’s support. Kim A. Wagner and Susie Protschky were kind enough to read the English manuscript and offer their expertise. Stéphanie Chevrier, Pascale Iltis, and Stéphanie Ribouchon at La Découverte did everything in their power to facilitate the English edition of this monograph. My gratitude goes to them all.  Finally, I would like to thank Clémence, Amalia, and Rose for far too many things to list them here.

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Note on translation This is the English edition of Combattre, punir, photographier: Empires coloniaux, 1890–1914 (Paris: La Découverte, 2020). This translation offered an opportunity to revise and shorten the book. Saskia Brown translated Chapter 2. Cadenza Academic Translations translated Chapters 5, 6, 8, and 9, as well as the conclusion. The author translated the four remaining chapters and the introduction with Martha Evonuk’s help. He carefully revised and edited the entire manuscript with Alun Richards’s assistance. The translation was funded by the Labex ArTeC, the Labex EHNE, the Centre de Recherches Anglophones (Université Paris Nanterre), and the Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Cultures Anglophones (Université de Paris), thanks to IDEX funding.

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Introduction When John Henry Godfrey set off for China in 1910, as an officer on HMS Bramble, he made sure to take a camera with him. Like many European military men travelling the globe to explore, chart, or conquer, he systematically documented his experiences using one of the portable devices Kodak and other firms had started mass-producing in the 1890s. On returning home, he carefully selected his best shots and glued them into an album. In doing so, he participated, along with thousands of other amateur and professional photographers, in putting together an immense repertoire of pictures aimed at recording the world. The engravings, paintings, and drawings that had littered books and articles on overseas experiences in earlier decades were starting to give way to new, supposedly more realistic, illustrations. Photography – in the form of a small camera for those who could afford one or a bundle of postcards for those who could not – appeared to allow anyone to capture distant lands and bring home a piece of their truth. Interestingly, Godfrey was not the average amateur. He owned a panoramic camera of a very specific format. On one of the first pages of his album on China, amid stereotypical views of landscapes and local people, he mounted the photograph of a village. It is possible he did not catch the name of the place, because what he wrote in the caption was ‘anywhere’ (Figure 0.1). The view shows a hamlet, possibly located near present-day Wuhan, but it did not really matter precisely where it was, after all. The exoticism of the scene was what caught Godfrey’s eye. The village had become generic: a cliché and a moment in an intangible script. It could have been in Africa or elsewhere in Asia. It did not matter. This village, ‘anywhere’, was rendered indistinct by photography. Godfrey’s picture resembles an overwhelming number of contemporary photographs of the world outside of Europe. In newspapers and illustrated books, and on projection plates, these pictures usually followed established codes. What survives of them in archival repositories makes for a repetitive documentation. Unmissable sights, quaint customs, remarkable objects and plants were all rapidly fixed into a stable register by the first photographers to record them. One of the key accelerators of this visual collection of the globe was colonial expansion. The imperial dynamics of European powers such as France and Britain, the two countries that are the focus

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The violence of colonial photography

Figure 0.1 John Henry Godfrey, ‘Village scene, anywhere’, aristotype, 9.5 cm × 31 cm, from an album entitled HMS Bramble, China, 1910–1912.

of this book, fostered an almost compulsive desire to record what the world looked like in photographs. Soldiers, explorers, and colonial administrators enthusiastically adopted this optical tool, at a time when the conjunction between the increasing portability of photography and peak colonisation was heralding new visual possibilities. What did they shoot? It was rarely the more unsettling aspects of their faraway experiences; more often it was Godfrey’s ‘anywhere’ village. Their photographs built a visual register whose main function, as Susan Sontag has pointed out for photography at large, was to establish a sense of reassurance.1 Nonetheless, there are also images that stand out, breaking the monotony of the generic and mondane visual tropes. Sepia-drenched scenes of human suffering, massacres, and executions  – photographs that are anything but ‘reassuring’. For instance, in addition to exotic views of people and monuments, many British, French, and German soldiers involved in the China Relief Expedition of 1900 brought back gruesome photographs displaying the beheadings of the so-called ‘Boxers’ who had violently opposed the Western presence in Beijing and Tianjin. In this book, I bring into focus this visual dissonance to examine the violence of colonial photography. To do this, I discuss three main sets of images. The first consists of views from the colonial fronts, the inaccurately named ‘small wars’ and their catastrophic impact on indigenous societies. It also features photographs from what could be called larger ‘imperial’ campaigns: those that projected European forces outside their official spheres of influence, sometimes in collaboration with other Western powers. This first set includes documentation not only of violence perpetrated by European forces and their local auxiliaries, but also of conflicts between local populations or against colonisers. The second set of images consists of early conflict photographs in general. There are continuities between what happened inside and outside European imperial spaces, as far as picturing armed violence is concerned. For example, visual innovations developed during the Boer War (1899–1902) influenced the coverage of the

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Introduction

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Russo-Japanese War (1904–05). The third set of images contains photographs of suffering and physical coercion inflicted for the purpose of repression. It may seem contrived to link this last set of images to the first two. I would argue it is not. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial contexts, the boundary between punishment and large-scale armed repression was porous. The organisation of the latter, or more precisely its public dissemination, was frequently aimed at soothing the latent fear of insurrection and renewed conflict among colonisers. These three sets of photographs all fall under the heading of organised violence; i.e., the reasoned use of force for political and military purposes.2 Of course, the categories listed above did not exist in the nineteenth century, even if words were beginning to be coined to describe the developing intersections between photography and conflict. Neither photojournalism, nor humanitarian photography, nor war photography was established as a well-defined practice prior to the early twentieth century. But rather than being an epistemological obstacle, this blur is revealing. In colonial situations in particular, violence was overflowing, meaning that neat classifications can actually prevent us from grasping its sprawling dimensions. A classic war-and-peace framework cannot do justice to the pain and force imposed on subjected bodies in such contexts. When early critics of empire began to speak of colonial exactions in early twentieth-century France, the phrase covered a wide variety of physical, legal, and financial abuses, all advantageously combined in the category of unforeseeable and isolated incidents. In truth, these supposedly anomalous excesses were the products of systems that could not endure without force or the echoes of its brutal application among local populations. The use of violence on bodies continued beyond the battlefield. Faced with loosely organised forms of opposition, guerrilla tactics, and occasional outbursts of resistance to their power, the armies and police sent by European states to control a territory performed types of violence that spilled over in time and place. What unfolded during and after the colonial conquest was not systematically disconnected from what happened before it. Emphasising the permeability of this violence is not anachronistic. Hubert Lyautey, one of the architects of French imperial policy at the time, acknowledged it as early as 1900. According to him, Europeans who left their homeland to work for the empire were ‘special human beings who are no longer military or civilian, but simply colonial’.3 From a European standpoint, such violence mostly remained at a geographical distance throughout the period from the 1880s to the 1910s. Armed conflicts were scattered over a multitude of faraway terrains and were often characterised by an extreme weapons gap, particularly in wars of colonial conquest in Africa and Asia. Rarely in the history of combat has the difference in firepower been so great. The campaigns documented in the photographs examined in the following pages were often the first testing grounds for artillery warfare, long-range rifles, and high-powered

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The violence of colonial photography

explosives. French and British metropolitan audiences witnessed, often indifferently, what the new face of battle looked like in pictures. Pictorial accounts of conquests, operations of so-called pacification, and the suppression of rebellions filled books and newspapers in the imperial metropolises. Visions of what was happening ‘overseas’ circulated with increasing momentum. As a result of technical developments and changing social demands, European societies became image saturated. Written accounts and pictorial representations of the first decades of the nineteenth century gave way to the apparent immediacy of the mass-produced photograph. Photography played a central role in the redefinition of what visual modernity could be in the eyes of contemporaneous spectators. Its ability to impose new types of visibility therefore placed it at the heart of the construction of imperial narratives. At the same time, and in subtle ways, what the projection of European colonial power could provoke in terms of violence and destruction started to be more discernible. Exotic shots and reassuring views of colonial development provided a sense of comfort and balance; however, disorder was lurking in other, rarer, photographic incisions. While the dark undertow of colonial expansion was inevitably sanitised, photographs of colonial physical violence are not completely absent from the archives. They can be found, sometimes easily. Nonetheless, swathes of human suffering, from sexual assaults to violence against children, were left largely undocumented. These missing images should concern us, and while this book focuses on what was photographed, it takes care not to hide other experiences of domination. Pictures of pain and destruction emerge according to a complex, fluctuating geography that needs to be charted. To use Deborah Poole’s term, the ‘visual economy’ of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conflict is at the heart of this book.4 Particular attention is given not only to the face value of these photographs, what they show and project in terms of meaning, but also to their exchange value, that is to say, their social lives as objects and the emotions invested in them. Such photographs of violence stand at a critical juncture between civilising creeds that aimed to justify overseas interventions and the ambivalent consequences they provoked.5 Still images of brutality are a case study in the ‘moral polyphony’6 that characterised French and British societies at the time. What was tolerable and what was not was reconfigured in the encounters between colonial powers and the populations they sought to govern; the line between appropriate force and excessive violence was repeatedly redrawn. In this multiplication of contacts and conflicts, France and Britain faced the question of what was morally acceptable to a given nation. The direct involvement of soldiers sent from the imperial metropoles, the active networks of information that documented and propagandised colonial advances, and denunciations of other actors in Europe, all contributed to making these distant events a distinct object, even if indifference was also part of the picture.

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Introduction

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This book focuses on ways of seeing and showing violence, and not simply the phenomenon of violence itself. The sensitivities that determine what can and cannot be photographed, and what can be shown to others or even published in a newspaper, differ from one historical context to another. The book explores how these sensitivities evolved during a time when European societies found themselves in the position of seeing, ignoring, and/or supporting the violent effects caused by the projection of their strength onto other continents. Crucially, it asks how organised violence, as expressed in colonial contexts in Africa and Asia in particular, was made perceptible by photography. How was it exposed, hidden, filtered, and/or distorted? Photography has a particular relationship with visualisations of extreme human experiences, partly because, as many scholars have pointed out, the medium has an indexical dimension. A photograph relates to reality in a way that other types of fixed image do not. At first glance, it even seems to be a direct chemical or digital emanation of something that has happened. However, such a perspective can hide the fact that photography is, first and foremost, an act. Someone looks through an optical device and triggers the camera. Even before an image is made, an event takes place around the machine. An initial relationship is established when an individual steps into the frame; if this individual notices the photographer, his or her posture and expression immediately change. Captured visually in a humiliating position, the subject may decide to turn away, or even to hide. Ariella Azoulay writes that a contract is silently established between the photographer and the photographed, even when the latter’s image appears to be stolen, because he or she is injured, dying, or imprisoned.7 In other words, the act of photography is never fully unilateral. Complicating this further, the relational dimension of the medium is not limited to the camera operator and the person or people in the frame; the spectator, in fabula or real, also enters into the equation. Photographers accumulate shots, selecting them according to criteria that are already revealing: anticipations of what assumed spectators, whether family or a larger audience, will see. Here, a badly framed shot is set aside; there, an unpalatable view is hidden in a box. A first sorting takes place, determined by what others might want to look at. Once the photograph is developed or printed, it escapes its creator. Generations later, the family album no longer says the same things, if it says anything at all, to those who turn its pages. The meaning of a photograph shifts even more rapidly when the picture moves beyond the intimate sphere. Published and disseminated images take on new significations in time and space, and this is especially true when what is displayed is transgressive. Some of the most violent photographs of the massacres of Armenians in Adana (1909) were circulated by the perpetrators themselves. The Young Turk authorities publicised images of hangings, for instance, because, from their perspective, they simply represented the restoration of order. These images, which aimed at

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The violence of colonial photography

creating and destroying an internal enemy, later mutated into evidence of atrocities and turned against their creators.8 This book aims neither at sensationalism nor denunciation. It does not seek to stir up resentment by presenting a compilation of atrocities. While it exhumes difficult images, it steers away from the revelation narratives – ‘treasure troves’ and ‘secret caches’ – that are often used to present historical photographs. Many of these documents were already circulating in the public arena during the period under discussion, sometimes for the purposes of condemning the actions of colonial agents or the horrors of war in general. Many are circulating on social media today, sometimes accompanied by inventive captions and interpretations. These images are therefore not to be understood here as evidence but as a process and as ‘ongoing durations’ of colonial situations.9 They are elements of a more intricate interaction between the photographed event, its production as an image, and that image’s subsequent uses. This exploration of images follows what Ann Stoler calls the ‘archival grain’  – the patterns and internal structures of the colonial archive  – in order to question and eventually disturb it.10 One must always be cautious not to apply present-day categorisations to the past. Examining our predecessors’ ideas and images through today’s filters can easily result in a clash of paradigms and the creation of binary discourses; looking for solutions to the problems of the present in simplified histories, one generally finds what one wants to find. To overcome this obstacle, the concepts and cultural horizons of the period under study need to be carefully considered. Nuancing and complicating the perspective even more, this book offers a comparative history of British and French colonial and imperial experiences. Such experiences are usually the subject of separate studies, with historians focusing on a single national entity, a specific territory, or a limited time frame. But enlarging the scope of the examination has its advantages: it offers opportunities to move beyond the prevailing narratives; for example, the British idea that French imperialism was far more violent than its British counterpart. Such a perspective remains embedded in British debates to this day. On the French side, even if exceptionalism might be less central to discourses on the colonial past, connections and comparisons with British experiences deserve closer examination.11 Engaging in connected histories of the visualisation of violence is complex but productive, especially when attention is given to the voices of the photographed subjects.12 This book also offers an often-frustrated attempt to find these voices. Such an undertaking, and the methodological challenges it poses, runs the risk of overgeneralisation. Artificial comparisons can easily result in predetermined conclusions. The mass of data to be processed, the aggregation of different historiographies, and the language barrier for a single historian all make this task particularly daunting. However, observing the imagery of punishment, repression, and war in

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colonial or semi-colonial situations offers fascinating points of entry to critically examine the similarities and differences between the British and French imperial experiences. Ultimately, the choice of France and Britain as two reference points is justified by the substantial role they played in the development of modern colonialism and in the popularity of photography in these two countries during the late nineteenth century. These countries are seen here not as two fixed objects but as interconnected entities that evolved over time in relation to each other. The asymmetries between the British and French cases are exaggerated as far as colonial expansion is concerned. The  two empires observed, imitated, and even protected each other in some instances. The book also takes the opportunity to move beyond European outlooks and decentre the perspective. It points to the Japanese and Ottoman empires, which were not disconnected from these wider trends, particularly as far as war photography is concerned. Despite multiple precautions, this book is a selection of documents extracted from an ocean of images. This is the nature of every work on the history of photography. The first trap to be avoided is therefore the illusion of documentary positivism. A catalogue of images is not evidence in and of itself.13 Photographs deserve more than the status of mere illustrations without context. Focusing on a particular set of images is not problematic as such; however, presenting it as a ‘natural’ collection of photographs is. The flow of images and remarks condensed by this book may cause distortions and leave a simplified view of a late nineteenth-century world ravaged by wars and human brutality. But one must keep in mind that no one living at the time ever looked at a concentration of images comparable to that shown in this book. It was not until the 1930s, when anti-colonialism eventually crystallised, that images of violence from across the world were published and analysed together.14 However, this does not mean that a strict focus on visualisations of violence is necessarily short-sighted. Today’s historians and readers share with most nineteenth-century viewers a sense of shock at the sight of realistic depictions of pain. Although this is not a cultural invariant, a photograph of overt violence triggers distinct reactions in most people. Photographic stasis – the fact that the camera freezes a tiny fraction of time – exposes the consequences of violence and destruction in a peculiar way, giving photography a potent capacity to cut through time and affect us. There is no consensus today concerning the links between mediated and real-life violence, but most scholars agree that realistic imagery of physical aggression generates very specific responses. Some of the images printed in this book are therefore nearly impossible to neutralise at first sight, if at all. They command our feelings, and rightly so. The most disturbing of them may even induce a form of blindness, where we are unable, on first view, to make sense of what is in front of us. The intensity, significance, and nature of this

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The violence of colonial photography

collision between the spectator and violent images vary: again, compassion in the face of pictures of suffering is not universal in shape and content. Yet it is precisely this power of photographed violence that permits us to avoid the pitfalls of a purely anachronistic sampling. Most of the images in this book elicited reactions among nineteenth-century viewers that differed in meaning, but not in intensity, from what the reader experiences today. Selection criteria have of course been applied. The compilation presented here was weighed against what could be considered acceptable or too shocking, though the line separating the two is porous and changes from one spectator to another. Given the sensitivity of the topic, the balancing act between acknowledgement and unnecessary exposure will never satisfy every reader. More is said about this in the first chapter. The amount of information attached to the photographs was also key to the process. Isolated pictures with no identifiable link to written archives or oral memories, locked in their silence and ‘loss of context’,15 have been omitted. Much attention was given to the possibility of naming identifiable victims. Despite this careful sieving of the mass of images produced at the time, none of the selected pictures are pure anomalies, as  is  made clear in the notes, which point to a number of attributions and offer weblinks to larger available series. The analysis is often applicable to other colonial empires that exhibited similar photographic practices, such as the German Empire and even non-European empires like those of Japan and the Ottomans. This goes some way to neutralising the Eurocentrism of the framing. One should not open this book without taking precautions. It takes two people, an author and a reader, to turn images of violence into gratuitous documents and their collection into a disturbing photographic object. Chapter 1 therefore serves as a critical introduction. It analyses the mechanisms of repulsion and erasure that affect the photography of violence and situates the book in relation to the ethics of looking. In addition, it examines the words used at the time to name the spaces and things recorded by the camera. Chapter 2 examines the camera as a physically invasive presence in contexts of war and colonial expansion. The lens was, by its sheer presence, a materialisation of control, and it sometimes became integral to manifestations of violence in themselves. This chapter also shows that the photographic archive was mined from the outset. In most instances, the photographic relationship was only unequal on the surface. Denying the existence of an infinity of escape routes, then and now, paves the way for a sort of ontological colonialism. There are few photographs that are fundamentally of the ‘other’, because a picture is never a fully conclusive capture. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to a history of the operators and their techniques in colonial and global contexts. Once the lexicon, theory, and chronology are established, Chapter 5 explores the colonial regimes of visibility through which unstable images of violence were circulated and filtered. Chapter 6 addresses

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Introduction

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the instability of the medium, examining how certain images, designed to support colonial discourses, were subverted, sometimes radically, and how others, sold as authentic views of distant wars, were in fact montages and fakes. Chapter 7 deals with the portrayal of the enemy’s body, fixed in death and defeat. Physical violence and its photographic registration are understood above all as messages. Flesh was the site of their inscription, a writing surface that could potentially be mass produced and spectated through photography. Chapter 8 is the necessary counterpoint to this analysis. It shows how ‘friendly’ bodies, destroyed or wounded, were photographed, memorialised, and instrumentalised. The final chapter looks at the metropolitan reception of pictures of warfare and colonial violence. The book applies several levels of analysis and narration to make its necessarily fragmented nature visible. Close-up shots of microhistory are followed by panoramic views of macrohistory: the montage, as articulate as it aims to be, is intentionally nonlinear.

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1 Repulsion, erasure, and loss of contrast Horrendous photographs trigger repulsion or voyeurism rather than careful examination.1 They may be immediately rejected by the spectator or provoke unforgettable revelations, especially for younger people. Atrocity has different effects depending on whether it is written about, painted, or photographed. Solutions were soon invented to protect viewers from the shock of early conflict photography. In one of the first books to use photographs to expose the massacres that took place between Greeks, Bulgarians, and Turks in the early twentieth-century Balkans, journalist and traveller John Foster Fraser (Figure 1.1), or his editor, added a written note to the pages featuring pictures of the atrocities: ‘This page can be torn out and destroyed by those who find the pictures too horrible.’ A dotted line was printed to guide censoring scissors. The question of what the ‘right distance’ to extreme violence should be arose early in the history of photography. Violence, especially when centred on the body, is not an ordinary object to behold in still and moving images. For a scholar, it might be prudent to dismiss these uncomfortable documents, whose gravitational pull can provoke a ‘visual fix’ that conceals more complex and subdued expressions of violence.2 In some cases, the study and exposure of graphic documents of mass violence can raise heated debates. Georges Didi-Huberman endured harsh criticism for his close reading of the four surviving photographs taken inside the gas chambers of Auschwitz by members of the Sonderkommando.3 The argument against his work was that these photographs could only deceive the viewer and betray a history of mass violence so extreme it should be considered beyond the reach of visualisation. Nonetheless, in recent years, a growing literature on extreme historical objects has demonstrated that attempts to analyse them dispassionately can be successful, even if collective and individual memories sometimes have difficulty in assimilating them except through simplifications, omissions, and fetishisations.4 There is no iconoclasm or excessive iconophobia in the present work, which builds on this existing research. To avoid the sight and analysis of photographs of violence is to set aside not just shocking illustrations of what unfolded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also photography

Repulsion, erasure, and loss of contrast

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Figure 1.1 John Foster Fraser, Pictures from the Balkans (London, Cassell: 1906), 12.

as a process that was key in shaping societies at the time, their views and their uses of violence included. Writing about photographs of bodily suffering requires a decision over what may be shown and what should remain invisible, over what is bearable and unbearable for the potential reader, who ultimately remains free not to turn these pages.5 Caution should guide this field of research. Susan Sontag decided not to reproduce any of the images she commented on in her seminal work on the pain of others.6 There are good justifications for this approach. It avoids, in part, the danger of voyeurism and the replication of the perpetrators’ acts of violence. By exposing photographs of a disturbing nature, does the historian become part of a circuit of violence that he or she should be trying to break, or at least to acknowledge?7 Ariella Azoulay went so far as to suggest suspending any work on archives that she considered compromised by their imperial past, to explore new perspectives, and to systematically include the question of reparations. Certainly, efforts to open conversations on colonial photographs and their meanings are crucial to any recirculations in the present, as Jane Lydon has shown in her work on nineteenth-century Australia.8 Yet, while there should be no question of minimising the pains endured, this book argues that employing radical dichotomies and dealing with things in absolute terms leads us to assign the status of victim or perpetrator to an endless line of descendants, when it ought to be possible to escape this fate. More importantly, perhaps, it may be that historical photographs, as revealing of the deep history of racial and social inequalities as they are, are less important in maintaining longstanding injustices than other, far superior forces. Researching and remediatising images of suffering is not a straightforward act. Exhumed pictures are always at risk of being used to advance dubious agendas. Some of those discussed here have already become badly captioned illustrations in a variety of narratives, from outraged victimhood to praise of the supposed glories of colonial times. This is often done at the cost of huge misunderstandings. In 2003, Chinese authorities opened an ‘anti-British museum’ in Gyantse (Tibet) to celebrate the Tibetan spirit of resistance to imperialism in the early twentieth century. A British expedition took the Gyantse fortress in 1904, inflicting a defeat on local troops and opening a route to Lhasa. In the entrance of the museum stands a statue of two Tibetan soldiers. For the sake of authenticity, the artist took his cue from one of the only photographic portraits to show local fighters still alive; most of the photographs taken by British members of the expedition show the graphic aftermath of very

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unequal battles. The aim was to project the image of courageous Tibetans resisting oppression (Western, obviously). But Clare Harris has proved that the photograph was in fact an invention. It actually shows British auxiliaries dressed as locals and was taken long after the battle.9 The heroes of Chinese Tibet were ultimately working for the West. Such reinventions and approximations make it all the more important to take a closer look at a medium that can be so easily reused to shape memories in all directions. This work has already begun, but informed analysis of these compelling documents is increasingly urgent, since many will eventually be digitised and newly visible. It is the responsibility of historians not to leave them without accompanying text and critical examinations. Susan Sontag’s strategy of not showing photographic material no longer works in an age that massively communicates via the visual; anyone reading her essay can find the photographs she refers to in a matter of seconds online. Whether one likes it or not, there is little room to skip images in the twenty-first century. Written depictions of extreme visual material are an alternative, but they do not protect against voyeurism.10 An Index expurgatorius always attracts more attention than it should. And the written word can infuse the missing document it describes with a power that it does not always have on its own. This book revives images of affliction that conceal a myriad of subjectivities and histories behind commonplaces. Because of the violence they express, many have the potential to become icons and simplistic visual abstractions of what supposedly happened. Photography, which is fundamentally a fragmented medium, easily erases individual experiences of violence to create a reproducible and indiscriminate visualisation of humiliation and suffering. This is true of photographs that were initially designed to magnify and glorify desecration, such as the ‘spectacular secret’11 of the lynching postcards that circulated in the United States in the early twentieth century. It also characterises pictures used to denounce atrocities and abuses, to the point of rendering them ineffective at times. Susan Sontag underlined the limited impact of superficial revulsion using the example of Ernst Friedrich’s book of photographs, Krieg Dem Kriege! (War on War), published in 1924.12 The book exposed the horrors of war in the hope that disgust would encourage pacificism amongst its readers. Needless to say, this hope was misplaced. All of the images reproduced in this book are commented on individually, and all are integral to the central goal of harnessing the valuable power of emotions13 and finding the wealth of information even a paroxysmic document may contain. They need to be deprived in part of their standing as pure visual information. The blow is also softened by time. The events depicted here unfolded more than a century ago, enough distance for the people fixed in the photographs and their immediate descendants to have disappeared. Of course, this justification remains disputable.

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Several examples mentioned in these pages illustrate the depth of local memories of violence and its photographic recording. There is no statute of limitations on painful memories of the distant past, but research on colonial histories, in order to move forward, should not contribute to the disappearance of the dead, or they would be twice erased.14 Presenting the visual fragments of colonial violence in its most physical expression can open the possibility of a collective mourning and acknowledgement.15 These fragments are ‘wounding apertures’ whose disappearance contributes to the maintenance of colonial legacies rather than the contrary.16 A last reason behind the decision to print several reproductions is that most of them are visibly of the past. Their framing, the blur that characterises some of them and that signals the use of early photographic technologies, and the simple fact that they are in black and white, places them at a chronological distance. They are reflections of another photography, one that has long disappeared, one that is closer to engravings than to the crisp images of our smartphones. This, in an age of high-definition images, mechanically lessens the shock. Assembling these pictures is crucial to resisting the combination of repulsion and erasure that obscures photographic reflections of the violence provoked by the spread of European influence in the late nineteenth century. It is necessary to take a closer look at these mechanisms of disappearance and to make sure that the ideas and words used to address the issue are clearly framed before we unflinchingly turn to the core visual material of this research. Torn photographs The colonial album is full of gaps and missing images. Cuts were made, seldom at random, as some of the reflections of a challenging past became problematic for the depositaries of a given set of pictures. For instance, a photograph was torn out of an album compiled by Percy Coriat, a British administrator in the Sudan in the late 1920s. Whatever it displayed had become harder to look at over the years.17 Petra Bopp observes a similar process in the albums of German soldiers of the Second World War.18 The crudest images sometimes disappeared from their pages, ripped away by either the original owners or their descendants. Papers donated by families are also sorted out before they are given to institutional repositories, to soften the rawest edges of an ancestor’s life. In addition to this, an active market for macabre pictures encourages some to sell the most spectacular views rather than save them for the local archive. The fate of these artefacts is further complicated by the context in which the donation or sale takes place. As late nineteenth-century colonial expansion is put at a generational distance, some of the considerations that stopped descendants from donating unfiltered papers and collections are slowly vanishing. The situation

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was different decades ago, when what was the memory of a father or a grandfather was more difficult to expose in all its dimensions. Erasures altered the photographs produced during the most intense period of colonial expansion at an early stage. Consecutive filters were applied to this imagery, in the same way that heirs sort through the belongings of a deceased person. The first step in this process is obvious to anyone who has practised analogue photography: it is the moment when one chooses which negatives will be developed, which will end up in an album and which will remain in negative. This crucial step is almost never documented. Before 1900, most photographers working in Africa or Asia used small glass plates. If they were active, their collections of negatives comprised hundreds of these pieces of glass, neatly arranged in heavy wooden boxes. When a photographer died, these burdensome mementoes, many of them broken, often ended up in the waste bin. Some of the answers this book seeks therefore lie in these untampered collections of negatives, which were filtered out for understandable reasons. Fortunately, as shown in the following chapters, a few private collections allow us to delve into the intimacy of these choices. The creator or collector of a given set of photographs may have laid the foundations of his or her memory during his or her lifetime. Most of the major figures of British and French imperialism were the architects of their own posterity. Nineteenthcentury Europe witnessed the development of the first full-blown institutions designed to collect the past, such as public archives,19 and few of the main actors of colonial expansion were unaware of the existence of these repositories. Indeed, they were often involved in the production of their own archives. Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934), the creator of the French protectorate in Morocco, compiled meticulously organised albums illustrating his colonial career from the 1880s onwards.20 His photographs of Madagascar were part and parcel of a wider campaign to promote French action on the island, which became a colony in 1897. They mostly document the more innocuous dimension of Madagascar’s ‘pacification’ – the name given by French officers to their strategy of military and administrative control  – rather than its bloodier episodes. With the exception of a few occasional incisions of visible violence that he considered useful to keep, these hundreds of views present an orderly colony on the road to progress. Photography visually organised the colony, which seems protected from chaos, even for future observers. This is not an exceptional instance: George Nathaniel Curzon  – viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905  – assembled more than eighty albums, which fixed what he himself decided would be visible of his imperial career.21 For decades, the iconography of history books on colonial empires has been derived from these predetermined visualisations. Significantly, many of those directly involved in colonial expansion were among the first to grasp the value of photography as a tool of communication. We depend on this self-shaped visual record, the

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archiving of which was often anticipated by its creators, without always realising it. To correct these distorting effects, historians have to be wary of the economy of residues of the past they write with. To use Joanna Sassoon’s words, they are ‘an integral part of a communication chain’ which made them into documents and determined their meaning.22 They have their own previous trajectories which must be reconstructed. Some of the material examined in this book is held in the archives of the British and French governments. These institutions are vital to scholars, as they show which traces of the past were considered valuable enough to be preserved, ordered, and catalogued. The criteria for determining what to keep, and what to discard, have varied over time. The main issue as far as photography is concerned is that it has only recently been deemed worthy of institutional collections. For decades, a variety of photographs have entered archival holdings in a fairly chaotic way, through bequests and purchases. Revealingly, photographs have often been stored separately from written records, even when they were initially part of a single grouping of papers.23 Catalogues were primarily intended to help iconographers  – the photograph was a potential illustration. Furthermore, the visual material produced on pre-1914 conflict zones is scattered in a vast number of archival institutions which have followed changing classification rationales. And, since the market value of colonial albums and photographs often makes them easier to find at auction houses rather than in public institutions, a variety of factors contribute to make the historian’s work rather complicated. This is particularly true of colonial imagery: all archives are, paradoxically, sites of oblivion.24 Jacques Derrida emphasises the links between archives and authority that systematically favour the repression or destruction of the ‘archives of evil’.25 Fortunately, the mechanisms of deletion are sometimes made obvious by dissonant private archives or by official documents that survived unexpectedly. Recent cases illustrate how secrecy can distort our understanding of colonial pasts.26 Comparative takes on French and British archives reveal many similarities in this respect. Careful research has recently demonstrated the existence of strategies of concealment and destruction of problematic archives within British governmental institutions.27 French authorities applied the same solutions to unpalatable records in the era of decolonisation.28 The most informative political archives were repatriated to France, following a precedent set in Indochina after colonies gained their independence, while potentially less explosive administrative archives remained in Africa and Asia to be kept in the newly established national archives of postcolonial states. Moreover, the content of what was kept on site varied considerably between French West Africa and French East Africa. Piles of documents were burned in Africa and Asia by colonial authorities before their departure. All in all, these imbalances in the records have had lasting consequences for the writing of history. The voices of those subjected by European powers became

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harder to hear, as those who wielded violence were often the only ones to record it – and were therefore in an advantageous position to write it out. Other forces intensified this documentary corrosion. Archives in Africa and Asia have been underfunded, and still are in many cases. The collection and preservation of photographic material requires substantial investment, which governments have not always been able or willing to make, since selective forgetting is not only the monopoly of ex-colonial powers but may also serve local interests. As a consequence of a far less political process, parts of photographic archives have been illegally sold along the years.29 This situation has consequences for the overall economy of what was retained from the past as far as photographs are concerned, particularly with regard to local practices, even if more and more initiatives are ensuring systematic collection and preservation. For several years now, however, the uses and understanding of historical photographic records have been considerably evolving. Photography-focused collections are now common, particularly in the United States. Numerous collaborative databases and amateur websites are also competing with public institutions. The traditional approach to photography from an essentially aesthetic standpoint, which favoured the neglect of the myriad amateur images that began to accumulate in the 1890s, is receding. Curators and historians are gradually overcoming the dividing lines between ordinary and exceptional photographs. There is a greater awareness of what photography became when its practice massified: a social relationship that must be approached in its entirety. The camera, as it became more affordable and portable, shaped the recording of one’s experiences. It entered into competition with the more traditional records that are kept in museums and archives, which struggle to account for this change in the relationship to memory from the late nineteenth century onwards.30 Peak colonialism, which unfolded at the precise moment when a multitude of users were adopting cheaper photographic technologies, heavily contributed to this evolution. As a consequence, research into colonial photography and visualisations of organised violence cannot do without an exploration of the microhistories of amateur practices. Archival distortions and contested legacies are not the sole factors accounting for the erasure of the photographs discussed here. If what was recorded of visible violence in pre-1914 zones of conflict has been partly erased from collective memories, it is also because two world wars, as well as several major conflicts after 1945, have provoked an accumulation of icons under which early images of distant suffering are buried. From a European standpoint, the process began after the First World War. The wars before the great wars quickly faded into obscurity. They did not seem to have the magnitude of the catastrophes that came after them.31 Wars’ reflections in the lens seem to dissolve into a blur before 1914. This book brings them into focus again.

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Violence made visible What today’s spectator would consider atrocity photographs were not necessarily censored in the years 1890 to 1910. Here lies a paradox. Erosion did its part in the twentieth century, but the intensity of wars fought far away from the industrialising world and the abuses surrounding them were not entirely invisible to contemporaries. L'Illustration in France and The Graphic in Britain, two popular illustrated newspapers, were not overly restrained when showing death, destruction, and war. The first photo agencies established in the 1900s sold gruesome pictures to whoever wanted them. For instance, a portrait of a soldier of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, taken in April 1898 following the Battle of Atbara (Figure 1.2), was published in Britain a few weeks after the event. A man stands with his rifle at his feet in a trench filled with enemy corpses. The photographer, R. V. Webster, was a private contractor who provided logistics to the Anglo-Egyptian army.32 It is clear that neither he nor the soldier nor the newspaper editors believed the photograph to be overly shocking. The corpses displayed in this picture were soldiers of Abdallahi ibn Muhammad (1846–99), successor of Muhammad Ahmad (1844–85), the ‘Mahdi’ who defeated the British at Khartoum in January 1885. Charles Gordon, the British officer charged with defending the city, had been beheaded and his head publicly displayed. More than a decade later, in 1897–98, Horatio Herbert Kitchener was given command of a campaign that aimed to avenge the humiliation. Atbara was the last battle before the final confrontation near Khartoum. Kitchener made a moving speech in advance of the attack, encouraging his soldiers to ‘remember Gordon’.33 When the offensive was successfully concluded, wounded Sudanese soldiers were bayoneted. Rumour had it that they ‘played dead’ in order to attack British and Egyptian troops, and this, combined with a long-running rage at Gordon’s demise, helped to break down ethical barriers. The circulation of such an engraving from a photograph materialises different assumptions as to what was legitimate in war in European and colonial contexts. The deliberate lack of respect for the enemy makes this an early example of the subgenre of trophy photographs that surfaced in the early twentieth century. Similar themes are  represented in American photographs of the Philippine–American War a few months later (1899–1902).34 This soldier’s portrait also testifies to the birth of an amateur war photography which spilled over into professional journalistic coverage. Webster was not a reporter but an opportunist with a camera. His photograph did not fit into the long tradition of aestheticising visions of the battlefield; it did not aim to embellish war like the heroic scenes long favoured by newspaper illustrators. This is, in many respects, a blunt picture. The photographer himself was certainly standing among the dead when he triggered his camera, around noon, as indicated by the

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Figure 1.2 Anon., ‘After the battle of Atbara, in the enemy’s trenches’, engraving from a photograph by R. V. Webster, The Graphic (28 May 1898), 13. This picture is an engraving, not a photograph per se. The original image was cropped and partially modified. The soldier’s helmet and some of the guns were accentuated. This movement away from the original placed such pictures between etching and photography. Late nineteenth-century printing technologies probably participated in softening the visual shock to a certain extent at the time. Hybrid documents such as this one question the very nature of what was deemed realistic, and hence potentially unbearable, in the eyes of late nineteenth-century spectators.

absence of shadows. The battle, which began at about 6 a.m., had ended some time before. So this is not a snapshot, but a carefully planned portrait. He and his living subject selected this grim location, in the middle of the battlefield, to celebrate their victory. Other British and Egyptian soldiers were probably told to stay out of the frame. The picture reflects the colonial face of battle with a harsh realism that did not outrage the Graphic’s editors or, for the most part, its readers, even if some critical

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voices surfaced. And as an image of the 1890s, it is far from unique in its immediacy. As we shall see, the photographic coverage of the entire campaign offered unprecedented and unequivocal visualisations of what so-called distant wars could look like. The existence of an early conflict photography that predated the global conflicts of the twentieth century cannot be denied. Well before the First World War, a range of – mostly white – men photographed violent scenes, sold them, and printed them. This assertion should not sound like a revelation. War, organised violence, and physical punishment were not hidden at the time, particularly when they occurred in colonial spaces. This book is therefore not so much about uncovering well-concealed evidence as it is about struggling against a multilayered occlusion which is typical of any archive of violence. The records are inevitably scattered. To make sense of them, a new archive must be created, one which can restore, if fleetingly, the visibility of what war, subjection, and control meant in an age of unparalleled colonial expansion. Photographs have to be located, technical constraints understood, and authors named. We must observe them as they handle their cameras, take a shot, glue a print in an album, or sell it to a newspaper. Violence, framed Classifying images under the broad heading of violence makes for an unsatisfactory nomenclature. Violence is not a fixed category. Histories of colonialism have addressed it in its invisible dimensions – both racialised and gendered – and in the diversity of its temporalities, from the slow violence of environmental destruction to the intense outburst of an armed uprising. The focus here is on unquestionable suffering and destruction in its visibility, physicality, and its spectacularity. However, understandings of violence, even in its most tangible expressions, are ever-shifting and contingent on a historical context. To understand how much force and devastation is normalised and why, we must pay attention to contemporary discourses that described, justified, and criticised collective expressions of violence. Examples abound of once acceptable inflictions of pain which later became unbearable in the eyes of the majority. To lose sight of the way in which violence is expressed both literally and discursively at a given time and in a given place is to approach the issue within the framework of contemporary morals. The photographs would then be arranged in an index that would tell us more about today’s ethical frameworks than those of the past. In this regard, the period under study is crucial. The remarkable multiplication of contacts between different societies brought about by the expansion of European influence connected numerous cultures, each one with its own understanding of the boundaries between senseless violence and justifiable force. Societies on all continents were confronted with ideas and objects that travelled with unprecedented speed over

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The violence of colonial photography

increasingly vast distances. In many cases, these circulations favoured tension and disarticulation rather than integration.35 Nineteenth-century colonial powers distorted these processes further through the exercise of war, large-scale punishment, and the establishment of systems of physical control over subjugated peoples, transforming violence into one of the first points of comparison between populations. These encounters of ideas and practices occurred at the very moment when violence began to be considered as an analysable object by scholars in Europe.36 The scientific study of this specific dimension of human relations took off in the nineteenth century. Violence, both interpersonal and collective, became a social phenomenon that had to be understood, but also rationally solved. In the eyes of some jurists, for example, an international legal framework might eventually reduce the ravages of war. Conflict and violence were questioned in new ways in a nineteenth-century world where, for the first time on such a scale, the very definition of humankind and the potential for huge conflicts became major issues. This raises a challenge: the vocabulary and ideas that developed around the topic of violence at the turn of the twentieth century inform our ways of thinking about, and forgetting, the abuses associated with the colonial period. It is possible to be captive to the vocabulary of late nineteenth- early twentieth-century perspectives on conflict. This is evident in some recent works on the history of violence that have taken hold in public discourses. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, for example, reflects a tendency to believe that the supposedly endemic violence of the past is now fading into memory, thanks to a downward trend in interpersonal violence and in the fatalities of violent conflicts.37 Pinker’s work, knowingly or not, is the continuation of a line of thought leading back to the nineteenth century. Herbert Spencer, Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and later Norbert Elias – the list is neither exhaustive nor homogeneous – all contributed to the analysis of human violence at a time when the continent they inhabited was colonising the world. Significantly, the destruction caused by this expansionary movement received limited attention from them, even though part of the vocabulary they used – from ‘totem’38 to ‘primitive’ and ‘civilisation’  – was common to the lexicon used by the promoters of colonialism. Grand narratives of Western history that crystallised at the time depicted a fairly linear decline of individual violent impulses in the face of state-based regulation. With few exceptions – W. E. B. Du Bois comes to mind – scholars skipped over the issue of colonial violence, a counterexample that might have proven dissonant. The nebula of violent conflicts that developed in the wake of late nineteenth-century imperial expansion stood in stark contrast with Europe, where violence was seen to be increasingly concentrated in the hands of an ordering state, or a legitimate tool for social change for revolutionaries. Few observers from the industrialising world acknowledged the increase of what appeared, to them, as

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distant convulsions; far less did they recognise their particular, unified significance. Nonetheless, there were some, such as the French socialist Paul Louis, who wrote a scathing chapter on colonial wars as early as 1905,39 who started to isolate the collective violence unleashed by European expansion in a definite category: a sign that the frame of analysis was slowly transforming. Neither overly rigid categories nor relativism are good guides for thinking about past violence, even in its most extreme expressions. The premise that the human condition is defined by a tendency for sudden and senseless aggression, and that this tendency can only be tamed by institutions that were slowly and painstakingly created – mostly in the Western world, according to a canon developed in the nineteenth century – is flawed. This widely held belief encourages us to see the perpetrators of horrendous physical violence as deviants  – isolated individuals or groups who have resisted the civilising influence. It also gives us an excuse for failing to challenge established narratives about humanity’s slow progress towards a general decline in violence. One has to abandon the worn-out adjectives commonly used to qualify violence, such as ‘barbaric’ or ‘savage’, in order to reassess meanings and motives. One of the dimensions of violence is the acute tension that surrounds an act of imposition, which, if one takes a narrow definition, stands out because of its physicality.40 It is rarely pure, as the senselessness often attributed by an onlooker to severe acts of aggression is not necessarily accurate. Colonial conflicts provide many examples to substantiate this. In another time and place, historians of the French wars of religion have pointed out how the most extreme acts of physical desecration made sense to their perpetrators and to society at large.41 In short, violence exposes definitions of the self, of the body, of war and of what seems just or unjust. These are all focal points of this book, via photography.42 The medium performed a pivotal role in the exposure and invention of distant violence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It reflected it back on the imperial metropolises and from one continent to another, giving it a renewed visibility. It was a tool of differentiation, a visual boundary between spaces obeying different rules. It sometimes exposed European spectators to the extent of brutality that was committed elsewhere in their name. It promoted expansion, justified military intervention and punishment, and, sometimes, helped denounce them. In doing so, photographs document the articulation between the actual manifestations of violence and its symbolic dimensions, between the effects of colonial power on bodies and the more indirect constraints that were implemented by empires. Were there already phrases and classifications to isolate the photographs of faraway pain and destruction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? A multitude of macabre subgenres emerged in albums and postcards during this period. Gruesome views of Chinese executions were amongst the most popular in the 1890s.

The violence of colonial photography

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Views of mass casualties, physical punishments, convicts, and inflicted pain circulated on a rather large scale. Conventions were born. Pictures started to be arranged in directories, under new headings. Victor Forbin (1864–1947), a French traveller and journalist, accumulated a considerable collection of images. He owned a small photo agency that supplied illustrations to French, British, and American newspapers. In order to organise this mass of pictures, he sorted them by country.43 The most sensational views were then put into marketable subcategories such as ‘disasters’, ‘military life’, and ‘executions’. Step by step, he created and named coherent sets of violent images for his clients. And this is just one of many examples of newly established conventions.44 The notion of war photography first appeared at the turn of the twentieth century. One of the earliest occurrences in English of the phrase ‘war photographer’ is to be found in an 1895 issue of The Graphic, in the caption of an illustration of the Sino–Japanese War (1894–95).45 Interestingly, it did not refer to European or American journalists, but to Japanese photographers such as Kamei Koreaki. A few years later, Jimmy Hare (1856–1946), Jean Rodes (1897–1946), and Ludovic Naudeau (1872–1949) were all considered members of a new generation of journalists famous for their photographic coverage of cataclysmic events such as the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05). By the turn of the century, paroxysmic images had found a name and a market. They are not the anachronistic construction of the present work. Focal lengths: viewing violence from a distance Unfortunately, colonial expeditions often bring together elements of such unequal moral value that the losses suffered by one party cannot be weighed against those of the other in any way.46

François Lamy (1858–1900) became a tragic figure of the French conquest of Africa when he was mortally wounded during the Battle of Kousséri (April 1900), in present-day Chad. His views on colonial warfare – quoted by his hagiographer Émile Reibell in 1903 – were far from atypical in the early twentieth century. For many of the agents of European expansionism in Africa and Asia, two theoretical spaces were clearly demarcated: one where the ‘laws of nations’ applied to self-styled civilised peoples and another where they could be suspended. Obviously, it is necessary to complicate this clear-cut division. The delimitation of these spheres where different norms could and should apply varied over time and between observers. A space considered ‘primitive’ by some may have been ‘semi-civilised’ for others. Neither Southern Italy nor Japan, for example, had a definitive position in this civilisational geography. It is not surprising that such hierarchies, which still lurk in today’s prejudices, were strongly held in the nineteenth century, but the thinkers of the period are marked out

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by their commitment to an increasingly assertive and refined formulation of these delimitations. Such a binary description might seem an oversimplification of the multitude of systems and classifications created to manage the colonised world, but it does reflect a demarcation that was central to the application of force by European empires in the nineteenth century. If anything, it was progressively reinforced as the turn of the twentieth century drew nearer. Since this analysis starts from euro-centred archival material, it is necessary to take a closer look at the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French and British vocabulary used to describe the world and its political geography. What were the perceived dimensions of the world outside? A sizeable proportion of the populations of industrialising countries experienced a considerable reduction in the time it took for objects, people, and information to travel. A wide array of technologies, from railways to telegraphs, gave the sense of an extension of geographical horizons. From this seemingly privileged position, those interested in what was happening around the globe – not everyone was, of course – divided the world into different imagined spaces. They were not necessarily the same between France and Britain, even if some of the vocabulary overlaps. Colonial empires constituted a first ‘sphere’. The phrase was used in the nineteenth century and could describe the huge political structures run by the two European powers. However, the word ‘colonies’ did not have the exact same meaning in English and French.47 In the English-speaking world, it was initially more likely to refer to the emigration and settlement territories of North America and Oceania than to African dependencies. It is also worth noting that British India, which long functioned as a virtually autonomous subempire, has no real equivalent in the French empire, neither in words nor in reality. One of the difficulties, therefore, lies in bridging the British and French experiences described by contemporaries in terms that may sound similar, but sometimes had differing meanings. What was ‘colonial’ or ‘imperial’ evolved over time. Even though simplification is needed for the sake of readability, one should not assume that all the interactions between industrialised powers and the populations of Oceania, Asia, or Africa are immersed in an indiscriminate and unchanging whole labelled ‘colonial’. The shapes of colonisation as well as the ideas and words of colonialisms are varied, shifting, and not easily fitted into an overarching category. The adjective ‘colonial’ refers here to a relationship of dominance between the industrialising states of Europe and human communities outside of Europe. With far superior mechanical, military, demographic, or financial resources, these colonising entities were in a position to establish legal and political relationships which aimed to profoundly transform the indigenous societies of the territories brought under their control. In doing so, they developed deeply unequal societies, often along racial lines. The corollaries to this imperial expansion were flows of settlers, European-made commodities,

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and financial investments of varying intensity. By the late nineteenth century, the implementation of these power relations was supported by increasingly articulate sets of ideas, and even structured ideologies, which aimed to justify the imbalances thus produced. What is ‘colonial’ can be a matter of discourses and ideas that can be arranged under the heading ‘colonialism’, as well as a tangible matter of territorial expansion and control – that is to say, of ‘colonisation’ in the strict sense of the term. The word ‘colonial’ therefore refers to both dimensions in this book. While it is taken in a broad sense, the many possible variations of the process it describes, such as situations where settler colonialism was almost nonexistent or territories where domination was constructed indirectly, must be pointed out. The term ‘imperial’, meanwhile, refers not only to the wider dimension of colony–metropolis interactions and inter-imperial relations, but also to the collective imperialism of international interventions and to the informal spheres of influence that characterised the French and British empires at the time. Despite these nuances, both these global superstructures were characterised by a common feature: they were heterogeneous assemblages made of centuries-old dependencies, of recent and uncharted acquisitions, of tiny trading posts, of areas that seemed under control and others where uprisings could start at any moment. Empires in the limited sense were not the only spaces where French- and Britishled military and police operations took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A variety of expressions were in circulation at the time to name spaces where the two powers exercised a more or less direct form of control that could result in armed intervention. The protection of a vast informal system of power which included ‘spheres of influence’,48 buffer states, and governments burdened by a public debt owned by banks located in London and Paris sometimes triggered such interventions. China, the site of a Euro–American imperialism that was not strictly speaking colonialism in its pure form, is a case in point. For French and British people at large, the perception of what was unfolding at a distance was necessarily confused, yet newspapers and other media started to offer more cohesive views of faraway events. Over the course of the nineteenth century, editors created new headings to make room for new geographies of information. French daily newspapers devoted entire sections to ‘affaires coloniales’ (news from the colonies). From the 1870s onwards, a British imperial system provided readers with international news, supplied by a vast cable network that seemed to link the interests of the Kingdom to the entire globe.49 Wars of conquest, so-called ‘pacification’, punitive expeditions, and spectacular punishments affected at one time or another all parts of this vast aggregate of spaces connected to European imperial metropolises.50 British and French colonial spheres shared common forms of organised violence. Again, contemporaries developed a

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specific semantics to describe these conflicts, where the rules were often believed to be different than the ones applied in the traditional state-centric wars of Europe. The French used phrases such as ‘guerres lointaines’ (distant wars), ‘petites guerres coloniales’ (small colonial wars), and ‘guerres d’outre-mer’ (overseas wars) to designate these multiplying interventions.51 Colonial wars became trans-imperial subjects of study, and even objects of desire. Albert Septans translated Charles Callwell’s Small Wars, a reference work on colonial warfare, in 1899.52 Albert d’Amade, the French military attaché in Great Britain in the early twentieth century, wrote reports on ‘small English wars’.53 Between the British and French empires, words and practices circulated to describe these armed conflicts and distinguish them from other types of warfare. In the English language, one talked of ‘distant wars’, ‘colonial wars’, and ‘frontier wars’. In both cases, these classifications placed colonial and imperial armed violence at a geographical and moral distance. The rules of war discussed in the great conferences of the late nineteenth century rarely applied to them. It is also crucial to point out that these expeditions, which numbered in the hundreds from the 1880s to 1914, offered some of the few opportunities of real combat experience available for the French and the British at the time. The intensity, spectacularity, and extent of the destructive violence unleashed in these events fluctuated. The face of battle, the terrain, and the weapons gap varied considerably from place to place. But experiences and solutions circulated, both within and between colonial empires.54 Joseph Gallieni, one of the most prominent French colonial officers, was an avid reader of British reports and books on the operations carried out on the borders of the Raj.55 On both sides, failures and successes were analysed to improve tactics and strategies. The disconnection between the ‘small wars’ waged by the British and those fought by the French is an a posteriori reconstruction that contributes to the distortion and erasure mentioned earlier in this chapter. The initial outbreak of violence caused by conquest, as seen through the camera, is one of the objects of our study. It offers an entry point into the uses and mediations of colonial violence. Beyond this paroxysm, other constraints and aggressive inscriptions on dominated bodies took place. The promoters of imperial expansion forged new concepts to name what happened after the most aggressive phase was seemingly over. They spoke of ‘pacification’ and, a bit later, of ‘development’ in the 1900s. Behind the words often lay a lower-intensity continuation of the original conflictuality, itself frequently mired in local tensions that predated the colonial moment.56 Enmity did not disappear; it was muted, mutated, and civilianised.57 European-proclaimed peace was often contradicted by recurrent movements of opposition. Endemic violence continued under other names because it was embedded in the structures and inherent dysfunctions of colonial projects. In the most troubled areas of empire, physical

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humiliation, the drastic application of capital punishment, corporal punishment, and wide-scale police operations were all reflective of this intrinsic continuity between conquest and its supposedly peaceful aftermath. Contemporaries were not utterly blind to this militarisation of the colonial situation; neither did they completely ignore its potential for extreme violence. Crucially, the notion of colonial violence and abuses was not invented by late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholars.58 In 1908, Les Hommes du jour, a satirical magazine edited by French anarchists, caricatured General d’Amade, who was responsible for the bombardment of Casablanca in August 1907 that killed hundreds. The front page depicts him with a bloody butcher’s apron.59 Revealingly, the attached article speaks of ‘colonial atrocities’. The early twentieth century witnessed the appearance of various publications pointing to similar exactions, more often than not to denounce the colonial abuses of competitors, such as Germany or Belgium.60 Intensifying calls in Europe for reformist colonial policies accelerated the spread of these publications from the 1900s. In sum, the idea that organised violence took on specific shapes in colonial contexts was not foreign to the period. More importantly, those who participated in its application were usually well aware of this. From the late nineteenth century to 1914, the brutal consequences of European expansionism offered many opportunities to frame physical violence through the camera lens. As mass armed violence mostly happened outside Europe, and as spectacular punishments were less and less accepted in France and Britain, notions of what was tolerable or not were thus largely redefined according to what was happening at a distance from the imperial metropolises. European colonial expansion reached its peak precisely when photography experienced its first major inflation. This conjunction  – there are no neat causal chains here – gave birth to a proliferating visual repertoire, and this repertoire, despite selective gazes and erasures, continues to exist as a library of extreme visual incisions. Their production and circulation are entry points into the dynamics of colonial violence and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century armed conflictuality in general. These photographs rarely, if ever, reflect straightforward ideologies or tension-free relationships. Besides, what is colonial and what is not in the images shown here is not at all obvious. There is the additional risk of being deceived by the irruption of photography as a record of the histories of a vast number of spaces outside Europe and Northern America.61 Viewed from the limiting lenses of photographers from France and Britain, violence and colonial expansion artificially stand out in visual disconnection with earlier periods, which have to exist without photography. While one must not lose sight of this photographic distortion, it is equally important to note the intimate connection between war, colonial expansion, and photography in the late nineteenth century. There was a contradiction between the visions of modernity and civilising creeds

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professed by colonial powers, and the repeated outbreaks of violence on the fringes of expansion. Between these two irreconcilable elements, photographs also acted as a contact zone. Their subjects, their authors, their spectators  – be they indifferent, supportive, or appalled – assigned meanings to this clash. Photography, then a new technology documenting a new global order, helped frame the chaos.

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2 Photography as power: force and counterforce Quite apart from what it represents, a photograph is the trace of an action and a presence. It tells us that an individual has used a camera to record what was in front of the lens. In the case of conquest or exploration – that is, when this individual arrives in unfamiliar territory to gather information about it or to take it over – the photographic act takes on a particular function. It becomes in itself a gesture of domination, a force in action, contiguous to other types of coercion. A camera’s presence is never neutral. Its occurrence is never passive. When imperial expansion or its preliminaries were at stake, the camera transformed into an agent of subjection. It is a tool which participated in, and supported, the application of violence. Three main issues arise when examining photographs taken in the context of European expansionism. First, photography became an instrument of colonial infiltration not because it documented wars, police operations, or displays of force, but rather because it was the material vehicle for expressing violence and controlling bodies. The focus here is not so much what is documented, as the potential to exercise or extend a certain force by means of a camera. Colonial powers were quick to grasp the advantages of photography for identifying people and places. One might think that, due to the unequal relation created by the lens, photography became one of the expressions of the empire’s almost unlimited power over its populations. Yet – and this is the second issue addressed in this chapter – we shall see that photography eludes this polarised reading. It also provided a way out for those subjected to it. Europeans used photography to frame their plans of conquest and influence, but it could also escape their control and backfire on them. A third issue is how images actually shaped the practices of violence. Photographing a conquered subject in death or suffering could sometimes affect how his body or corpse was treated. There too, the photographic act, in its most concrete materiality, reveals something about the specific violence of colonial situations. After all, as Karen Strassler underlines, all images should be considered to be ‘unfolding events’. They are never fixed, but are ever-mutating, from the first shot – when the shutter closes – to the ‘multiple social encounters’ which inescapably transform their meanings.1 This is acutely true for colonial photographs.

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Photographic pressures

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The picture looks reassuring (Figure 2.1). A French soldier is showing his photographs to the locals gathered around him, using one of those portable cameras that were all the rage in the 1890s. This one is a Richard Verascope, a light and sturdy instrument which could also be used to view the glass plates. On the surface, there is nothing unsettling about the soldier’s gesture. The images he is displaying to the inhabitants

Figure 2.1 Edgard Imbert, ‘Tanala venant rendre les armes, on leur montre le Vérascope’ (Tanala coming to lay down arms, we showed them the Verascope), 1902 (October?), aristotype, 4 cm × 4.5 cm. The Verascope – literally, ‘the lens of veracity’, a revealing brand name in itself – was invented by the manufacturer Jules Richard as an ultralight camera for stereoscopic, glass-plate negatives. With the ‘Memento’ option, a specially designed sheet of paper could be slipped into the device for notes. The Verascope could also be used to view the developed plates, as we can we see in the above photograph, which documents a crucial moment in the conquest of Madagascar, between conflict and negotiation. The Tanalas of Ikongo, a region in the southeast of the island, capitulated in the autumn of 1902. These are very probably the people represented in this photograph, where the camera operates as an interface.

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might be portraits or views of their village. The scene is more complex, however. The photographer, Edgard Imbert, is an officer who accompanied Hubert Lyautey during the long months of the ‘pacification’ of Southern Madagascar, between 1900 and 1902. He amassed hundreds of negatives of the island’s landscapes and plants, its inhabitants and their chiefs. Like many fellow officers interested in photography, he was encouraged by his superiors to participate in the creation of an image library, located at the Topographical Office, which Joseph Gallieni had opened in Antananarivo in November 1896. By the turn of the century, thousands of shots of Madagascar and its populations could be consulted there.2 Gallieni masterminded the takeover of Madagascar. He combined limited military operations with an excellent knowledge of the different populations on the island. Having identified potential support and resistance, he quickly developed infrastructures to neutralise the latter. His interest in photography was not aesthetic: in helping to organise the visual documentation of Madagascar, he could map ‘races’ and identify local leaders. Imbert’s photograph – a sort of mise en abyme – is not wholly innocuous. The mass of negatives he filed in Madagascar show the country’s landscapes, local scenes, and the ethnic typologies so common in colonial iconography. Rarely was any violence shown. Yet the sudden appearance of cameras and the circulation of photographs conveyed the message that a change of power was at hand. Edgard Imbert’s Verascope was both a lens the French authorities’ new subjects posed for and a viewing device through which these same subjects might see and understand themselves and their surroundings to have been captured in an eternalised instant. The camera functions as a crossroad and an instrument of coercion. Théophile Pennequin, a contemporary of Gallieni and Lyautey, was quick to cotton on to this. Since his auxiliaries often deserted his Tonkin campaigns (1888 to 1896), he had his riflemen photographed in order to build up a visual register by which to identify the renegades. Imbert and the dozens of other soldier-photographers who scoured Madagascar and the new French dependencies likewise constructed visual inventories. Photography was instrumental in establishing ‘bureaucratic- clerical-statistical systems of intelligence’.3 Faces of non-European peoples were recorded in huge numbers for study and, if required, for control. It was not the French who invented this use of photography, but the British, during the 1860s, in response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. They set up several projects to get a better understanding of their Indian possessions. A plan for the comprehensive collection of photographs of different ethnic types on the Indian subcontinent ended up years later as a multivolume book entitled The People of India.4 This novel sort of compilation was conceived as a practical tool for understanding and mastering the colonial environment.5 Set poses, which destroyed any individuality, conveyed physical and political characteristics considered useful

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for administrative purposes.6 These British experiments became known in France through several influential figures.7 Jean-Marie de Lanessan, for example, knew a lot about British techniques of government in the Raj, and spent several months travelling there on behalf of the French Government, in 1886. He wrote up his findings in books and reports, which he drew on when he became the Governor of Indochina in 1891.8 Joseph Chailley-Bert, another architect of French colonial thinking, was one of the anglophiles who inspired Hubert Lyautey, a fervent defender of British Imperial policy.9 The theories of how best to administer overseas territories varied between the two European powers, but scientific literature and techniques circulated between them through a number of channels, in the networks of the learned societies.10 The high hopes placed by European powers in visual documents for simplifying colonial administration were dashed, however. The photographic inventories made by the British and the French proved inadequate on their own, and were in fact unusable, much like other domains of colonial knowledge whose efficacy in the field should never be overestimated.11 The power of photography did not really lie in these image-collection campaigns after all, but in the photographic act itself. The presence of a camera is a form of communication. It signifies power, a power that its European operators readily exaggerated, as a message both to the local populations and to the authorities in their home country, who seemed to find photographic identification of colonised peoples reassuring.12 The ever-expanding number of anthropometric and typological portraits made for European colonial powers in different parts of their empires was a measure of the anxiety raised by the diversity of human groups that had come under their control. The camera, and the vast collections of images that it produced, gave some illusion of control. It was far from easy, however, to photograph the subjects’ faces and bodies in accordance with the norms established by the theorists of these visual taxonomies, since the subjects often refused.13 In these cases, it was tempting to use force to obtain bodies adapted to the camera. The perfect subjects in this respect were naturally prisoners of war. When the anthropologist Karl Weule travelled through the German colony of East Africa during the so-called Maji-Maji War (1905–07), accompanied by soldiers, he would photograph suspects awaiting punishment in the villages he came to. There had been a sizeable uprising, brutally crushed by German troops. He describes the captives as subjects who would never have come of their own free will before the lens of a researcher working alone. The ethnographic photograph collection built up by Thomas Huxley after 1869 provides a similar example. As the President of the Ethnological Society of London, Huxley asked the Colonial Office to have governors send him photographs of all the ‘races’ under their administration. Some of these photos were taken inside prisons, such as the series received in 1871 on ‘Natives from India, China, Ceylon, and the Malayan Peninsula’.14 Firmin-André

The violence of colonial photography

Salles, an Inspector of the Colonies, took hundreds of photographs in Indochina from 1895 to 1896, using equipment of unrivalled sophistication for the period.15 Among these were several portraits conforming to the criteria imposed for anthropometric photographs (Figure 2.2). Salles’s photographs are similar to the anthropometric images taken for identifying criminals, even if this was not his primary intention. This use of photography for identification and control again staged the medium’s power. It was first practised by the French. Alphonse Bertillon’s research, and his invention of anthropometric images for criminological purposes in the late 1870s, are well known.16 The French colonies served as an overseas testing ground for his ideas. Identification centres were set up in Algeria after 1888 and in Indochina in 1898. Chinese nationals immigrating there were subjected to a ‘bertillonage’ on arrival, apparently as much to inculcate submissiveness as to create a reliable system of identification (Figure 2.3). Madagascar acquired a similar service in 1902, and the British in India followed suit: a version of the Bertillon system was introduced in Bengal in 1892 and in Madras some months later. But finally, another, functionally similar, recording technique won the

Figure 2.2 André Salles, Cochinchina, ‘Trinhvan – De, Tonkinois de Hanoï, trente-trois ans (43m/m), cinq ans de prison pour voies de fait envers un supérieur; n°10: Phan-van-Chan, ` n Tho´, trente-cinq ans (35m/m), cinq ans de réclusion pour faux en écriture’ Cochinchinois de Câ (Trinhvan-De, an inhabitant of Tonkin from Hanoi, 33 years (43m/m), five years imprisonment for ` n Tho´, Cochinchina, 35 years (35m/m), violence against a superior; no.10: Phan-van-Chan, from Câ five years imprisonment for forged documents); glass plate 13 cm × 18 cm. These individuals, exhibited face on and in profile, were detained at the Poulo Condor labour camp in the Côn Ðao archipelago, where those charged with insurrection were often imprisoned, in extremely harsh conditions. Full-face and profile shots are very common in colonial photography, but they are not unique. André Salles’s portraits here resemble anthropometric images of criminals, but other standardised and apparently similar photographs do not serve that purpose. The scientific aesthetics of physical anthropology influenced photo albums of the 1880s and 1890s, which abounded with what can be called ‘types’. These were as likely to be Italian or Breton peasants as Asian or African people. ˛

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Figure 2.3 Anon., ‘À leur arrivée à Saïgon, les immigrants chinois sont “bertillonnés” comme des criminels’ (At their arrival in Saigon, Chinese immigrants are “bertillonised” like criminals), engraving from a photograph, La Vie illustrée, 25 August 1905, 1.

day: dactyloscopy, or fingerprinting. In the 1890s, as Inspector General of Police for Bengal Province, Edward Henry developed a classification system for fingerprints.17 So the British likewise used their colonies as their preferred terrain for photographic experimentation. The camera was an important accessory for the particular brand of modernity introduced by European expansionists. It not only had a documentary function, for

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The violence of colonial photography

exploration and campaigns, but also a performative one. It was present in the most palpable and concrete sense. Transporting photographic material for major semimilitary exploratory expeditions required the coerced participation of many individuals. Although the equipment became lighter from the 1890s, the photographic coverage of something like the 1898 Marchand Mission still involved careful transport of an ever-increasing number of crates of photographic plates, under conditions that were far from optimal for preserving such fragile items.18 Photography thus contributed substantially to the huge loads carried by thousands of porters on their backs over the expedition’s thousands of kilometres. And since Jean-Baptiste Marchand wanted to bring back 4,000 to 5,000 negatives, he left with hundreds of kilograms of photographic equipment.19 The camera itself was a complex machine, a reflection of industry and Western science, just like a precision weapon or an engine. It also had a certain resemblance to a firearm. As Paul Virilio notes, ‘the function of the weapon is the function of the eye’.20 When a camera appeared in societies where photography was rare or nonexistent, this itself signified power, even before the device was actually used. Both the content of photographs and the photographic presence itself thus sustained the control of populations and territories. The lexical field of the firearm was used abundantly by the photographers of the time. Samuel Bourne, a founder, in the 1860s, of one of the most important studios in South-East Asia, pointed out that ‘From the earliest days of the calotype, the curious tripod, with its mysterious chamber and mouth of brass, taught the natives of this country that their conquerors were inventors of other instruments besides the formidable guns of their artillery.’21 Paul Lamy, a military doctor with the colonial army, described his first contacts in words which betray a similar confusion between weapon and camera, for himself and for those caught in his lens: ‘It was a general “run for your life” when I pointed my camera at the natives’ (Figure 2.4). This was not an isolated occurrence, because the camera did indeed signal conquests to come. On seeing Dr Hocquard’s camera documenting the Tonkin Campaign in 1884, the inhabitants on the coast supposedly ‘took my black box either as a sophisticated war machine or as a huge lantern’.22 Populations whose first contact with photography came through colonial photographers or explorers could not respond to the medium’s mastery on their own terms. It was not rare for an image of someone to be taken without permission, and the act of photographing seemed to have something intimidating or violent about it. In his book In the Forbidden Land, published in 1899, Arnold Henry Savage Landor (1865–1924) mentions how he was accused by a Tibetan woman of having killed her child through photography23 (Figure 2.5). He had photographed her the previous day without asking permission, and when she objected he finally gave her money to stop her bothering him. The child on her back died during the night. The woman returned

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Figure 2.4 Jules Lavée, ‘Ce fut un sauve-qui-peut général’ (It was a general run for your life), engraving from a photograph in Paul Lamy, ‘Souvenirs de la Côte d’Ivoire’, Le Tour du monde, 11 February 1905, 71.

Figure 2.5 Anon., ‘The photograph that caused the child’s death’, engraving from a photograph by Arnold Henry Savage Landor taken in 1897, in Arnold Henry Savage Landor, In the Forbidden Land, vol. 1 (Heinneman, London, 1898), 141.

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to accuse the photographer of having caused the death through his camera. Regardless of whether this story was invented or not, the photographer-explorer cultivated the idea that his camera possessed a certain power in the eyes of the native populations. Photography could also be cannibalistic. Ferdinand-Joseph Harfeld, a Belgian officer involved in the Western powers’ operations in China in the early twentieth century, quoted a local newspaper from 1884 with satisfaction, in its statement that ‘the devils of the West […] need […] the black eyes of Chinese children […] their innards, brain, and bone marrow are used to make photographic products’.24 Some subjects, like this Tibetan soldier taken prisoner in 1904, apparently suffered a real panic attack, much to the amusement of the operators (Figure 2.6).25 The photographic relation is always unequal to begin with. And the law has always granted more extensive property rights in the photographic image to its author than to its subject. In situations where the photographer’s subject is powerless, this inherent violence is intensified – in a colonial context, for example, in wartime, or for prisoners, corpses, or the wounded. Those who have never seen a camera before experience this too. That is probably how the cliché of photographs stealing souls gained credence.26 An author writing in a specialised journal in 1902 maintained that ‘savages, it seems, dread only two things possessed by civilised men – the “shooting-stick” and the camera […] to photograph a savage is to scale him into abject obedience, as

Figure 2.6 Frederick Bailey, ‘M. I. with Tibetan prisoners. The man on the left thought the camera was a pistol, hence his face’, silver print mounted in a private photo album linked to the British expedition in Tibet (1903–04). The caption gives meaning to the prisoner’s expression, supposedly one of fear. Nothing else suggests he was terrified. His posture could be a way of stating a refusal or indeed have nothing to do with the presence of the camera. As with Henry Savage Landor’s photograph, the photographer constructs the myth of photography as a vehicle of Western power.

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he thinks you have stolen his soul from his body, and can kill him a thousand miles away by tearing the picture in half’.27 In actual fact, reactions to the lens varied from place to place, but the camera’s power was noted both by its European operators and by its local subjects. The stereotypes concerning reactions show an awareness of this. Many potential photographic subjects tried to dodge the machine’s gaze, out of fear or as an act of resistance. Often, photography lay beyond the subject’s horizon. As Allan Sekula has rightly pointed out, the photographic image requires a form of literacy.28 A photograph does not contain the keys to its own explanation, so there is nothing self-evident about it. In the late-nineteenth century, the medium was not as ubiquitous as it is today. For some viewers, a photograph was hardly legible. Edmond Doutté, who travelled through the Maghreb at the beginning of the twentieth century, made the following remarks about the inhabitants of the High Atlas: ‘On the portrait I made of myself in Marrakesh, and which I showed them, nobody recognised me […] one thought it was a house, another favoured a view of Marrakesh […] this inability to reconstruct reality from the lines of a drawing is widespread among primitive peoples, and has often been observed in North Africa: the same can be found among our French peasants.’29 Responses varied considerably. Depending on the culture or the moment at which photography appeared in a given area, the ways the medium was received could be quite diverse. In the British camp, the Scotsman and orientalist Henry Yule commented on this, when on assignment in Myanmar in 1855. He mentioned the lively interest elicited by the equipment of Linnaeus Tripe, the expedition’s photographer. Only the negatives, generally more difficult to make out, were shown at the court of King Mindon Min, and yet, Yule observed, they were ‘understood’ and ‘appreciated’.30 Yule was surprised because he believed that for ‘Natives of India, of whatever class or caste, Mussulman, Hindoo, or Parsee, Aryan, or Tamulian, unless they have had a special training, our European paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs, plain or coloured, if they are landscapes, are absolutely unintelligible […].’31 Here, he is rehearsing a cliché on local reactions to Western modernity which took many different forms. At the same time, like Doutté in Morocco, he is suggesting that the ability to read photographs is not a given. Many of the mostly British and French practitioners of the new medium, who left home in the second half of the nineteenth century to photograph the wider world, came to the same conclusion. They were the first to introduce this technology into new spaces, or at least the first to write the triumphant tale of its spread from the industrialised world over the whole globe. The photographers who commented on the visual illiteracy of populations encountering this technology for the first time thought of it themselves as direct, undistorted (because based on chemical processes), and hence almost natural. In this respect, they too had their blindspots. They were often unaware that photography is

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The violence of colonial photography

a way of seeing and showing that has its own conventional, and initially European, codes.32 There is nothing obvious about displaying the world in two dimensions, in black and white, and on paper. Other cultures around the world have other ways of representing what they see, which seem just as natural to them as photography seemed to be for French explorers or British officers of the time. This assumption that photography should be instantly comprehensible, and that visual illiteracy equated to backwardness, simply expressed the hierarchy between coloniser and colonised, or explorer and object of exploration. This imbalance determined local people’s interactions with photographs, or lack thereof. Many of the photographs taken by military officers or explorers were designed for a European audience. As such they were, if not invisible, then often unintelligible to their subjects, or simply not widely seen by the populations they captured in the absence of local spectatorships. Two photographs by D. H. Gifford, a British officer, suggest how outlandish the camera must have seemed in places where it was unheard of. Gifford was a member of a punitive expedition in the Abor Hills (1911–12), in the far northeast of British India. The local population had been resisting British expansion and administration in this densely forested zone for decades. After they assassinated a colonial officer, Noel Williamson, the British decided to subdue them once and for all. An expeditionary force of 2,000 Gurkhas was dispatched, which burnt down several villages and captured the culprits. When the British arrived, the area was still uncharted territory, and there was limited contact with the local population. As such, it was the Indian troops who first initiated the inhabitants into photography. Gifford’s camera was undoubtedly a Kodak, by then a standard piece of equipment for officers of the Raj.33 Gifford took two snapshots of the inhabitants of the village of Dosing (in today’s Arunachal Pradesh state) (Figure 2.7). From these two shots alone, we can see that the camera attracted little attention at first. Children are looking around in all directions, some directly at the lens but others not. Yet in the short lapse of time between the two photos, something has changed. A questioning look is now being addressed to the camera. With that, the photographic gesture’s one-sided nature has been overturned. Exiting the frame: power to the subjects Photography generally became a familiar presence over time. A new balance was found, as the initial asymmetry gave way to something more complex, where the subject photographed regained a participatory role, however intrusive the photographer may have been. For a photograph is not simply a stable document. It has a mobile relationship between the photographer behind the lens, the subject in front of the camera, and the person looking at the print. In this dynamic, the subject was not necessarily defenceless. Those who had had no prior contact with photography often

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Photography as power: force and counterforce

Figure 2.7 D. H. Gifford, ‘Abors in Dosing Village’, silver print mounted on card, each image 9.8 cm × 7.2 cm, private album of the Abor Hills (1911).

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The violence of colonial photography

came to understand and sometimes appropriate the medium with surprising speed. Photographic subjects became protagonists in their own representation, instead of objects of an alien camera. We see this, for example, in the ritual portrait sessions – voluntary or not – of conquered members of the aristocracy. A remarkable photograph of the photographic act itself, taken by Captain Émile Coquibus (1874–1915), shows one of the sons of Samory Touré (1830–1900), a major figure of African resistance to the spread of French influence in the Upper Niger region (Figure 2.8). Samory Touré had been unable to control his image in the numerous humiliating photographs taken of him by French soldiers to objectify his defeat. He became a popular photographic subject at the end of the nineteenth century, as British and French troops marked their victories with portraits of vanquished leaders which invariably expressed all the violence of colonial conquest.34 Samory’s son, however, was not a prisoner when Captain Dauvilliers photographed him in January 1904, and the photograph was not taken against his will. After the conquest, lines could be redrawn. Former captives posed for the camera of their own accord, and gradually the balance of power and its associated images registered relations beyond that of dominator–dominated. What is visible in the photograph of Samory’s son, for instance, is his status. And many local chiefs appropriated photography in this way, to represent their own power, thus inventing new responses to the photographic medium along the way. Even when the local leader, toppled by the European armies and their allies, was photographed in his powerless state, he could still manage to react. Tiny details – a certain look, a pose  – could indicate his refusal of this photographic record of his decline. This is suggested, for instance, by the way Béhanzin, the King of Dahomey (today’s Benin), treated the lens. The first portrait of him dates from 1894. At the time, he had been on the run for over a year. After General Dodds’s troops had overrun his capital in November 1892 during a punitive expedition, the king managed to elude the French soldiers until 25 January 1894, when he turned himself in. He was photographed the next day by the Assistant Commissioner François Michel. Alexandre d’Albéca, the administrator of the trading post of Ouidah on the coast, noted years later that 'the former king was very interested in this operation’.35 The following month, François Michel enclosed the portrait taken in a letter written to his brother Joseph, stating that ‘if you feel like sending the photograph of Béhanzin to a newspaper, you can do so […] other officers will probably have photographed him, and will be sending their prints to France’.36 After being deported to Martinique, Béhanzin was again photographed, this time with his family, by Firmin André Salles.37 The last portraits of him are a series taken in Blida, Algeria, where he died without seeing his native land again (Figure 2.8). Images like these were reproduced in many different formats, from postcards to the glass plates used for lantern projections in schools. From today’s perspective it

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Figure 2.8 Émile Coquibus, ‘Le capitaine Dauvilliers photographiant un fils de Samory’ (Captain Dauvilliers photographing one of the Samory sons), 1 January 1904, gelatin silver bromide photograph on glass, 6 cm × 6.4 cm.

may seem as though this exiled king was repeatedly humiliated – subjected, like so many other local chiefs captured by the colonial powers, to the ritual of the staged photograph. But this is far from self-evident. The kings of Dahomey were well acquainted with self-representation: one need only look at the royal statues seized as booty by General Dodds and today exhibited at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. Moreover, they were familiar with the codes of European representations of power. The Navy lieutenant Bouël gave a portrait of Napoleon III to King Ghezo (the ninth king of Dahomey) in 1852. In 1863, Commodore Wilmot gave a portrait of Queen Victoria to King Glele (Dahomey’s tenth king).38 And the uses of photography for intelligence purposes were also no secret for the kingdom’s authorities who, in the early 1890s, banned European visitors from taking photographs.39 So Béhanzin’s relation to the camera was anything but naïve. In portrait after portrait, over a twenty-year period, he consistently displayed his origin and his status through traditional clothing and accessories. A photograph taken during his time in Algeria shows his deliberate choices: whereas his sons are dressed in a European style, he

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never accepts any Western elements in his dress; his long pipe is always in his hands, and he is unfailingly sheltered by a parasol. Fully inhabiting his role as sovereign, Béhanzin monitored his own image with sufficient success for his portraits to become emblems of resistance against European colonisation decades later (Figure 2.9). A statue inspired by these photographs today presides over a square in Abomey, Benin. Compromise solutions between local and colonial codes of representation are not unusual. In very different ways, depending on the places and the vernacular traditions, local elites adapted photographic imagery to legitimate their own power. Alongside other information-gathering techniques deployed in societies being colonised, photography contributed to the broader process of the invention of traditions.40 Thus local leaders transformed their techniques and vocabularies, producing hybrid discourses which were partly fashioned by colonial imports and partly traditional. Images played an important role in staging and stabilising these ticklish (re)balancing acts. Although certain features of Western modernity caught on rapidly, the history writers of the time nevertheless presented a ‘progress’ imposed from the outside, disconnected from local dynamics. The imagery established at the moment of contact, frozen in time, could return to haunt local notables. When Bembya, from the northern region of today’s Zimbabwe, was interviewed in the 1930s, he said he only put on his traditional headwear when Europeans came to the village: ‘Mwamba of today has the headdress

Figure 2.9 Jean Geiser, ‘Béhanzin, ex-King of Dahomey, his family and his suite’, c. 1906, postcard, Algiers.

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of Mubanga Chipoya, but he only wears it now when you white people come to his village. That is how the Bwanas like to photograph him dressed after the fashion of the past.’41 The subjects of colonial photography, far from being passive, could have a sharp sense of the potential of this new technology, and devise their own strategies for resisting the lens. In the particular case of missionary photography, characterised by complex and conflictual relations with official discourses, as we see below, colonial subjects often reappropriated the situation in particularly visible ways. The experience of François Coillard, who was sent by the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society to the Lozi populations of the Upper Zambezi region in the 1880s, is a case in point. Coillard was an excellent photographer. He used his camera and his prints for proselytising (even if he certainly exaggerated this aspect). The populations he encountered, he suggests, held photography to be a kind of magic.42 In 1886, he showed the Queen of Nalolo (modern-day Zambia) some portraits of rebels opposed to the local authorities, who were later killed in combat. According to Coillard she exclaimed ‘“The villain! These people” – she was talking of me – “are frightful; they have the living and the dead eating out of their hand.”'43 Coillard cultivated this reputation by organising magic lantern shows using his own photographs, which included many portraits of local chiefs, to demonstrate the legitimacy of his evangelising work.44 He was in for a surprise, however. While Coillard thought he was exploiting local reactions, the Lozi dignitaries were reinforcing their own public image. Thanks to the missionary’s photographs they could extend their authority through a modern, mechanised medium. When King Lewanika visited Great Britain in 1902, his selfportraits combined European elements with traditional objects. He was thus juggling his precolonial authority with the new curbs on his legitimacy imposed by the British Protectorate (negotiated in 1890).45 His composite portraits spoke both to his own people and to the colonial powers. It was not long before local photographers began creating an imagery which presented their own particular differences and was less assimilable by an outside eye.46 For Africa, an exhaustive history of these local actors remains largely unwritten; the colonial archives contain few records, and many of the prints have sadly been lost. Yet vernacular photographic activities that escaped the codes of colonial images did gradually develop. Neils Walwin Holm, a photographer working in Lagos in the 1890s and 1900s, close to the Panafrican movement, is one such inventor of an independent imagery. Thanks to a local clientele eager to display their social standing in portraits very different from the primitivist stereotypes favoured by the Europeans, he amassed a sizeable collection of photographs.47 A community of photographers sprung up in Freetown, Sierra Leone, at the end of the nineteenth century. It spread all over Africa, particularly to other ports. Toffa, the King of Porto-Novo from 1874 to 1908, employed a photographer to make portraits which could reinforce his official communications.48

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There were roughly 500 studios in Asia. In India, some local photographers were as well regarded as their European colleagues, for instance Lala Deen Dayal, who worked at Secunderabad and Sudore.49 When the first French photographers arrived in Hue, the capital of Annam (the centre of today’s Vietnam), Trương Văn San had been practising at the court of Emperor Tự Đức since 1878.50 Photography was nothing new there. This should tell us that the familiar history of photography as radiating out from a European ‘centre’ to various ‘peripheries’ is in serious need of revision. So photography had a number of origins in colonised territories or in those within the European sphere of influence, but it seldom played an important role outside these limits before the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, since the production of information and ideas was controlled by the authorities, it was rare to find images likely to create a problem. Signs of disobedience or contestation were generally inconspicuous, as in the case of Béhanzin. When they were more visible, the unruly photographer was censured and punished. An example of this occurred in Madagascar in 1887, when the queen’s palace was thrown into confusion. At the time, France was meddling in the country’s internal affairs, after the peace treaty signed in 1885. The island’s ruling family had been reluctant to accept photography within its borders, due to its desacralising effects, and in this instance it saw its worst fears become realities: a bundle of pornographic photographs was discovered within the palace walls. Ladies-in-waiting had been photographed in compromising positions. Accusations flew from all sides, and a French officer and keen photographer was accused of this infamy. However, the inquiry identified a Mauritian photographer, a certain Marquet, who had in fact added heads to nudes and then photographed the result.51 With Marquet’s expulsion, honour was saved and order restored. After that, none of the local studios could be in any doubt that the French would not countenance images that threatened their interests. From the turn of the twentieth century until the First World War, the French and British colonial authorities made sure that local photographic production did not stray beyond genres considered innocuous, such as the portrait. Like other media, photography was closely monitored. In the archives of the British Secretary of State for India, however, we can find one example, probably from as early as the 1870s, of photography in the hands of Indian nationalists. The composite image shows a goddess fighting British ‘demons’. She is surrounded by photographs and engravings representing the faces of leaders of the independence movement.52 The document was considered sufficiently troublesome at the time for this early example of militant photography to be put on the Index by the British authorities, in the collection of ‘forbidden publications’.53 As Christopher Pinney has shown for the British Raj, photography, initially a ‘remedy’ – insofar as it permitted record-keeping and control of populations – could become a ‘poison’ for the coloniser as soon as local inhabitants

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used it to document ill treatment of the population or to undermine the powers of the time.54 So, prior to 1914, vernacular uses of paroxysmic photography against European interests could realistically only be practised beyond the borders of the French and British empires. There is an example from China, where Western influence took a particular form in the nineteenth century, radiating out from the concessions. China was not strictly a colony, but it was a site of complex forces, where European military campaigns never quite succeeded in silencing local sovereign powers. Chinese photography spread rapidly inland from the large ports.55 A dynamic local press was also present, which used illustrations from the end of the nineteenth century. The scene was therefore set for photographers and local journalists to rework foreign photographic codes for targeted counterdiscourses. As we see below, pictures of atrocities were a popular genre for the Western clientele of photographs from China at the turn of the twentieth century. Scenes of Chinese executions and torture were a category in themselves, one that cultivated the myth of Asian cruelty. But this myth was out of step with the times, since, as Jérôme Bourgon has shown, traditional Chinese punishments were being gradually forbidden in this period, partly due to European pressure.56 The accusations of cruelty were to be turned back against Westerners in 1906, however. On 22 February, the magistrate Jiang Zhaotang went to negotiate the situation of Chinese Catholics with Jean-Marie Lacruche, head of the Nanchang Catholic Mission (Jiangxi Province). At the end of a day of discussions, Jiang Zhaotang received several knife wounds to his throat, leaving him seriously wounded. Over the next few days, alive but unable to speak, he jotted down some notes, which suggested both a suicide attempt and that Lacruche was responsible. Despite this contradiction and the ensuing confusion, rumours soon spread, and Lacruche was accused of assaulting the magistrate. Although missionaries were not colonisers in the strict sense, their position was complicated, especially in the context of hardening nationalist sentiment against all forms of foreign interference. Some days later, to avenge Jiang Zhaotang, rioting demonstrators attacked Marist missionaries, killing five. Lacruche himself was killed a few streets away from his mission.57 And the affair did not stop there. The following month, a Reformist daily paper in Peking, the Jinghua Ribao, published a photo-engraving showing Jiang Zhaotang’s wounds with the following commentary: ‘Readers, judge for yourselves whether this wound could be made by someone trying to commit suicide.’58 This grisly tale became a photograph and a symbol of the tensions in China caused by European and American interventionism. More importantly, the image reversed Western accusations against China. Whereas scenes of ‘Asian cruelty’ were frequent in publications on the region, filling Belle Époque imaginations with dismembered

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bodies and terrifying forms of torture, suddenly the photographic staging of the tormented victim was no longer harnessed to the stereotype of a people with strange and cruel customs. In this exceptional case, the violent imagery and its rhetoric were turned back against their author.59 The extreme image is here a mirror in which Westerners can view what their own codes define as abuses. However, as mentioned above, this was an exceptional case, and it was not until the late 1910s that nationalist movements really began to use photography against the colonial empires. The photographs taken by Narayan Vinayak Virkar at the site of the Amritsar Massacre in 1919 typify the new direction taken, with records of violence used against the colonial power. In the same year, Egyptian nationalists used photographs in a completely new way, displaying injured bodies in order to get the attention of participants at the Paris Conference (1919) and to denounce British imperialism (Figure 2.10). Although one might suppose the camera to be an instrument of unilateral oppression, it almost always operated where the colonial desire to control, know, and coerce met the counterforce of local desires. Even the most extreme photograph showing the critical moments of suffering and death could elude imposed meanings.

Figure 2.10 Anon., photographs of victims of whipping, half-tone engraving, in Egyptian Delegation to the Peace Conference (Paris: 1919), 187.

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This use of photography by the Egyptian delegation to show lacerated bodies is quite remarkable. Their partial nudity, which was problematic for the local culture, suggests the strength of political will behind this pioneering way of documenting alleged brutalities by the British in Egypt. Photographic technology has successfully changed sides: it is here an anti-imperialist weapon.

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A legacy of disempowerment and humiliation? We have seen how photography invariably sows the seeds of (photographic) resistance, adaptations, and local mediations. However, in extreme photographs, which are the theme of this book, the relation between the photographer and the subject photographed seems unquestionably unilateral. The act of photographing may be intrinsically linked to the practice of violence, and even to the death of the person who resists the colonial advance or the enemy in general, in an armed conflict. This was indeed the case for the soldier-photographers who went off to conquer empires for France and Great Britain: they aligned the power of photography with the power of arms. This symbiosis between destruction and the picture of destruction is exemplified in the photographic trophy.60 Combining the two was meant to heighten the effect of an execution, and it was a practice used by both the French and the British in the 1890s in Africa. Jean-Baptiste Marchand, who had been sent to quash the revolt of the Batekes in the Congo in 1896, smoked out the remaining rebels from a cave and decapitated their leader. The head was then placed on the grave of a French officer the man had killed. Finally, it was photographed, almost certainly in order to pass the print round nearby villages.61 The British used similar techniques during the campaign against the Sultanate of Sokoto in 1903. Frank P. Crozier, who took part in the Battle of Burmi (27 July 1903), described the end of the fighting as follows: ‘Over a thousand Fulani were killed by Maxim gun fire in and around a mosque from which there was little or no escape, photographs of decapitated ringleaders being taken for distribution round the country – so as to convince the diehards of the futility of fighting.’62 The British certainly photographed the remains of their recent conquest, Sultan Muhammadu Attahiru I. Kill, profane, and photograph the enemy: these three practices went together. Years later, in the Natal (South Africa), British officers used similar methods during a campaign in 1906. Bhambatha kaMancinza, the leader of a Zulu clan opposed to the levying of a new tax, headed a rebellion of a few thousand followers. He was defeated on 10 June 1906 at the Battle of Mome Gorge. His head was removed for identification. Under escort – as shown by a photograph published some months later in a local newspaper – it was displayed to several hundred inhabitants of the region in order to prove that the rebel leader was dead.63 The news shocked London, and

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William Redmond, an Irishman and MP, and a notorious opponent of the Boer War, challenged the government in Westminster on the issue.64 Trophy photographs seem to have circulated in the area for quite some time.65 It is almost impossible to construct a reliable history of these practices. The records are few and far between. Moreover, these sorts of photographs circulated only within the colonial societies or the personal and professional networks of European military forces. They came to the surface due to accidents and painstaking research. Yet it is clear that this use of photography was widespread, particularly in Africa. Significantly, it contributed to the stereotype of a technology with magical powers. The photographs, some of which had a trans-imperial audience, were explicitly aimed at publicising the defeat of a local potentate using an emblematically modern medium. As such, photography redefined a rhetoric of violence locally. Trophy photographs were not simply limit cases of representation, absurd as well as cruel and repulsive. As they spread between the troops of the different empires fighting in Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, they made it clear to the local populations that a rhetoric of mastery had replaced the previous rituals of victory. Thus, among European troops campaigning overseas, photographing the enemy’s humiliation in the form of a portrait, if the subject survived, or else a trophy image, became a new ritual of victory. Faces and silhouettes of leaders resisting the colonial forces multiplied, fixed in their postures of defeat. Over time, some of those photographed became the heroes of wars of independence and, much later, referents for collective identification. African and Asian societies today may have no portrayals of their national heroes other than as subjects humiliated by the colonial lens. Their revival repeats this original brutality to some extent, especially in our epoch, where nothing can exist without an image: central elements of a people’s identity may thus consist of demeaning representations caught in an iconographic asymmetry. At the turn of the twentieth century, many of the groups concerned were unable to produce a counterimage. For example, in the 1970s, an engraving of Samory Touré, who fought off the French troops in West Africa in the 1880s and 1890s, was put on the 100 syli bank note printed by the Guinean Central Bank. The engraved portrait was based on photographs made by the French after his capture in 1898. This was how Sékou Touré, the first President of the Republic of Guinea, celebrated the memory of his great-grandfather. He called on this genealogy in other forms as well, to legitimate his power. However, visually, this was a complex legacy. The original photograph is one of many taken by the French, for whom the Samoury Touré later found on the bank notes was a defeated leader. There are numerous other examples of this type of reuse, in which European colonialist images live again. But does the initial structural inequality return intact?

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Nationalist narratives reinvented the meaning of these photographs, deforming their origins and original sense. At the time, local strategies of diversion, denial, and reappropriation were mobilised to counteract the foreign-imposed photographic proof, and to neutralise some of the power of the camera. In the case of Bhambatha, neither his wife nor his close circle acknowledged his death, despite the exhibiting of his corpse.66 The official story was that he had left for the Portuguese colonies. Sometimes a detail in an image could be used for a heterodox reading. We shall come back to the French in Indochina and the way they exposed the remains of rebel groups, but first, within this macabre gallery of portraits, we shall look at a particularly interesting case, where the prescribed interpretation of an extreme photograph is challenged locally. Hoàng Hoa Thám, known as the ‘Đề Thám’, was what the French called a ‘pirate’ at the time. He became a national hero in the twentieth century for his struggle against the colonial forces. In 1908–09, he sustained heavy losses, including among his closest circle; one of his commanders, Ba Biểu, died while fighting in today’s Yên Thế region (Vietnam). Ba Biểu’s body was hidden by villagers, but it was finally discovered and exhibited for all to see along a stretch of road. A postcard published by Pierre Dieulefils immortalised this scene in order to increase its effect (Figure 2.11). The presence of three French soldiers, partially visible at the edges of the image, can leave no doubt as to the purpose of the photograph. Moreover, the fact that it was printed on a postcard, a cheap product which could circulate rapidly, added to the degrading effect. However, what neither the soldiers, nor the photographer, nor the European purchasers of the image noticed was the position of the dead fighter. As Ellen Takata has observed, there is something dissonant in the picture: someone, perhaps one of the villagers, had evidently repositioned the body.67 Ba Biểu is in the position of Buddha, through which he regains some of the dignity that Captain Péri, the probable author of the photograph, intended to strip him of. Opportunities for alternative readings capable of overcoming the dishonour which seemed to be consubstantial with this type of photograph can also arise as the photo is redeployed over time. In this case, as in that of the portraits of leaders in captivity which we mentioned before, heroisation and altered significations remained possible. John Ndevasia Muafangejo, a Namibian artist who died in 1983, provides a more recent instance of these new meanings. His work The Death of a Leader (1971) is an explicit reframing of the meaning of a trophy photograph of an Ovambo leader. Taken by South African soldiers in 1917, the photograph shows the body of Mandume ya Ndemufayo surrounded by smiling soldiers from the Ovamboland military expedition of February 1917.68 As Margo Timm has shown, the artist, in reworking this picture, reorientates the memory of a leader whose defiance was an example to be followed in the context of guerilla resistance to foreign domination.69 Despite its

The violence of colonial photography

Figure 2.11 Captain Péri, ‘Ba-Bieu, lieutenant du Ðê` Thám exposé après sa mort pour être reconnu (colonne du Phuc-Yen 1909)’ (Ba Biêu, a commander under Ðê` Thám, is displayed after his death for identification (column of Phuc-Yen 1909)), 1909, published as a postcard by Pierre Dieulefils, Hanoi. ˛

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concrete involvement in conquest and control within the colonial situation, photography can never impose a closed narrative line. The photograph’s meaning, from the moment the shutter closes to decades later, is never wholly imprisoned by the sense its author intended. The violence packed into its frame inevitably exceeds it. In the hands of European colonisers, the camera and photographic prints are no longer neutral components of a medium, but vectors of the newcomer’s power. This is why we should leave aside the photograph’s content to focus on the photographer in situ and how his photographs circulate locally. Of course, the situations described here do not cover all the many aspects of the photographic encounter in the context of colonial expansionism. What they do reveal is that the photographic apparatus is a declared and materialised intrusion, an agent of coercion. Yet the photographic subjects are rarely silent when confronted with the lens, the pressures it brings with it, or the photographic stagings. Signs which are invisible to the photographer may gesture towards a refusal or an assertion. Jane Lydon rightly points out that despite ‘enormous power inequalities’ the subjects of colonial photography should not be exclusively considered through the white photographer’s view.70 Those looking closely might see the image veer towards a particular detail. And then there were those in the

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colonial library wary enough never to appear before the lens, or else to appear only fleetingly, like the inhabitants of the Transvaal whom a soldier-photographer from the Lincoln Regiment tried desperately to photograph at the turn of the twentieth century, and who, as ‘conscientious objectors (to photography)’, systematically turned their backs on him.71 Their visual absence is probably also a sign of their ability to resist and evade the colonisers’ cameras. In contexts such as these, the confidence which photographers and their hierarchy placed in the force of photography obscured its real shortcomings. The endless proliferation of anthropometric portraits, of postcards of defeated leaders, and of photographic trophies was often a way of concealing a lack of real territorial control and of knowledge of the populations. In this case, amassing signs of mastery may well denote its absence.

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3 Depths of field: darkrooms and conflicts prior to the 1890s Alexander Dudgeon Gulland was a surgeon in the British Army. He served in Crimea, the Second Opium War in China, Jamaica, and northern India in 1868 during the ‘Black Mountain’ Campaign (in the present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan). He bought and compiled several views of the territories he visited. His collection includes rare photographs showing the aftermath of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, one of the great crises of the 1860s.1 Although this collection does not feature any photographic visualisations of physical suffering – an isolated engraving depicts the execution of Paul Bogle, the leader of the uprising  – it indirectly documents the violence that occurred at the fringes of the European empires. Gulland’s album includes an outstanding photograph that reflects the way in which the articulation of colonial warfare and the rapidly evolving photographic medium provoked unprecedented bursts of visual innovation. The view is entitled ‘The Attack on Mhunnah-Ka-Dhunnah’. It was shot in October 1868, as soldiers of the British Indian Army fired shells at Pashtu combatants hidden in the dense forests covering the slopes of the Agror Valley (Figure 3.1).2 The anonymous author of the photograph was likely in the military,3 as no professional photographer is known to have joined the mission. The photograph places the spectator right in the middle of the action. It captures the trail of smoke left by the shell as it travelled a few hundred metres across the frame, a distance achieved in less than one or two seconds with this cannon.4 Operating at the very limits of the technological possibilities offered by his camera, the operator skillfully fixed the battle on negative. This photograph is unusual in its proximity to the combat. The album, purchased by the Princeton University Library, resurfaced recently; invisible for decades, it offers a glimpse of the erasures mentioned in the previous chapter. In dissonance with the aesthetics and thematics of its times, it survived by chance through auctions and inheritances. It is an invitation not to neglect these late nineteenth-century conflicts fought far from the imperial metropolises, where new visualisations of war emerged.

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Figure 3.1 Anon., ‘The Attack on Mhunnah-Ka-Dhunnah’, 1868, albumen print from a collodion glass negative.5 On the right-hand side of the image, troops commanded by British officers look down the valley as a shell is fired at adversaries standing outside the frame. In the lower left of the image, Gurkhas form a compact mass at the edge of the forest, ready to attack.

With few exceptions, warfare took place outside the industrialised world from the 1870s onwards. It was also there that new visualities, such as the recording of mass violence and catastrophes, could be developed at a distance, sufficiently far from French and British audiences to soften the shock of such pictures of pain. New professions were born, as early conflict photography developed into a fully-fledged occupation. The reporter-photographer made his entrance at the turn of the century. Armies set up photographic sections and experimented with cameras. They also sought to regulate the use of these tools, which could turn any soldier into a photographer, at the risk of exposing the unflattering aspects of colonial expansion. Missionaries, who were also on the frontlines of European expansion, used photography as well, with their own agenda in mind. The destabilisations caused by the imperial moment of the late nineteenth century were therefore captured by a myriad of camera-wielding actors.

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More often than not, histories of photography have overlooked this prehistory of the visualisation of distant suffering in the nineteenth century. Early conflict photography is crushed under the weight of twentieth-century photojournalism. Engaging in an archaeology of photographic visions of organised violence is therefore a difficult but rewarding task. As colonial expansion and industrial warfare multiplied occasions to capture destruction, a repertoire emerged that heavily inspired twentieth-century visual culture. These developments mostly occurred outside of Europe, far from its metropolises and mass culture, as lenses turned toward distant (at least from a British or French standpoint) sites of violence and pain. To write this history, it is necessary to retrace the trajectories of a multitude of photographers – mostly men and mostly European – and untangle the visual economy in which they participated. Is photography just a technology? Grand narratives of the medium provide a linear account of its development into an innovation crucial to contemporary experiences of the world. It seems to have progressed almost inevitably from its blurry origins to its ever-more-realistic and accurate twenty-first-century forms. Surely, one cannot reasonably set aside the mechanical constraints that characterised early photography, with its long exposure times and limited portability. However, adopting a univocal approach to its development, one which privileges technological causes over cultural ones, provides a limited perspective. The visual capture of war and suffering illustrates that what some people imagined photography might eventually do was as significant as what it actually could do. To explore the ideas of photography and its realities, it is critical to address the first conflicts documented by photography from the late 1840s onwards. Most were not necessarily ‘colonial’ in nature, at least not in the sense of the concept as it was understood in the very late nineteenth century. They did, however, set precedents that cannot be ignored and must be examined before the next chapter turns to the more systematic photographic coverage of conflicts in the 1890s and 1900s. Our focus is on the early practitioners of photography and the material quality of their practices. These photographers escape the neat categorisations of the twenty-first-century historian. Colonial conflicts offered them many opportunities to experiment with their cameras; however, other wars and other catastrophes could draw these photographers outside the strict boundaries of European empires. We will need to follow them wherever they went, without losing sight of the singularity of colonial contexts. Liberties must also be taken with the chronological framework established by the title of this book, with a view to challenging the idea that pre-First World War photography had little to offer in terms of realistic visualisations of the ravages of war. This chapter is a prologue to the 1890s; it looks at what unfolded prior to the ‘photo-inflation’ of the late nineteenth century. It seeks to tackle a seemingly

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straightforward issue: how did early photography document frontlines? How did darkrooms and lenses intersect with weapons and their impacts? The photographs considered here did not necessarily enjoy wide circulation at the time, nor do they systematically show raw violence. We need to search through the records and allow ourselves not to be excessively constrained by categories that crystallised later, at the turn of the twentieth century. Into the blur (late 1840s–late 1850s)? At the mention of early war photography, specialists and readers interested in the history of the medium all have a few icons in mind. Felice Beato’s 1857 photographs of the so-called mutiny in India may surface. The rebellion, which was initiated from within the British Indian military, turned into a large popular movement that threatened the entire colonial edifice. The subsequent repression was brutal; its intensity was commensurate to the existential anguish that the crisis caused on the British side. Two views shot in the wake of this conflict have become icons of early war photography. One shows the courtyard of the Sikandar Bagh, a villa in Lucknow where nearly 2,000 rebels were killed during a British offensive in November 1857.6 Beato’s photograph of the interior shows some of their remains, scattered on the ground, left there to publicise the British victory. The other view shows the hanged corpses of two rebels executed by British authorities. Much like Roger Fenton’s photograph of the ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’ in the Crimea, where a light cavalry charge ended in a massacre at Balaklava in October 1854, these photographs have become ubiquitous. Some of the early photographs taken during the Mexican–American War of 1847 might also be considered to belong to this set of references. One of these daguerreotypes, taken by Charles S. Betts – the owner of a pioneering studio in Mexico City at the time – shows the disturbing amputation of a soldier’s limb.7 These images shared one characteristic. Despite their professed realism  – photography was, in and of itself, a performance of truthful novelty at the turn of the 1850s – all of them were staged. Beato photographed the two hanged men a few seconds after they died, stabilising the corpses himself to get a clean shot.8 Similarly, he likely arranged or rearranged the bones in the courtyard of the Lucknow villa to make things more sensational and spectacular.9 Fenton carefully avoided any hint of British corpses and probably took the picture long after the events occurred. The amputee from the 1847 war does appear to have undergone an actual surgical procedure – the surgeon shows a severed limb for the spectator to see  – but the picture was obviously staged. What twenty-first-century observers consider realistic war photography simply did not and could not exist in the early 1850s. Battle scenes and the acme of movement were still beyond reach. Officers’ portraits and empty battlefields after the

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fight were easier to capture. There is a consensus among historians: the first wars to be photographed appear to be immobile and mostly post facto.10 The cumbersome apparatus of the early years of photography certainly did not help. Roger Fenton, who covered the Crimean War in 1855, built a special cart to carry his equipment and darkroom. Long exposure times prevented any successful attempt at capturing fast-moving objects. Even Beato, who did his best to overcome the limitations of wet collodion negatives, needed just under four seconds of light. To make things more complicated, glass plates had to be processed within minutes of exposure. Capturing battles seemed impossible to achieve, and the impasse was not only technological. While mechanical constraints played a part in concealing many dimensions of warfare, the operators’ cultural horizons, and those of their clientele, also influenced what war should look like. Engravings and paintings still had a decisive role to play in the depiction of combat prior to the 1890s. The sketches sent by special correspondents and artists to newspapers in London or Paris were central to the distant visualisation of armed convulsions and episodes of mass violence. Significantly, there was no strict delineation between the first photographers who went to war and the guardians of older pictorial traditions. From Roger Fenton to James Robertson or Charles Langlois, most of the pioneers who documented the Crimean War – the first conflict to be extensively photographed  – were also painters or engravers. In more ways than one, photography did not yet exist as an independent form, or at least that’s what many people thought. This impression may have been self-fulfilling, informing our understanding of how photography developed in connection to warfare, with consequences for what has been kept in the archives or considered worthy of displaying in exhibitions and books. What a ‘real’ war photograph looks like to us is irrelevant here. The thing that matters most is how contemporaries felt in front of these images. This is because the idea of what looks real has its own history. When photographers were able to get close to action in the 1850s, many thought that they could actually capture the misfortunes and tensions of war. Carol Szathmari, a Romanian photographer, took dozens of photographs of the Crimean War in the spring of 1854. He apparently took several shots of ongoing battles. Ernest Lacan, who wrote an important book on the photographs exhibited at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1855, was amazed at Szathmari’s photographs of the siege of Silistra: ‘In the distance, on the hills, one can see black lines crossing each other [...] in uncertain masses, under whitish clouds that the wind chases away and scatters: here they are, the clashing armies, battle itself [...] many have asked whether photography can record the great scenes of war [...] these two pictures provide unquestionable evidence that the answer is yes.’11 One might argue that Szathmari’s views were probably retouched. It is likely that no one will ever know, because they were lost, never to appear in any book on the history of

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photography. The crucial point is that, despite the evident technological limitations of photography in 1854, his work provoked an unprecedented feeling of realism from a mid-nineteenth-century standpoint. Lacan and many others hoped that photography would capture war, among a wide array of extreme objects of contemplation. The medium was therefore always more than its mechanism. The intensity of conflicts did not always elude the lens. Some dissonant views and negatives failed the test of time, having no lasting influence on the evolution of twentieth-century visual culture. Others were left unprinted by their authors because of their supposed flaws. Many were simply lost. For example, Richard Nicklin, who was sent by the British Government to cover the Crimean War, drowned with his plates when his ship sank in November 1854. Who knows what his pictures looked like? Sometimes it is photographic historians who overlook revealing documents. A good example is that of a view captured by the studio of James Robertson, father-inlaw of Felice Beato, his assistant at the time. It is entitled ‘Sevastopol before the Last Bombardment’. The view is unspectacular to the twenty-first-century eye: not a soul or an explosion in sight. A closer look reveals the parapet of a trench in the foreground, placing the observer in the position of a soldier overlooking the besieged city. The caption suggests an imminent artillery barrage, implying that the photographer was putting his life at risk by positioning his camera slightly above the ridge. Yet the image was shot around 8 September 1855, long after the fight. Evading the restraints of collodion sensitivity, the photographer tried to convey the proximity of the battle via the inscription, which Walter Benjamin called ‘the most important part of the photograph’.12 The misleading words gave the relatively benign image a sense of immediacy, therefore pointing at what the photographic lens might record one day, rather than what it could effectively capture in the autumn of 1855, stuck as it was within its technical limitations. However, death and destruction were never completely outside the frame. Carol Szathmari photographed a quarantine camp for cholera patients. The disease killed far more people than bullets in the Crimean War, and such a view was probably terrifying to any beholder. Although corpses as such were never included in his famous views, such as ‘The Interior of the Redan’, Robertson also photographed soldiers’ graves,13 and his less famous ‘Breach in the Redan’ leaves little to the imagination.14 Despite many sociotechnical constraints, these artists were already pushing the medium to its limits. Instead of looking at the early days of conflict photography in terms of its inadequate ‘modernity’, gauged from the privileged standpoint of observers of the past, one should consider how contemporary aesthetic and commercial choices, and then archival effects, shaped the photographers’ understanding. A deep-seated hatred of blur characterised photographic aesthetics until a fairly late date. This led many photographers to leave negatives undeveloped, and these absent shots are also part of the history of photography. A visible consequence of this avoidance of blur was

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the petrification of war in images. For years, those interested in the convulsions and movements of warfare had to turn to the panoramas of Parisian boulevards, those large, 360-degree paintings that placed the spectator at the centre of a battle, or the lithographed illustrations of Henri Durand-Brager or William ‘Crimea’ Simpson. As soon as the possibility was within reach, photographers began to invent new visualisations of war, though no particular conflict played the definitive role of a turning point. The Italian Campaign of 1859, which saw the French Army, allied with Sardinian troops, clash with the Austrian Empire, offered an opportunity for several photographers to explore brutality in images. The most striking images were not made by soldiers in this conflict, even though Napoleon III decreed that photographic coverage be organised by the army itself.15 An anonymous English correspondent for The Photographic News who went by the initials J. L. wrote about his experiences: ‘I will send you proofs of these as soon as I have an opportunity of printing some [...] You will see many dead bodies scattered about among the trees, and many lying side by side [...] but no bodies of men in actual conflict; I felt it would be absolutely impossible to get near enough to pitch my camera.’ J. L.’s prints have disappeared, but one such innovative view from the 1859 war survived. It is thought to be one of the first graphic depictions of war in photographs. It is a view attributed to Jules Couppier, a French photographer, showing Melegnano cemetery in June 1859 (Figure 3.2). The caption suggests that what is unfolding is a collective burial after the offensive. But this would be a misunderstanding, informed by twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual cultures and their depictions of mass violence. In fact, the shot shows the battlefield itself. The 1st Zouaves Regiment lost dozens of soldiers in a deadly bayonet charge that took place in this very cemetery. This is not an orderly burial, but a vision of how death accumulates in a battle. The stereoscopic view was a commercial success, selling not only in Europe but also in the United States.16 A demand for more direct visualisations of violence emerged as the terrible fate of the wounded and dead attracted attention in the wake of the work of Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross.17 The amateur networks that developed around photographic societies were not unaware of these thematic and technological developments.18 In this first decade, conflict photography amounted to a profusion of scattered experiments. Rarely having official backing, most of those who went to the frontlines with their cameras were commercial or amateur photographers who were heavily influenced by the conventions of paintings, drawings, and engravings. Occasionally, and sometimes accidentally, some of them captured scenes at the utmost limits of their technological capabilities; however, these views are rare. Regardless, emerging networks and markets for these pictures soon appeared. It was outside Europe that the visualisation of suffering and death could be transformed more opportunistically from the late 1850s.

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Figure 3.2 Jules Couppier, ‘Cimetière de Melegnano, le lendemain de la bataille (8 June 1859)’, (Melegnano cemetery, the day after the battle (8 June 1859)), stereoscopic view, albumen print, 13.6 cm × 6.9 cm.19 It is essential not to lose sight of the materiality of photographs. The most striking element in this view is its format. It is in fact a stereoscopic view that offered a three-dimensional view of the scene. This image could be mounted on an optical apparatus to give the sensation of depth, making the scene even more macabre to the viewer’s eye. This particularity in itself signals a contemporary interest in radical new ways of looking at armed conflicts.

Colonial contexts and pioneering experiences (late 1850s–60s) The sites and rhythms of the development of early conflict photography are currently fixed in a narrative that places Crimea and the Civil War at its core. However, they are actually more diverse and chaotic than these milestones might suggest. There are scattered traces showing that amateur practitioners and soldiers were trying to record the shock of war or violent repressions and to experiment with new techniques and pictorial codes well outside of these canonical events. These attempts, which often had no lasting influence, may appear to be accidental outbreaks of imagery connected with organised violence. They do, however, indicate that the extra-European campaigns of colonial powers provided many opportunities to further emancipate the medium. This is illustrated by the account of an anonymous British photographer who travelled to Algeria in 1859.20 He was able to do something that would have been impossible, or very difficult, in the United Kingdom or France. He photographed two critical ‘colonial’ moments. The first was the execution by guillotine of the murderers of a French family. The daughter, who had been mutilated by the assailants, miraculously survived. The photographer prepared a highly sensitive collodion solution

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and built a homemade shutter. He hid under cover of darkness in a carefully chosen location not too far from the execution site. The next day he captured what he called ‘moving objects in transition’ (the detached head of the condemned) in six frames. A few days later, he joined a regiment of Spahis on their way to suppress an insurrection in Kabylia. On the eve of the battle, he selected a location overlooking the French troops and the mountain held by their adversaries. Hiding his tent behind branches, so as not to attract attention, he took several shots of the battle and developed them on the go with the help of an assistant. His account clearly demonstrates that being outside Europe facilitated such experiments in recording violence. Once again, these images have disappeared; however, this example illustrates how distance from the imperial metropolises and the colonial context, with its less stringent regulations and its recurring conflicts, favoured the technical and aesthetic emancipation of photographs of organised violence. British India, a subempire in itself, where new ideas and technologies were more easily put to use to support imperial control, also offered an advantageous terrain for inventive uses of the camera. John McCosh (1805–85), a surgeon in the Indian Army, had a camera with him at an early date, during the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–49) and the Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852–53).21 Another sign of this early adoption was that officers of the East India Company were trained in photography from the mid-1850s at the Addiscombe Military Seminary. Regiments operating in the Raj were faster to adopt the medium than continental troops.22 Corporal E. W. Jones, who was involved in the suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, took documentary shots of operations. He did not capture the battle itself or its aftermath; however, his photographs and those of others testify to a rapidly spreading use of photography by the military in India. There are much better-known examples of these experiments, such as the work of Felice Beato. He acted as a semi-official photographer to European troops during the Second Opium War in China (1856–60). In August 1860, he took several views of the Taku Fort after its capture by the French. Beato did not need to alter the scene this time around, as he had in India. A witness wrote: ‘Signor Beato was here in great excitement, characterising the group as “beautiful,” and begging that it might not be interfered with until perpetuated by his photographic apparatus, which was done a few minutes afterwards.’23 His views circulated widely enough, particularly among the officers involved in the campaign. Copies can be found in several major private collections. They were also exhibited in London in 1861. Engravings from Beato’s photographs illustrate Robert Swinhoe’s account of the conflict, among others.24 Significantly, his pictures only show Chinese corpses. Several other photographers covered the campaign in a more or less official capacity. John Ashton Papillon, a Royal Engineer, took dozens of shots, which were compiled in an album presented

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to the War Office.25 Antoine Fauchery, funded by the French Ministry of Public Instruction and the Moniteur Universel, also documented the campaign. But he died of illness before it was over, and his glass plates were forever lost. From the suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 to the Second Opium War in 1860, uses of the camera on non-European frontlines became more coherent.26 The work of Lieutenant Henry Senior (2nd Gurkhas), who took photographs of prisoners and military positions during the Ambeyla Campaign of 1863 (in the Khyber Pass area, present-day Pakistan), is another illustration of these experiments that are sometimes overlooked in histories of war photography.27 At the beginning of the American Civil War, a turning point in the history of war photography, capturing the battle in its most abrupt and immediate dimensions was still a fragmented project, pursued by photographers from diverse backgrounds. Techniques, topics, and commercial structures developed in a haphazard way. The idea of using photography to document critical phases of repression or combat was not completely new. However, the photographic coverage of the Civil War by Mathew Brady, and by the assistants he employed with the support of the Lincoln administration, exceeded in scope anything that had been done before. This documentation has been studied in depth, to the point that it is not necessary to detail how it forged a new ‘macabre iconography’ whose influence, crucial to the development of late nineteenth-century American visual culture, extended to Europe. A number of Britain-based journals specialising in photography have discussed the issue since 1864. British journalist George Augustus Sala (1828–95), who worked for The Illustrated London News, mentions at length Alexander Gardner’s photographs in his war diary (published in 1865).28 Charles Dickens brought back a ‘striking photograph of the Battle Fields of the Civil War’ from a trip to the United States, which he showed to Queen Victoria at her request.29 In France, Robert d’Orléans, Duc de Chartres (1840–1910) and Philippe d'Orléans (1838–94), aides-de-camp to General McClellan during the Civil War, were great collectors of photographs. They knew about the work of Brady’s team. Thousands of less prominent French individuals took part in the conflict and were also familiar with these developments. They cannot be disconnected from other terrains. The fact that visual archives for this period in the United States are well-structured and massively digitised, and that American academic writing on the history of photography tends towards exceptionalism, explains why the photographic coverage of the Civil War is generally isolated from other conflicts. However, it is actually marked by striking continuities. By the early 1860s, photography was playing a growing role in the mediatisation of war. The Second Prussian–Danish War (1864) led to the publication of a series of stereoscopic views entitled Theatre of War in Schleswig-Holstein, which were sold in Paris by Alexis Gaudin.30 Other conflicts outside Europe and America

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also provided opportunities for photography to get closer to mass armed violence. Javier López’s photographs of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70) are particularly striking in this regard. He was contracted by George Thomas Bate, who owned a studio in Montevideo, to go to the front in 1866, where he took graphic shots that were subsequently published and sold.31 As in the aforementioned Algerian example, geographical distance, which also translated into different moral conventions, made it possible to create more explicit photographs. Such images had limited reach beyond the first circles of their consumers: officers directly involved in the campaigns, the clientele of local studios, or the readers of a press that had no readership outside colonial societies. Several illustrations of these practices can be found within the British Empire. In New Zealand, the Māori Wars (1845–72) were partly captured through the lens. From the mid-1860s, local studios such as William J. Harding’s, as well as anonymous soldier-photographers, visually recorded the conflict.32 Early examples of group portraits of captured ‘rebels’, a particularly popular subgenre in the late nineteenth century, were made. Some were commissioned by local newspapers.33 Soldiers also kept photographic trophies of their adversaries. An 1871 print held by the University of Otago shows Captain Thomas Porter and a number of Ngāitai kūpapa (pro-British Government Māori auxiliaries) posing in front of the corpse of one of the followers of Te Kooti, their most formidable adversary.34 The photograph, sold by a local studio, provides an early example of the types of pictures whose existence depended on the specific violence of colonial contexts. Archival effects have masked other advances in the representation of human catastrophes. Alfred Sarrault’s photographs of the 1868 famine in Algeria offer an important illustration (Figure 3.3). His photographs were sold by Nadar in Paris, and engravings from the originals were published by L’Illustration in June 1868, in an early example of humanitarian photographic discourse.35 By the late 1860s, many subgenres related to distant suffering were coming into existence. These photographs were still characterised by visible continuities with the engraved and painted illustrations of war and violence that can be traced back to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.36 Their development proceeded in fits and starts, following a chronology and a geography that defy common assumptions in the history of photography. Weapons and cameras: first experiments While the conflicts of the 1850s and early 1860s were often covered by photographers with informal positions or, more rarely, by the first special correspondents employed by newspapers, innovative uses of the medium developed within the armies of the industrialised world. Once again, the French and British were among the first to consider the role of photography in this context. Some of the photographs taken

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Figure 3.3 Comparison of an original photograph by Alfred Sarrault and its engraved reproduction in L’Illustration. On the left, we see a shot by Alfred Sarrault, ‘Famine d’Algérie 1869’ (Algerian famine 1869), a photographic print (Société de géographie, SG WE 36) donated by Victor Largeau. The caption was added later, as shown by the inaccurate dating. On the right is an engraving of the photograph by Hippolyte C. Dutheil, ‘La famine en Algérie’ (The famine in Algeria), published in L’Illustration on 27 June 1868, p. 412. Note how faithfully the engraver reproduced the photograph, so as to be able to claim the truthfulness of the visual coverage.

during the Crimean War were compiled on the orders of Lord Panmure to be kept by the War Office as a documentary source.37 French officers compiled albums in a less formal way.38 The French Government nonetheless supported the work of JeanCharles Langlois and his assistant Léon Méhédin, who were charged with keeping faithful visual records of the war and its landscapes so that large panoramas could be painted for the Parisian boulevards. These were sporadic uses of a still minor tool. Military authorities were interested in photography but had no systematic procedures. They explored possibilities. There was, for example, a position entitled ‘military photographer’ at Woolwich from 1861.39 The first appointee was John Spiller, a chemist employed by the Royal Arsenal since 1856, who became head of the General Photographic Establishment created by the War Office, where he had trained artillery officers in photography in the late 1850s. Royal Engineers were also taught photography from the 1850s.40 Francis B. Head’s handbook

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for Royal Engineers included a substantial discussion of photography in its 1869 edition.41 In France, publications on the uses of photography multiplied in the 1860s as the field became slightly more structured.42 The two great photographic nations of the time observed each other via memos and reports. The evolution of their photographic norms was messy but linked. In France, the Dépôt de la Guerre (France’s military archives) put together a photographic workshop in 1859. Famed photographer Eugène Disdéri convinced the Minister of War to grant him the direction of a ‘photographic section in the army’ on 17 February 1861.43 He argued that ‘there must be many photographers [...] always ready to collect anything remarkable in the spectacles that attract the eye’.44 The ‘geodesy, topography, drawings, and engravings’ section of the Dépôt de la Guerre was given an additional task in 1863, that of ‘military photography’.45 On both sides of the Channel, photography was primarily employed as a supplement to mapping and mapmaking.46 However, the hope of a realistic recording of war was already looming on the horizon. As early as the 1860s, some expected soon to be able to see ‘the horrors of the battle-fields […] brought home to us’.47 By that time, it was fairly common for photographers to cover military campaigns. The technology was also used to illustrate manuals and books destined for the training of soldiers.48 One of the main military applications of the medium remained related to exploration and topography.49 James McDonald, a Royal Engineer who photographed Palestine as a member of the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem in 1864–65, offers an illustration of these uses.50 The acme of combat was not the main focus of these pioneering soldier-photographers. However, because of the increasing interest in photography, more and more cameras were being used by those who went off to explore, and sometimes conquer, faraway lands. This first period is one of trial and error, not of systematic organisation. The advocates of military photography were pioneers with diverse backgrounds. Many accomplished technical feats that had no lasting influence. For most high-ranking officers, the camera was a useful complement to other tools, little more. Certainly, photographic portraiture was particularly popular in military circles; however, notions that conflicts and military actions might be visualised differently in the long term only surfaced sporadically. Correspondents from ‘the seat of war’, who reported on expeditions, still favoured written accounts and drawings over photographs to depict combat and its consequences. For rank-and-file soldiers and low-ranking officers, meanwhile, cameras were simply too expensive. Many would visually record their memories in sketches and carefully preserve them in personal notebooks. Nevertheless, the visualisation of armed violence underwent noticeable evolutions as opportunistic amateurs, painter-photographers, soldiers, and photography’s first clientele became familiar with the camera’s potential. These evolutions found a coherent expression at the end of the 1860s.

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A visual and colonial turn (late 1860s–70s) As James R. Ryan has shown, it was not until 1868 that a military expedition was photographically documented in a self-conscious and systematic way.51 A precedent was then established that had a lasting influence. That year, British troops landed in Ethiopia to fight Emperor Tewodros II, who was holding several hostages in Magdala, his capital. These hostages were Protestant missionaries who had, somewhat unwisely, come to preach their gospel in this ancient Christian country. Their liberation became a matter of honour for the United Kingdom: the cost of the operation seems disproportionate given the stakes. For example, special train lines were built, at great expense, for logistics. The Ethiopian troops were crushed in April 1868, with Tewodros  II committing suicide immediately after his defeat. The commander of the campaign was Robert Napier, who had already participated in the Second Anglo-Chinese War, where he had met Felice Beato. Throughout the expedition, a well-equipped team of photographers attached to the 10th Sappers, led by John Harrold, covered the operations. Roderick Murchison, then President of the Royal Geographical Society, played a part in making sure the expedition would also be a scientific endeavour (and eventually an opportunity to collect objects and loot). The photographic initiative aimed not only at picturing the terrain for surveying and intelligence purposes but also at documenting military operations for posterity. These specialised officers took hundreds of negatives.52 Seventy-eight prints were selected shortly after the campaign ended to be compiled in an album, several copies of which were distributed to participants and members of the government.53 No one was able take a picture of Tewodros’ corpse, much to the disappointment of Napier, who had hoped to bring back a trophy in photographs. However, the emperor’s wife and their son, Alemayehu, were captured by the lens and their portraits added to the Royal Collection. There was still a seeming reluctance to publish an album consisting solely of photographs. The official album included both engravings and photographs (Figure 3.4). Was this a sign that the camera had not yet dethroned the pencil? Regardless, this visual compilation was an object of a new type, a true milestone in the history of early conflict photography. Several of the selected views display troops on the move, showing a tolerance for blur that is fairly unusual for the time. The album, in its very form, signals a shift toward a new and innovative photographic coverage of campaigns. The Illustrated London News published a volume of engravings inspired by the official photographs of the expedition.54 The visualisation of this campaign, shaped by the military itself, can therefore be considered a prototype that many British and French officers would have in mind in the following years. Such a groundbreaking combination of topographical and political uses of the camera attracted interest from outside the British Empire.55 Louis Armand d'Heudecourt, a French officer who had

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Figure 3.4 ‘Ascent of Djedda (sketched by Mr. Simpson)’ and ‘North scarp of Djedda,’ engraving and albumen print, 16 cm × 24 cm and 20 cm × 27 cm, respectively, in John Harrold et al., Photographs from Abyssinia, 1867–1868, by the Photographers of the 10th Company, Royal Engineers.

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met Robert Napier in China (1860), reported on the 1868 war, which he witnessed firsthand. He made sure to underline the significance of these new uses of photography to Marshal Niel, the French Minister of War and recipient of his memoranda.56 The military applications of photography were not immediately obvious to every French officer, yet its capacity to enhance narratives of war did not go unnoticed. This issue became prominent during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. The Prussian Army had a small, ad hoc photographic section for covering operations,57 and the pictures taken by these photographers were published in various formats in both Germany and Alsace-Lorraine in the months following the conflict.58 The consequences of the bombardment of Strasbourg were particularly well recorded. For the French, the iconography of the defeat  – and of the Paris Commune  – was difficult to cope with. L’Énigme, painted by Gustave Doré in 1871, painfully exemplifies this.59 New uses of photography were also developed during the war. Microphotography was used to send messages by pigeon post. Photographs recorded some of the atrocities committed by Prussian soldiers. The remains of a noncommissioned officer who had been taken prisoner and then burned alive near the castle of Pouilly (Burgundy) were photographed and attached to a report. The image became an icon of Prussian brutality in the 1870s and beyond.60 Not only did photography document the conflict, but the presence of cameras and transportable studios made it a more familiar presence on the frontline. While lithography still held sway in war depictions, the optics of photography began to modify the ways in which destruction was envisioned.61 The conflict exposed numerous shortcomings, primarily from the standpoint of the French military authorities, who had miserably failed in their task. However, the British closely observed the crucial role Prussian intelligence had played in the war. As a consequence, a wave of reforms to the French and British topographic sections gave new technologies such as photography a more prominent place than before. Charles Wilson founded the Intelligence Branch of the British War Office in 1871. He emphasised the importance of using photography in this newly created institution, not only for topographical purposes or for the photocopying of documents but also to start compiling a visual register of colonies and foreign countries. The situation was slightly different in France, where contemporary publications still doubted the medium’s usefulness to the military.62 Experiments were apparently more easily carried out in Great Britain and British India than in France in the early 1870s. Much remains to be discovered, nonetheless. It appears, for instance, that Claudius Portier, a photographer based in Algiers, photographed the 1871 insurrection in Kabylia with the authorisation of French military authorities.63 The rates of adoption of the medium might have differed from one industrialised country to the next, but the combination of three main factors contributed to the development of shared visual constructions of colonial expansion in photographs.

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First, the very nature of imperialism visibly evolved in the 1870s. Although the details of this chronology are debatable, British foreign policy was characterised by an increasing level of global interventionism. This was the advent of a ‘new imperialism.’ In France, the humiliating defeat of 1871, as well as the slow consolidation of the Republic, changed the framework within which national destiny was shaped and formulated. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu’s De la Colonisation chez les peuples modernes (On colonisation among modern peoples) is one of the many symptoms of this new way of understanding France’s position in the world.64 After years of limited foreign interventions, operations of conquest and ‘pacification’ in Asia and Africa multiplied as a consequence of rivalries between the great powers and the development of new geopolitical orientations. Faraway wars and colonial expeditions became recurrent topics in the news. The second factor lies in the technological changes that deeply transformed photographic practices in the 1870s. Gelatin dry plate negatives gradually replaced the wet collodion technique, which required complicated preparations and burdensome equipment. The two processes coexisted for a time before the production of dry plates was fully industrialised, making older techniques obsolete. In France, the Lumière brothers sold fifteen million of their ‘blue label’ plates in the 1880s. Technological advances also affected the camera itself. Lighter and more efficient mechanisms made it possible to shoot at shutter speeds on the order of 1/60th of a second. Guillotine or focal-plane shutters eventually helped conquer instantaneity.65 This had far-reaching consequences. The few obstacles that had made photography a less viable record of distant expeditions than sketches and drawings were gradually removed. The evolution of the press and printing techniques is the last factor to be considered here. The demand for realistic takes of events, supported by both cultural and technological changes, furthered the omnipresence of photography. In this nascent economy of photographic news, cameras reached the most inaccessible edges of imperial expansion. Colonial enthusiasts had a complicated relationship with public opinion in the imperial metropolises. They nonetheless had every interest in controlling the narratives of their ventures. By the 1870s, most imperial expeditions in Africa and Asia were photographically documented. The Anglo-Ashanti War of 1873–74, mostly known through Melton Prior’s illustrations for The Illustrated London News, was photographed, even though it is difficult to assess exactly how and under whose authority the photographs were taken.66 John Burke famously photographed the Second AngloAfghan War (1878–82).67 A commercial photographer with a military background, he joined the marching troops in an informal position. His views were heavily influenced by the pictorial conventions of earlier engravings and paintings such as James Rattray’s depictions of the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–42).68 Although Burke’s work did not mark a notable aesthetic breakthrough, it was used as a means of visual

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communication by military authorities. Officers from the Bengal Miners and Sappers, trained in photography, were also tasked with photographing Kabul and its fortifications. Their innovative pictures remained partly confidential.69 These experiments in Afghanistan did not go unnoticed in France, where Elisée Reclus used some of Burke’s views to illustrate his famous Géographie universelle (Universal geography).70 There were real commercial opportunities for adventurous professional photographers such as Burke. Their first clients were the soldiers and officers who took part in the campaigns. By the 1870s, many wanted more than traditional portrait and landscape photography. James Lloyd, who had a studio in Durban (South Africa), rushed to the front of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 to cover the conflict.71 He was joined by several colleagues, including George Ferneyhough, who photographed the burning of King Cetshwayo kaMpande’s capital, Ulundi, on 4 July 1879.72 The major sites of the war, including that of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift (22–23 January 1879), were photographed after the combat. Officers such as Colonel Hume and Major Froom (94th Regiment of Foot) bought albums compiling the various prints on offer (Figure 3.5).73 The French seem to have followed the same practices during the conquest of Tunisia  in 1881. Once again, records are far from satisfactory, but at least one photographer – likely Jean Geiser (1848–1923), who had his studio in Algiers – was embedded with French troops to photograph key moments, including the capture of Kef in the spring of 1881, with the agreement of military commanders.74 The same year, an insurrection south of Oran was also photographed by the expedition’s surgeon.75 Engravings from photographs were sometimes published by Paris-based newspapers; however, soldiers were the primary customers at this point. As a short piece in L’Amateur photographe pointed out in 1889: ‘officers are authorised to buy these views after each campaign, the large number of sold pictures reflects their interest’.76 Many views were taken during the Egyptian Expedition of 1882. This expedition saw the British defeat of Ahmed Urabi, the leader of a nationalist movement that threatened the authority of the Khedive, the sovereign of Egypt and an ally of European powers anxious to protect the Suez Canal. Luigi Fiorillo, whose studio was in Alexandria, photographed the city being bombed by the British fleet at the opening of the campaign. The event received unprecedented exposure in Europe. Naval connections made it possible to send images to the metropolitan press in a few days. Magic lantern views of the attack, with explosion effects made possible by the superimposition of dissolving plates, were offered for sale at the time, and some out-of-frame images began to appear in the albums of officers and regiments. A photographer, likely Hippolyte Arnoux, whose studio was in Port Said, toured the battlefield of Tel el-Kebir in mid-September 1882, shortly after a British charge had

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Figure 3.5 James Lloyd, ‘Zulu remains on Gingilivo battlefield’, 1879, albumen print, 21 cm × 12.3 cm, view no. 29 of George Froom’s album (Major, 94th Regiment of Foot). The arrangement of Froom’s album is telling. This photograph, showing the remains of Zulu soldiers, was mounted between a view of a cemetery where some of the British killed in the campaign were buried and another of the site where Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1856–79) was buried. The Imperial Prince joined British troops in this conflict, where he was killed while scouting an area. The album also includes a fake photograph of a dead Zulu (‘Dead Zulu near Prince Imperial’). The death of a European aristocrat on an African battlefield was not an ideal twist for a narrative of colonial conquest: the photograph rights the wrong by staging the death of one of the attackers shot by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in his final act of bravery. These bleached bones, which were photographed long after the battle, play a similar role. The photograph also testifies to the existence of a macabre form of tourism at the sites of British battles against the Zulus. The sight of unburied human remains seems to have attracted some interest. David Bruce (Royal Army Medical Corps), who had come to South Africa to study the sleeping sickness, took a snapshot of the hill where King Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo was defeated. Much like this reproduction, his view of the site of the Battle of Tshaneni (June 1884) shows an abundance of human remains.77

left nearly 2,000 Egyptians dead on the ground. He sold several views taken after the battle. The decomposing corpse of an Egyptian soldier is shown in the foreground of one of them. These images had a commercial fate. John Downes Rochfort (1826–85), who collected war photographs for himself, included one of these prints in his collections. Herbert Conyers Surtees, who took part in the 1882 intervention in Egypt, also bought a copy for his personal album. A first threshold seems to have been crossed in the early 1880s. The relationship that saw photography initially imitate engravings

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and paintings seemed to find another balance. Operators, especially those with a commercial interest in taking pictures, anticipated a demand for more realistic and morbid imagery. The defeat of the enemy and his subjection in non-European wars were assets in this respect. The trends already observed in New Zealand in the 1860s were confirmed. These developments did not occur randomly. French and British military men travelled across empires. Long careers led many of them to take part in numerous operations around the world. Too narrow a focus on separated conflicts and isolated colonial terrains poses the risk of overlooking their trajectories and how they connect visual histories. Robert Napier, a promoter of photography during the Abyssinian Expedition in 1868, had met with John McCosh – a pioneer photographer – during the Second Anglo-Sikh War in 1848–49. He had his portrait taken by Felice during the Second Opium War in China (1856–60). Napier alone offers a striking illustration of the informal networks that connect the scattered traces of an early demand for the photographic coverage of war between the late 1840s and the 1870s. The same applies to the French, even though photographic experiments in ‘faraway’ wars were more audacious on the British side until the 1880s, and more precisely in British India, where at least one photographer  – often one of the expedition’s surgeons  – would semi-officially record events with a camera. This was the case during the Gilgit Campaign (north of present-day Pakistan) in 1885.78 This specific expertise in the Raj was materialised by the publication of several memos and works in favour of a wider adoption of photography by the military.79 More systematic uses of the medium in connection with armed colonial expansion took shape during the French conquest of Tonkin from 1883 to 1885. One of the most interesting photographers in this regard is Charles-Édouard Hocquard (1853–1911), a military doctor who joined the expeditionary corps in 1883 with his camera. His role as a photographer was informal, even if some high-ranking officers seemed to have supported the endeavour. Hocquard was assigned to the ambulances, from which standpoint he was able to see the battlefield ‘as if at a show’.80 Did he seize this opportunity to photograph combat? The set of pictures he published sometime after the campaign confirms this hypothesis. Most are the expected picturesque and ethnographic views, but some display unfiltered perspectives of the expedition. A view of the Battle of Kỳ Lừa (28 March 1885), where the French were able to block a Chinese counteroffensive, was visibly taken in the heat of the moment.81 A photograph of the Battle of Sontay (December 1883) is another attempt to capture the immediacy of events (Figure 3.6). Revealingly, this blurry photograph was a failure by the standards of the time, but it immerses the viewer in the chaos of the battlefield and was printed and sold as part of a popular photographic book edited by Henry Cremnitz. The publication was officially authorised by General de Négrier, even though some of the

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Figure 3.6 Édouard Hocquard, ‘Abords de Sontay le soir de la prise (Approaches to Sontay on the evening of the taking)’, Woodburytype, 10 cm × 16 cm, in E. Hocquard, Le Tonkin, vues photographiques prises par M. le Dr Hocquard, médecin-major (The Tonkin Campaign, photographic views taken by Mr. Dr Hocquard, medical officer) (Henry Cremnitz, Paris: 1886), plate no. 115. This photograph shows the photographer’s desire to experiment with the limits of his equipment. Hocquard photographed this post-battle scene late in the afternoon, under adverse conditions. For decades, war in photographs was necessarily a daytime event. The first snapshots of night combat were made during the First World War, thanks to the use of flash photography.

commanders did not appreciate the initiative. This means that Édouard Hocquard used his camera to cover the battle more directly than was customary at the time, and that this example of visual modernity crossed the threshold of publishing and military censorship. The blur, for once, seems to be a guarantee of verisimilitude – a sign that the camera has come close to the immediacy of the battle. Hocquard’s work includes several other unconventionally graphic shots. His February 1885 view of Lạng Sơn’s road – the site of a brutal battle against the Chinese – displays several enemy corpses lying on the battlefield.82 The doctor-photographer also seized an opportunity to photograph an execution by beheading, almost frame by frame. This series spoke to broader trends and European stereotypes. The Asiatic execution subgenre became popular in the decades that followed. Written accounts, sketches, and engravings were still the preferred modes of visualisation for the Tonkin Campaign; however, Hocquard’s photographic coverage indicates changes in the picturing of war and violence in colonial contexts. A selection of his photographs

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was published in 1886 as lavish Woodburytypes, an expensive but accurate photomechanical process developed by Walter Bentley Woodbury in 1864. The choice of this particular printing technique is itself indicative of the exchange value assigned to photographic communication by Hocquard and some of his commanders.83 This was a dual shift: both in aesthetics and techniques. A precedent, which might have been an echo of earlier British uses of photography at war, was set. More and more photographers started to send their pictures to newspapers in France and Britain. It soon became clear that the photographic coverage of colonial campaigns could help shape them into positive media events, in a context where public support for widespread imperial expansion was far from assured. L'Univers illustré, a major French periodical at the time, published a full page of engravings illustrating the capture of Sơn Tây (16–18 December 1883).84 The editors made sure to emphasise in the caption that these had been made ‘according to the official photographs of the Navy’. Hocquard’s photographs were therefore officially distributed in Paris a few months – if not weeks – after the battle to help visualise operations that were still in progress. Following Théophile Pennequin’s example, many of those involved in the colonisation of the Indochinese Peninsula adopted the medium.85 When some of them left Asia in the 1890s for other terrains, such as Madagascar and West Africa, these colonial photographic practices rapidly spread throughout the French Empire. By the 1880s, photography was no longer an interesting but trivial accessory. It was a familiar presence at the sites of colonial expansion and exploration. A new visual economy was in the making, as an era of photographic profusion began. Pictures of the violence that enveloped imperial conquests in the late nineteenth century are but one facet of this transformation. They nonetheless quickly participated in redefining what was visually unbearable. Thresholds There was a first warning in 1886 for photographers who considered colonial terrains as sites of unfettered experimentation. It was described as an isolated anomaly at the time; however, it actually signalled a redefinition of the thresholds of tolerance for graphic imagery. Yet, what amounted to a photographic scandal to European eyes was more broadly symptomatic of the ubiquitous racialised violence that characterised late nineteenth-century colonial empires.86 The main culprit was an Indian Army officer named Willoughby Wallace Hooper (1837–1912). Heir to years of development of photography within the army, he had made ethnographic views for The People of India in his youth. He shamelessly and opportunistically sold several shocking photographs of the victims of the Madras famine (1876–79) through various circuits in India and the United Kingdom. The line between his commercial photography and his position

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as a military officer was apparently always a thin one. While participating in the Third Anglo-Burmese War (1885–86), Hooper decided to experiment with instant photography, which was no longer unattainable by the 1880s, to capture the crucial moment of an execution. As Provost Marshal, he was in a privileged position to capture death on a photographic plate.87 In January 1886, Hooper supervised the execution of several dacoits – a phrase derived from Hindi used by the British in Burma to categorise local resistance fighters as bandits. He ordered the firing squad to pause for several minutes, until he was fully ready to photograph the moment the bullets struck their chests (Figure 3.7). The self-confident officer-photographer had no qualms about taking these photographs; this was probably not a first for him. This time though, someone from the audience took exception. Mr Colbeck, a member of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, was revolted by the proceedings and decided to publicly denounce Hooper’s behaviour. And with that, the very same technological modernity that had pushed Hooper to the limits of photography turned against him. News of his actions reached England in a matter of days, thanks to a telegraph line between Burma and London. The London Times published a damning article,88 and on 22 January a debate took place in the Commons.89 Condemnations poured in from all sides. For one of the first times, Hooper’s photographs had revealed a great danger of photography: its ability to

Figure 3.7 Willoughby Wallace Hooper, ‘Execution at Mandalay,’ print from a glass plate negative, 15 January 1886, 15 cm × 10 cm.

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create public outrage. Frederick Temple Blackwood (Lord Dufferin and then Viceroy of India) feared that ‘public opinion’ in British India would turn against British rule.90 Hooper was tried by a Court of Enquiry under a special jurisdiction, but in the end he was let off with a simple reprimand, not because of the photographs in and of themselves, but for having unjustifiably kept the convicts waiting.91 Grattan Geary, who authored a book on the conflict in 1886, pointed to a revealing paradox when he wrote: ‘the photographing of the men shot at Mandalay under the circumstances mentioned was undoubtedly reprehensible […] but it is open to doubt whether there is not something very pharisaical in the spirit which revolts at the operation of photographing a batch of men at the moment of their execution, when their execution in batches is accepted as an ordinary incident in the subjugation of a conquered people.’92 Despite the enquiry, Willoughby Wallace Hooper did not lose his commercial touch. He swiftly published 100 views to illustrate the campaign, some of which were sold as magic lantern plates from 1887.93 The atrocious pictures of the execution that disgraced him were not part of the set, but some views, including those showing the capture of the Mindlah Fort in November 1885, still offered a graphic take on colonial campaigns.94 Hooper’s case illustrates the specificities of photographic practices in colonial contexts. It raised legal, political, and mediatic issues for the first time. It demonstrated how problematic the absence of clearly defined boundaries between soldiering and photographing and between amateurs and professionals could be. Professional photographers and correspondents could also step outside of their assigned roles to fight on the battlefield. Hooper took full advantage of this situation. At the same time, photography supported a multitude of compartmentalised narratives, some circulating within the soldiers’ interpersonal networks, others in the larger circles of emerging colonial societies. A few problematic images could be transferred from one sphere to another and exposed to wider audiences in imperial metropolises that could more easily be outraged. Hooper’s execution photographs revealed the existence of this chamber of mirrors at precisely the moment when the nationalist movement was beginning to take shape in India. Other spectators were joining in, and photographic acts as well as their meanings could shift radically. Hooper’s trajectory was not overlooked in France. Joseph Chailley-Bert, who kept a watchful eye on British colonisation, was aware of the scandal. He wrote about it in scathing terms in 1891.95 Hooper’s execution photographs are expressions of the culmination of a process, one that saw conflict photography in the broad sense consolidate as a visual repertoire from the 1850s to the 1880s. Technological advances, many of which were tested in colonial terrains, made it possible to capture bursts of violence that were coterminous with European imperial expansion. Revealingly, Hooper did

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not foresee the scandalous potential of his photographic attempts. The sensation came as a surprise, because he did not anticipate that Europeans in Mandalay would denounce him. He was not an idiot; this had simply been his experience in the local colonial society that was emerging in the wake of British involvement in the area. Taking photographs of convicts or of spectacular physical punishments seemed relatively common in this time and place. For example, the anonymous album of an Englishman who was in Burma in the mid-1880s includes a portrait of so-called rebels shortly before their execution. The caption reads: ‘My boys. Nice looking lot are they not? All hanged.’96 Another scene, showing the flogging of naked locals by the British, ended up in the collection of Tim Davies, a military doctor who was involved in the Anglo-Burmese War.97 The very same images, viewed from the imperial metropolises, were suddenly unacceptable. Photographs could transform into stigma. This ambivalent spectatorship testifies in its own right to the juxtaposition of radically different moralities within the European empires. Following the Berlin Conference (1884–85), the 1890s witnessed an unprecedented acceleration of imperial expansion, as well as a multiplication of armed conflicts in Asia and Africa. As this chapter has demonstrated, new visual economies of organised violence emerged well before this peak period of colonisation. From the 1850s onwards, a plethora of photographers, working in British India, China, Abyssinia, and Tonkin, redefined how pain was pictured. It is important to emphasise that this occurred in Asia, Africa, and South America, rather than in the United States during the Civil War or in 1870–71 France. Occasional occurrences of graphic images, some of which had little to no lasting influence, suggest that part of the history of early conflict photography needs to be revised in light of what happened in ‘distant’ wars. Colonial contexts provided unparalleled opportunities for picturing constrained bodies and inflicted suffering. The specificity of violence in a colonial situation is reflected in their photographic coverage. A new repertoire emerged. In particular, it is the representation of bodies that distinguishes the organised violence of the interstate conflicts of the late nineteenth century from that linked to colonial expansion. While the dead of the American Civil War are typically used as an example of the horrors of war, and those of the Crimean War are only suggested, what characterises photographs of imperial conflicts from the 1870s and 1880s is humiliation. Another notable difference is that classical conflicts have the characteristic of ending in peace, while many colonial conflicts were marked by recurrent uprisings and postwar phases in which rituals of submission and example-setting executions were commonplace. Their respective images bear witness to this in different forms. These particularities echo several characteristics of colonial situations at the end of the century. For example, the mechanisms for differentiating between populations are more powerful in the European empires of the late nineteenth century than in their earlier forms. A

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more intense militarism, fostered by the overwhelming dominance of the armaments of industrialised countries at the time, made war and repression common tools of governance. Colonial conflict is not easily accommodated in the traditional frameworks of war and policing developed by Westerners. It escapes traditional frameworks because it is rarely interstate in a strict sense. It involves irregular actors in the eyes of Europeans. European powers did not hesitate to use nonstate agents, whether private militias, as in the future state of Rhodesia, or local auxiliaries. In this confusion, violence and its imagery moved in new directions.

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4 Conflicts in the lens: from the 1890s to the First World War ‘The real painter of war today, the fiercest and truest, is Kodak.’ Jules Claretie, ‘Le triomphe de Callot’, Le Figaro, 2 April, 19051

Émile-Louis Abbat (1867–1916) is almost nonexistent in the French colonial archives. He is not a well-known figure of French expansion in Africa, nor are his photographs exceptional from a technical or aesthetic point of view. Yet the photographs he took between 1894 and 1898 in West Africa signal a turning point. In the early winter of 1897, he travelled south of the city of Ouagadougou to fight the supporters of Boukary Koutou, the former king of the Mossi people. The sovereign had been overthrown a few months earlier by Paul Voulet (1866–99), an officer best known today for the part he would play two years later in one of the bloodiest episodes in French colonial history.2 The fallen monarch led a guerrilla war, relying on former loyalists. In response, the French sent local troops to ‘pacify’ what is now southern Burkina Faso. This operation was not a war per se. Only sparse mentions can be found of the campaign. It does, however, provide an example of the blurred line between the periods before and after a conquest. It took months, if not years, for the French-led auxiliaries to subdue the regions faithful to the former king. Abbat’s photograph of the burning village does not depict shocking violence; however, there is evidence of brutality (Figure 4.1). Confronted with elusive guerrilla forces, the French-led troops practised a scorched-earth policy in several of the regions suspected of supporting the rebellion. As Abbat himself stated: ‘No village was safe from punishment [...] I had people say everywhere that, if there were delays in their surrender, we would return to cut the millet when it was almost ripe, thereby forcing the dissidents to submit by starvation since it was impossible to reach them otherwise.’3 Months of food supplies went up in smoke in the blaze pictured in the photograph. Famine was often used as a weapon by French and British troops in Africa. Voulet repeatedly applied this technique and threatened disobedient villages with a similar fate in the same area Abbat was patrolling. It is impossible to say how many people were displaced and killed by the destruction of these villages as a result of

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Figure 4.1 Émile-Louis Abbat, ‘At halt during the burning of the village of Kalagaga’, 15 November 1897, gelatin silver print from a glass negative, 7 cm × 10.8 cm. This photograph, clumsily framed and out of focus, shows a burning village in the background. The picture expresses a form of aesthetic awkwardness, giving it a suggestion of visual modernity. Locally recruited troops appear in the foreground. The photographer is one of the few European soldiers to actually participate in the expedition he commanded. This image also provides documentation of the French colonial conquest as it was intertwined with intra-African conflicts and violence.

the loss of their granaries, but the toll was undoubtedly high. This image was a way for Émile-Louis Abbat to retain a visual record of these operations. It was never published. It circulated among his inner circle, that of his comrades in arms and his relatives in France. But while the shot did not receive much exposure, it embodies a broader shift. Whether the work of amateurs or professionals, widely printed or retained within a small family network, such photography was reaching the most inaccessible edges of colonial expansion and documenting them with unusual visual crudeness. Abbat was not particularly well off, nor was he trained in photography. He nevertheless decided to practise the medium as soon as he arrived in Africa. In June 1894, he asked a friend of the family who had remained in France to send him some equipment, ‘a small device’.4 He received an 8 × 9-format camera, the lightest model available at the time. It was most likely the ‘Photosphere’ model produced by the French Photography Company (Compagnie Française de Photographie), a

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camera that was popular with colonial photographers because it was made entirely of metal and was resistant to humidity and heat. Its small gelatin-bromide plates were capable of capturing movement at approximately 1/60th of a second. Placed in a case with several glass plate negatives, this device was no larger than a modern digital single-lens reflex camera. It could be taken anywhere. At first, Abbat sent his plates back to France for development, but later he was joined by another photography enthusiast who had portable development equipment.5 He bought a new camera in 1897. As an amateur photographer, Abbat extensively recorded his time in Africa, producing more than 400 negatives that he annotated and carefully stored after returning to France.6 His pictures often fit into the aesthetic of the democratising photography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They mimic the pseudo-ethnographic views and landscapes of previous decades. Abbat chose to depict his modest hut, his hunting trophies, and the people he met during his travels. But he also kept visual records of his military expeditions and of the often less-visible aspects of the colonial experience.7 Cameras were beginning to replace older ways of registering experiences, from sketches to written notes. They became so portable and easy to use that even a low-ranking officer like Abbat could use one on a regular basis. A colonial soldier like him could describe his own conquest in pictures, send his negatives to his family, or even discreetly sell prints. And soldiers were not the only ones to wield these photographic devices, which were becoming lighter as manufacturers invented ever more practical models. The change was obvious and far-reaching at the end of the nineteenth century. Explorers, journalists, missionaries, and tourists could all lay claim to this technology. The Lumière brothers and George Eastman sold several million negatives each year. There was a seemingly endless expansion of photographic material. The initial technical difficulties faded away. A regime of visual production took hold that allowed the recording and staging of conflicts in an unparalleled way, at the risk of a loss of control over the narrative of the conquest by military and civilian authorities. This chapter begins by examining the central role played by the photographers involved in operations of exploration and conquest in the development of the medium. Soldiers, military attachés, and journalists all explored new uses of photography. They also improved photographic processes and equipment in order to adapt the medium to new terrains. The evolution of photography was determined in part at the locations of colonial expansion. After this first thematic section, two distinct periods are explored to refine the analysis on a chronological basis. The first corresponds to the 1890s. Soldier-photographers, journalists who dressed and acted like combatants, military attachés, and local opportunists built a visual system that redefined the status of recorded and depicted violence. A movement towards immediacy, realism, and

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more explicit images was accentuated in a colonial sphere that was still unregulated as far as legal, aesthetic, and commercial norms were concerned. These developments were neither linear nor inevitable. Univocal and deterministic interpretations should be avoided. Unexpected images, breaking with established codes and traditional visibilities, appeared without generating any echoes. Other images, equally dissonant with pictorial conventions and equally isolated, seem on the contrary to have achieved influence and posterity. These nebulous changes did not go unnoticed at the time. Authorities started to discuss photographic censorship, starting with the campaign against the Mahdists in Sudan in 1898 and then more markedly during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa. Military commanders and governments began to grasp the ambivalent potential of photography in a context where the first colonial scandals fuelled by images were beginning to make headlines. Photographs of organised violence were reaching a first stage of economic and technical maturity. Genres and repertoires that fed metropolitan publications were taking hold. The shocking and brutal were becoming media objects, triggering the first debates centred on violence in images. In short, it is the very chronology of the articulation between photography and organised violence that is re-examined here. In the 1900s, the photographic company Comptoir Photographique Colonial, located in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, focused their advertising on the reliability of their products, which were intended specifically for overseas travellers (Figure 4.2). Their key selling point – products that could withstand remote expeditions must be of superior quality – was regularly used by French and British traders to promote all sorts of items. Some firms even practised an archaic form of product placement by sponsoring expeditions. For example, the French Photography Company focused attention on its latest model, the Photosphere, by providing equipment to the expedition of Captain Binger, who explored Africa from Niger to the Gulf of Guinea in the late 1880s.8 The colonial label was indeed a guarantee of sturdiness, even if customers might sometimes be deceived by unscrupulous salespeople. Field tests in desert or tropical environments were necessarily demanding for photographic equipment. In a few years, a large market developed in the wake of innovations made by several firms, including Kodak. The decreasing costs of devices and negatives and progress in the portability of photographic equipment led to soldiers fighting ‘distant wars’ and colonists far from the imperial metropolis becoming a distinct clientele. Their correspondence and links with the metropolis incorporated photographic prints with ever greater frequency, as images were provided to supplement the written word. The price of a Richard Verascope was approximately 175 francs in 1903 (roughly equivalent to 600 euros in the 2010s). This was equal to the entire bonus offered to former soldiers re-enlisting in the French colonial army as noncommissioned officers at that time. But this was

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Figure 4.2 Advertisement for the photographic company Comptoir photographique colonial, La Dépêche coloniale illustrée, 15 June 1907, 150.

high-end equipment. Simpler devices were offered for less than 30 francs in the 1900s, and glass plate negatives were sold for 2 francs a dozen. The Kodak Brownie cost only 5 shillings in 1900, and its six-frame film cost 2 pennies. From the early 1890s, the cost of photography fell rapidly, and by the turn of the twentieth century the technology was within the reach of most British and French colonial noncommissioned officers. Caught up in a frenzy of photography, some colonials took thousands of images for their personal collections. Manufacturers could not ignore this market. One of the most ‘tropicalised’ devices of the late nineteenth century was an aluminum model produced by the French firm Hanau. It was called the ‘Marsouin’ (porpoise), the nickname given to the French marine infantry regiments who made up the bulk of the colonial troops at that time. It was easy to handle and could be preloaded with eighteen stereoscopic plates. The logistical and climatic constraints encountered by photographic operators during their expeditions or while on military operations led to a multitude of small technical advances. As we have seen, practitioners who were closely and/or indirectly attached to the army, and were therefore placed on the front lines of colonial expansion, were among the most active in solving technical difficulties. This movement gained momentum at the turn of the century.

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There was a distinct photographic culture among those enlisted in Africa or Asia, as an article from 1908 notes: ‘[French] colonial infantry officers encourage their men (especially their re-enlisted soldiers) to become photographers as much as possible.’9 Several publications in France testify to the dynamism of ‘colonial’ soldiers in terms of their photographic innovations, even if the circulation of such publications remained limited.10 Alexandre Le Mée’s La Photographie dans la navigation et aux colonies (Photography in navigation and in the colonies), published in 1902, or Edgar Imbert and Maurice Poincet’s La Photographie en France et dans les pays chauds (Photography in France and in hot countries), published in 1908, exemplify works built on first-hand experience. In both books, practical issues are addressed with great precision, from image formats to detailed chemical compounds adapted to extreme environments. The Revue illustrée de photographie (Illustrated photography review) and many other specialist publications devoted pages to the specifics of what is sometimes called ‘colonial photography.’11 On the British side, publications such as the Journal of the Royal United Institute also examined the use of photography in the field.12 This topic was further addressed by a multitude of journals devoted to amateur photography. Whether through military expeditions, explorations, or the first photographic safaris, terrains of colonial expansion offered multiple opportunities to test the limits of photographic equipment. Revealingly, many of the soldier-photographers of the time were also members of learned societies promoting the medium. Some donated their photographs to the Société de Géographie in Paris or the Royal Geographical Society in London, where members could even train in photography with John Thomson (1837–1921) from 1886.13 These associations, operating on the edges of the official spheres of the army and government, organised the collection of topographic and photographic data and helped standardise practices.14 It is fairly obvious that a good number of the photographers situated closest to colonial conflicts and the tragedies that surrounded them were soldiers. They were the ones who experimented, often anonymously, with stylistic conventions and technical innovations. A cluster of converging evidence appears to indicate that this trend, already visible in the 1860s and 1870s, continued after 1890. The links between photography and the army became increasingly structured, even though no official photographic sections as such were established in France or Britain prior to the 1910s. In individual files of noncommissioned officers, some superiors in the French Army would even note if a soldier was a ‘good photographer’.15 Authorisation was also granted to officers to become members of local or national photographic societies, which facilitated the first indirect institutionalisation of photographic practices in the armed forces.16 Individual initiatives in this area were also encouraged among the British. Royal Engineer Charles Foulkes (1875–1969) was first stationed in Sierra Leone (1897–99). He then participated in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), where he

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headed a photographic division. He publicised his work in The Windsor Magazine, in features such as a 1907 article entitled ‘Photography in Military Reconnaissance’.17 His was not an isolated case. At that time, several British military engineers claimed the title ‘Sergeants of Photography’.18 Special carts, containing all the required photographic material, could be brought to the front line if necessary.19 Foulkes modernised this system during the Second Boer War, inventing an apparatus that could easily be transported on horseback or by bicycle. With this new, extremely mobile photographic system, he travelled the front line for months and took dozens of shots. Some of these were taken in front of the Boers’ combat position, using a telephoto lens.20 And such innovation was not limited to the French or British. The Japanese armed forces institutionalised the official photographic coverage of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), and an almost fully developed photographic section accompanied the Italian troops invading Libya in 1911. Armies observed each other and ordered reports on the formation of photographic divisions in foreign armed forces. Warfare outside of Europe also provided opportunities in which one could hone battlefield shooting techniques from innovative angles. The so-called Boxer War, for example, gave French military engineers (Génie du Corps expéditionnaire) the opportunity to experiment with aerial photography. In a pioneering experiment, they photographed Tianjin from balloons following the French offensive.21 Ever-multiplying individual uses of photography therefore coexisted with official uses within the armed forces. The medium became more familiar and more commonplace. Photographic illustrations began to be included in written documents and publications.22 It was now not uncommon to see officers pasting their own snapshots into end-of-mission reports.23 Military attachés  – officers of a foreign army allowed to observe operations – were a familiar sight at the beginning of the twentieth century. Armed with a Kodak or a Richard Verascope, they filled their memos with photographs that sometimes amounted to outright espionage.24 As seen in the previous chapter, medical officers were also keen to record their campaigns with the camera, taking advantage of their privileged position. A range of more or less experienced photographers participated in modifying the visual vocabulary of war.25 The work of Albert d’Amade (1856–1941), a military attaché in China from 1887 to 1891 and then in London from 1899, was particularly innovative in this regard. D’Amade secretly used photography to draw plans of Chinese fortifications to prepare for potential operations. He also took many pictures while attached to the British Army headquarters in Transvaal starting in 1900. He photographed actual live combat at that time.26 Soldier-photographers involved in imperial campaigns played a fundamental role in the transformation of photographic techniques and aesthetics. They invented

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new ways of visualising organised violence, both in its most obvious forms on the battlefield and in its less spectacular aspects during campaigns of colonial repression. This shift was facilitated by the very nature of what was being photographed. This is an essential point for understanding how representations of war were modified long before the First World War, which is often taken as a visual turning point. What the agents of colonial expansion saw through the lens were new modes of warfare. Colonial conflicts were testing grounds, not just in terms of visual discourses but also in terms of methods of destruction. The combination of this dual shift favoured the creation of images that are unique in their form and content. The catalogue of weapons that transformed the face of war at the end of the nineteenth century is a long one. The rapid-fire Maxim machinegun, developed in the late 1880s, is high on the list. Its devastating effects were demonstrated at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898, where more than 10,000 Mahdist soldiers were killed, 4,000 of them in the first hour of the battle. The war against the Mahdist state also offered the opportunity to test the effect of Lyddite shells, made of pressed and cast picric acid, fired by the new BL 5-inch howitzer. The tomb of Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abd Allah (1844–85) was used as a convenient target during the capture of Khartoum. Journalists and officers photographically recorded the destruction with fascination, sometimes at great physical risk: Hubert Howard, a correspondent and photographer for the New York Herald and the London Times, was hit and killed by shrapnel. This new smokeless compound had an impressive explosive capability. It was the first of a new generation of ammunition that would later ravage the battlefields of the First World War. The French adopted this technology in the form of Melinite, a close cousin to Lyddite, invented by Eugène Turpin, a chemist based in Colombes near Paris. They found several opportunities in the colonial wars to experiment with such shells under live-battle conditions. Throughout all this, the camera stood ready to record the effects of the new weapons. The asymmetry in firepower was spectacular and became a visual topic in and of itself. A book published by the Geiser studio in Algiers in 1908–09 entitled Album de la 1re colonne du Haut-Guir (Album of the first column of the Haut-Guir) provides a good example.27 French troops and allies were then fighting in southern Morocco, not far from Boudenib, where local resistance was fierce. These were the first stages of the so-called ‘pacification’ of Morocco, which would last more than twenty years. This volume compiled dozens of images from twelve different photographers – the majority of whom were officers, from generals to lieutenants – to create a memento that would be sold to participants of the operations in the form of a visual narrative. In its composition and format, the book visibly imitates the albums marketed by the British after their victories in Sudan in 1898. The publication is in itself a reflection of the popularisation of portable cameras among the troops operating in North Africa.

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There was no official photographic service as such; however, the multiplication of officer-photographers effectively institutionalised the photographic coverage of this campaign. The presence of multiple cameras was no doubt sanctioned at the highest level, likely by Hubert Lyautey himself, who became the first Resident General of Morocco in 1912. Lyautey’s grasp of the significance of photographic communication has already been mentioned. This illustrated book was intended for a military clientele and revealed a straightforward perspective of combat and daily life during the campaign. The exoticism that characterised earlier coverage, such as John Burke’s views of the second Anglo-Afghan war (1878–80), was gone. Full pages displayed enemy corpses. Significantly, Geiser selected a scene showing several combatants killed by a single Melinite shell (Figure 4.3). As the caption indicates, the explosive and its impact on bodies are the real subjects of the image. Such depictions of war illustrated a fusion of modern technologies, where instantaneous images captured the newfound power of industrial weapons. New perspectives This juxtaposition of military and visual transformations gave rise to a new way of envisaging conflict prior to the First World War. The realities of modern warfare and its mediatisation underwent an irreversible mutation. For Frederic Villiers (1851–1922), one of the most active British war correspondents of the late nineteenth century, this shift became obvious during the Sino–Japanese War in 1894: […] there was no blare of bugals [sic] or roll of drums; no display of flags or of martial music of any sort … It was most uncanny to me after my previous experiences of war in which massed bands cheered the flagging spirits of the attackers and bugals rang out their orders through the day. All had changed in this modern warfare: it seemed to me a very cold-blooded, uninspiring way of fighting, and I was mightily depressed for many weeks till I had grown accustomed to the change.28

In front of the camera and the eyes of witnesses, a new type of war was taking place. It was less visible. Gunpowder made less and less smoke; an ungraspable no man’s land widened as snipers and artillery lengthened their range of fire; and damage and death were easier to see than the well-ordered movements of men. The Sino–Japanese War also gave rise to a photographic scandal surrounding atrocities committed by the Japanese at Port Arthur in November 1894. Soldiers posed sword in hand among the townspeople they had just slaughtered. The image circulated around the globe.29 A photographic repertoire of modern combat was invented at the turn of the century in an attempt to show the true nature of violent conflict. This repertoire was already in

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Figure 4.3 Anon., ‘Cadavres de 16 marocains tués le 13 au soir, par le même obus à la mélinite’ (Corpses of 16 Moroccans killed on the evening of the 13th by the same Melinite shell), half-tone print, in Sud-Oranais. Album de la 1re Colonne du Haut-Guir, mars-avril-mai 1908 (South of Oran. Album of the 1st Column of Haut-Guir, March–April–May 1908) (Algiers: Geiser, c. 1910), 18. This photograph records the aftermath of a battle in a region situated west of present-day Morocco. The French subsequently began an expansionary military intervention that would last for more than twenty years. The author of the photo is not specified. This two-volume collective work borrowed from standards established in British publications (see p. 101), offering four to five photographs per page to show the sequence of an event. The volumes were produced exclusively for the soldiers and officers who participated in the operations and, therefore, were published in Algiers and not in mainland France. This publication, which shows numerous images of dead enemies, is one example of the radicalisation of combat imagery observed in French North Africa in the 1900s and 1910s (see Chapter 5). This image, far from being unique in this collective work, provides a trace of the growing awareness among officers of the amount of damage new weapons could inflict.30 L’Illustration published the picture on 27 June 1908. The newspaper’s archives are not accessible and attribution remains uncertain,31 but it is possible that the photograph was taken by the journalist Jean du Taillis, then correspondent of Le Figaro. Taillis served for a time as the editor-in-chief of the Revue générale des colonies (General Review of the Colonies) and was therefore close to colonial circles. He also participated in Lyautey’s Moroccan communication campaign in the 1920s.32

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place prior to 1914. While the colonial wars were only one type of conflict revealing this new face of war, because of their large numbers, they constituted a major part of these developments. The wide availability of small photographic devices in the 1890s and 1900s transformed visualisations of war, as well as the staging of images of large-scale catastrophes. Demand for paintings of war, which had been the dominant source of images of frontline violence in the 1850s and 1860s, was in decline. As stated by Robert de La Sizeranne in 1895: ‘These wars everybody speaks of, no one paints them anymore.’33 The situation was different for designers and engravers, who survived the inflation of photographic illustrations in newspapers. They were able to depict a war that no longer really existed, one made up of individual exploits and heroic charges. Combat and organised violence were starting to be photographed in a more documentary fashion. This did not mean that these photographs were widely circulated. The drawings of war correspondents, which did not involve complex production logistics, prolonged the life of representational conventions established in the mid-nineteenth century for a long time. This coexistence of pencil and camera, which favoured a reciprocal influence in terms of aesthetics, lasted until the First World War. However, the decline of drawing and engraving was already underway. Photography’s potential dominance as a visual source was clear to many by the 1890s. In December 1889, the founder of The Graphic, one of the great British illustrated newspapers of the time, invited hundreds of guests to a banquet to discuss the future of the press. A colonel toasted the war correspondents and predicted that they would ‘depend more on the camera than on the pen’, before paraphrasing Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, a famous poem about the Crimean War, with the verse: ‘Kodakers to the right of them, Kodakers to the left of them’.34 A jokester then added that professional journalists would no longer be of use anyway, because it would be possible ‘to telegraph images [...] directly to the editors’.35 Histories of photography often focus on major photographers and how the archetypes they forged eventually influenced broader practices. Such an approach would not do justice to the emergence of the new aesthetics of war and catastrophe at the turn of the twentieth century. An empirical approach to the social life of photographs reveals how early photojournalism largely took the form of an ocean of amateur, low-quality imagery. The changing face of battle and its depictions are to be found in the humble private collections of soldiers via media such as postcards and amateur snapshots, which then inspired other, more established photographers, rather than the reverse. The distinction between amateur and professional photographers, one of the central elements in the structuring of war journalism in the second half of the twentieth century, was not clearly established at the end of the nineteenth century. The categories were fluid and the roles mixed.

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Francis Gregson, who worked for the St James Gazette, was a veteran of the campaign against the Mahdists. He had fought in January 1885 at Abu Klea in the failed attempt to save General Gordon, who was besieged in Khartoum.36 Years later, he volunteered to be a correspondent, even though he had no real experience in the trade. Many of the journalists and photographers who were paid by the press at that time either came from or maintained a privileged link with the ranks of the army. To cultivate a martial appearance, Frederic Villiers often appeared at his public lectures in a uniform adorned with medals.37 Knowledge acquired within the regiments often allowed such correspondents to get closer to combat than their civilian counterparts. The fact that roles were not always clearly distinguished favoured subsequent aesthetic transformations. Journalist-photographers who came from the civilian sector found inspiration in the work of these improvised photojournalists. The work of René Bull (1872–1942) illustrates this perfectly. He was hired by the Black and White magazine as an illustrator in the early 1890s before being sent to several conflicts as a photographic reporter. He covered the Greco–Turkish War of 1897 and the massacres it entailed. He then reported on the famine and plague that hit the Indian subcontinent in 1897. In 1898, Bull accompanied expeditions aiming to regain control of the Khyber Pass, one of the access routes between India and Afghanistan, key to the stability of the northwestern border of the Raj, where several groups threatened British dominance. The same year, he was alongside the troops led by Kitchener to crush the Mahdists. He was then wounded in 1901 while reporting on the Boer War (1899–1902). An excellent photographer, Bull used high-quality cameras produced by Adams and Co. in London.38 With his assistance, Black and White published a series of four war photo albums entitled War Albums. Two are devoted to the Sudan Campaign, one to the British Navy, and another to the Tirah Expedition on the northern Indian border, which Bull joined in January 1898. Bull captured the launching of a rocket in two consecutive images during a campaign in present-day Pakistan. This sequence of the two images is almost cinematographic. It provides an illustration of the revolution experienced by war photography at the end of the nineteenth century (Figure 4.4). The image itself is the product of intersecting technological modernities. The equipment used by the photographer was portable and enabled short exposure times, two conditions that were necessary to make highly realistic photographs of military campaigns. The second aspect of technological modernity revealed by this document is that of the printing techniques. The ‘snapshots’ published in Black and White were printed in halftone, a process that consists of a fairly faithful reproduction of the tint gradations in a negative. Engravers no longer had to intervene heavily to modify the content of images. From lens to page, the impression given was one of immediacy. The third element that places this document in the new war aesthetic is inherent in its subject.

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Figure 4.4 René Bull, ‘Firing a shell rocket from Karuppa Camp’, half-tone print, in René Bull, Black and White Albums, The Tirah Campaign (London: Black and White, 1897), 16. Here, René Bull took advantage of the possibilities offered by the shutter mechanisms introduced in the late nineteenth century. With this technology, capturing the explosion of a shell or the firing of a shot could finally be achieved, with a little skill. A new temporality of war and destruction, one that could capture the split second of a blast, was within reach.

The battery of Hale rockets seen here is actually an old-fashioned weapon. The Indian Army was testing the system for mountain combat. The test was inconclusive, even if the rockets did instill fear in the enemy.39 Regardless, the launch captured by the lens is spectacular. Photography effectively instilled a visual sense of modernity into these weapons as it reflected the emergence of new standards and possibilities in the representation of war. The profound changes in the gaze that these pictures illustrate also affected other aspects of the representation of violence. The portability of cameras and the capturing of snapshots made it possible to report in challenging environments. Bull hid his camera to take some of his shots of the atrocities committed during the Greco–Turkish War.40 The lens insinuated itself everywhere. Catastrophes, crises, explosions, executions, planes moving at full speed: an accelerating world could be industrially fixed, captured, and reproduced by the camera. In 1889, a commentator summed up photography’s ability to make the present eternal. The title of his article, ‘The Everlasting Now’, brilliantly described the medium’s newfound power.41 The imagery of the so-called ‘small wars’ of peak colonial expansion stands out. These ‘small wars’ offered the last few opportunities to narrate and stage acts of individual heroism; such opportunities appear to have faded away on the great battlefields. Most of the time, colonial operations were on a smaller scale than the major conflicts that occurred from the 1900s to 1914. They usually involved only a few hundred or a few thousand soldiers. Unlike wars made invisible by their magnitude and nature, such as those in the Balkans in the early 1910s, the smaller extent of colonial operations made them easier to capture through the lens. Colonial wars were a last refuge

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for certain perspectives on combat. Colonial contexts also offered more photographic opportunities to capture death and physical punishment in their immediacy. For instance, William Wallace Hooper, whose example was studied in Chapter 3, was far from unique in his quest to capture the fatal moment of death. ‘Distant’ wars were sites of experiments in this regard. James Hevia justly speaks of a ‘pedagogy of imperialism’ to describe the mediatisation of humiliation and suffering that aimed to imprint Western power on dominated spaces and bodies.42 The moral metrics were ultimately different between colonised and colonising spheres, with tangible consequences on visual economies of organised violence. Two main periods need to be distinguished in order to grasp the development toward new forms of visualisation of distant suffering. The first one spanned from 1890 to the Sudan Campaign of 1898 and the Boer War, which began in 1899. This period was marked by a growing popularisation of photography. The second period, from 1900 to 1914, definitively set the parameters of genres and the photographic profession, with lasting consequences. 1890s: permeabilities Many major events of the 1890s, with respect to European colonial expansion, played out in Africa. The Berlin Conference (1884–85) initiated a vast movement of consolidation of external rules and colonial conquests on the continent. The following years saw the European powers sign multiple treaties delimiting their sovereignties in Africa. Explorations, military expeditions, and punitive operations against local sovereigns resisting these changes multiplied. Dozens of ‘small wars’, to put it mildly in light of the loss of life they caused, ravaged the continent. In Asia, the conquest phase came to an end, but conflicts remained commonplace. Colonial powers now had to face armed opposition on the borders of their possessions, as well as within their colonies. Recurring operations were conducted north of British India, including the Tirah Valley Campaign (in present-day Pakistan) in 1897–98. Meanwhile, French authorities in Indochina faced numerous rebellions, including one led by Hoàng Hoa Thám. At the turn of the century, Europeans based in China faced an anti-Western revolt led by a secret society called the League of Harmony and Justice, also known as the ‘Boxers’. This group attacked foreign embassies and Christians in Tianjin and Beijing in 1900, triggering an unprecedented international intervention. Schematically, two distinct narratives dominated the visualisations of imperial force: exemplary punishment in Asia and adventurous conquest in Africa. Types of warfare were extremely diverse in both contexts. They ranged from large international expeditions to small-scale guerrilla operations. While the expressions of organised violence that surrounded these conflicts had extremely varied

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configurations, one element connected them in a systematic way: those who decided and led the operations could not ignore the emergence of public opinion at home. The spectacularisation of violence was one of the instruments of European power in these regions. It was also a tool used to justify colonialism within the European metropolises. It should not be forgotten that, in Great Britain, as in France, foreign interventionism did not necessarily attract widespread support. The logistics and money required for these expensive expeditions needed to be justified. For the British, as well as the French, a ‘real’ war could only occur in Europe. From a military point of view, any fighting that broke out in distant places was of secondary importance. The conquerors of ‘French Sudan’ (present-day Mali) were accused of spending too much public money in the early 1890s. Garnet Wolseley (1833–1913) and Frederick Lugard (1858–1945), like other architects of British conquests in Africa, were forced to keep a close eye on their spending.43 The energy invested by colonial enthusiasts in communicating a positive picture of their African and Asian endeavours was, in a way, proportional to the difficulties they encountered in obtaining consistent support from governments in the imperial metropolises. The effort put into producing images and coverage to propagandise colonial advances often stood in stark contrast with the meagre financial support received. Sometimes, of course, it was concealment that the colonial authorities cultivated, specifically when news of colonial brutality threatened to destabilise established narratives. This was a complex balance in which both indifference and attention were carefully cultivated to avoid damaging media sensations, while ensuring that expeditions would not plunge into complete obscurity, potentially resulting in sharp cuts to the funds allocated to colonialism and imperial influence. The actors in this process found themselves in an unprecedented situation at the end of the nineteenth century. All were taking part in conflicts where moral as well as racial differentiations, recourse to local auxiliaries, and distance from traditional decision-making centres often favoured expeditious solutions. They also needed to operate in a new media environment where norms and techniques were rapidly evolving under the influence of various factors, one of the most noticeable being the near exponential growth in the practice of photography. Inventive or incompetent, those involved in empire-building had to handle these unstable components to achieve their objectives. An example of their innovations can be found in the colonisation of Mashonaland. In 1889, British investors, in the form of the British South Africa Company, were granted a royal charter to exploit the mineral resources of what is now Zimbabwe. Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), the founder of this organisation, aimed to extend British influence in a privatised form. His company attempted to secure mining concessions and to sign treaties with local monarchies. Rhodes relied on paramilitary forces that were administratively independent of the British Army. He was also careful to

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maintain a certain distance from the government in London. This type of private colonisation prompted many disputes, especially among those local missionaries who thought that the British Government and the Colonial Office offered a better guarantee of protection than a corporation.44 It was therefore essential for Rhodes to ensure that the projected images of his activities were favourable in Britain. The Pioneer Column, which entered the Shona area in 1890, had an ‘official photographer’, Lieutenant William Ellerton-Fry, who was also an intelligence officer.45 This campaign was a demonstration of force that went largely unopposed. Unlike other expeditions in the years that followed, its photographic coverage left little room for potential scandals. The column’s success was celebrated in images in a volume of the very first photographs of the region, entitled Occupation of Mashonaland – an echo of the ritual of commemoration instituted after the 1868 expedition to Abyssinia.46 Significantly, even if their trajectories are difficult to retrace, some photographs were opportunely sent to the editors of The Graphic, which published reproductions of Ellerton-Fry’s photographs as early as November 1890, when the manoeuvers had just ended.47 This popular illustrated periodical therefore provided wide – and positive  – exposure for the British South Africa Company. On a very small scale, Rhodes’s decentralised colonialism incorporated quasi-institutionalised forms of photography. Few expeditions, military or otherwise, set out without an appointed photographer. Negatives were often sent to the press to help build a pictorial narrative of colonial advances. Louis Archinard (1850–1932), a French general who waged war against the ruler of the Tukulor Empire, Ahmadu Tall (1836–97), whose authority extended from present-day Guinea to Timbuktu, brought back carefully kept albums of his campaigns.48 Several of Archinard’s officers were responsible for the photographic coverage. Among them was the medical officer Jean-Marie Collomb, who treated Archinard’s column in Sudan during the period of 1890–91. He produced dozens of images, some of which were taken shortly after combat and sieges. He visually documented the capture of Segu (in present-day Mali) in 1890.49 Collomb’s colonial career started in Tonkin (in present-day northern Vietnam) in the early 1880s. He participated in several operations in Cochinchina (present-day Vietnam south of the Gianh River) at the end of the 1890s and then went to Dahomey (West Africa). His career and photographs spanned the entire peak of late-nineteenth-century colonial expansion. Collomb’s case is typical of the informal networks that characterised the visual coverage and mediatisation of French empire-building at the time. His photographic work seems secondary if one only reads the textual archive, but Joseph Gallieni, one of the major figures of French colonialism and a promoter of photography as a tool of governance and communication, knew him well. Several of the images taken

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by Collomb and his fellow photographers were used by the press or by writers of conquest stories in the months and years following expeditions.50 Sometimes, such informal networks of friendship between officers and journalists made it possible to assemble vast photographic projects. The case of Marcel Monnier (1853–1918) provides an example of such a collaboration. Monnier was a correspondent for Le Temps, one of the leading French daily newspapers of the time, and a friend of Louis Gustave Binger (1856–1936). As part of a topographical mission in the Ashanti Empire in 1892 to delimitate the colonies of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, the two men brought back hundreds of photos taken using a Photosphere camera. Some of these pictures were exhibited at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in December 1892, while others were published in the press. In both cases, there is little direct evidence of the interactions between these semi-official photographers and their hierarchy in the archives. Nonetheless, they existed and shaped colonial discourses. Little by little, circumstances began to favour the wider dissemination of photographs that had initially been reserved for a first circle of relatives and colleagues. The Verascopes, Kodaks, and Photospheres provided a means to supplement military incomes, which did not always meet the expectations of those who joined the colonial troops. Dahomey’s campaign in 1892–94 ended with the surrender of King Béhanzin. François Michel, the assistant commissioner to General Dodds’s troops, was one of the first to photograph the king in January 1894.51 He hoped to sell his photo to newspapers in France but feared that his journalistic attempts might overstep boundaries. He was afraid he would be accused of ‘trafficking’ photographs without the approval of his commanding officers.52 However, secretive editors and complacent hierarchies made it possible to get away with the sale of such photos most of the time. Thanks to their privileged position on the frontlines of colonial expansion, soldier-photographers could produce and sell disturbing images. For instance, who took and sold the photograph that served as the basis for the engraving published in November 1892 by L’Illustration (Figure 4.5)? Perhaps it was Abel Tinayre, sent to Dahomey by Le Monde illustré, whose brother Louis was also a journalist as well as a painter and photographer.53 The image, perhaps too graphic to be openly attributed, remains without an author. The growth of a market for sensational images motivated photographic operators to provide views likely to display the spectacle of violence. Popular publications were less reluctant to reproduce such images at the end of the nineteenth century. Armed conflicts were just one of the subjects of this new sensationalist visual landscape. Accidents caused by new industrial modes of transport were also a recurring theme, as well as natural disasters or eruptions of political or criminal violence. Images of colonial conquests were part of a larger whole but had their own specificities. These wars opened fronts in spaces that could almost always be described as untouched, trampled for the first time by European modernity. The ancient trope of first contact with

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Figure 4.5 Anon. ‘The Dahomey Expedition – Cremation of Dahomean corpses after the Battle of Dogba’, engraving based on a photograph, L’Illustration, 19 November 1892, 1. The original photograph was taken during the Second Dahomey War (1892–94) in what is now Benin, after the Battle of Dogba (September 1892). French troops commanded by Alfred Dodds defeated King Béhanzin’s armies, who left behind more than 100 dead on the battlefield. These bodies were cremated soon after the fight. Like many illustrations reproduced in this work, the original photograph passed through the hands of an engraver, who modified the original print, adding details such as smoke. The very graphic foreground and the framing centred on a corpse retain some of the photographic realism of the original image. This picture reflects the intent by the French military to terrorise the local population by depicting corpses in a degrading manner. Engraved drawings of the same scene published at the time usually offer more distant and dramatised views. The reader of the issue of L’Illustration in which this macabre scene was reproduced just had to turn a few pages to read the ‘Courrier de Paris’, a weekly column written by André Fagel, alias ‘Rastignac’. Under the guise of schoolboy humour, his column was quite critical of the conduct of operations. It ended with an ambiguous pun playing on the polysemy of the word column: ‘One is proud to be French contemplating this column.’

isolated and unknown people was given new life by photography. To Westerners, the photographic device became a talisman of technical modernity that was manipulated under the astonished eyes of those unfamiliar with it. In these far-off terrains, where distance allowed all sorts of exoticisms and fictions, the asymmetry of the encounter made it possible to create images and stories that were likely to arouse surprise, horror, or fascination in a context of commodification and massification of cultural productions. The so-called faraway wars offered the advantage of a tolerable brutality.

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Presented as victories against barbarism, such wars were seemingly justified in their ferocity, including in their visual and photographic portrayals. Porosity between military and civilian positions, as well as between professional and amateur photography, continued to characterise the 1890s. The roles of doctor, officer, topographer, and journalist overlapped. But this confusion was only superficial, as most imperial actors shared an awareness of the part played by the visualising of colonial expansion. French officers were not blind to what their British counterparts were doing, and vice versa. A permeability also existed between empires. Media coverage in each responded to the other, and photographers emulated one another. Photographs also circulated beyond national spheres. Comparisons and competitions were common. All of the armies involved in the conquests of Africa and Asia manipulated photography for communication purposes. However, the first initiatives to systematise the production of photographs during and after a conquest were taken by the French officers who led the colonisation of Madagascar from 1895. The cumulative experiences of the French in Indochina and French Sudan served as the foundation for an unprecedentedly methodical and organised use of photography. Under the leadership of several high-ranking officers, including Joseph Gallieni, the conquest and ‘pacification’ of Madagascar were recorded in an orderly photographic repertoire of several thousand photographs. This was a combined work that began with the invasion of Madagascar in 1895. A French expeditionary force, commanded by General Duchesne, landed on the main island, forcing Queen Ranavalona III (1861–1917) to accept a French protectorate. Duchesne’s chief of staff in charge of intelligence, Léon de Beylié, was a trained photographer. He was familiar with the specific photographic culture that had developed among the officers in the Indochinese peninsula, as shown by the example of Dr Hocquard. The expedition also attracted officer-photographers such as François Lamy54 and was accompanied by several correspondents equipped with cameras, including Louis Tinayre (1861–1942) from Le Monde illustré, a newspaper that devoted several front pages to the campaign.55 Projection plates were made for propaganda purposes from negatives taken by Édouard Hocquard.56 Fresh from Tonkin, Hocquard served as a doctor during this campaign, which he photographed with even more professionalism than he had his previous assignment in Tonkin. The annexation of Madagascar to the French Empire and the appointment of Gallieni as Governor General in 1896 accelerated the rationalisation of the photographic tool in the service of colonisation. Upon his arrival, Gallieni set up a network of photographers to fix in negatives the installation of French authority on Madagascar. Dozens of semi-official photographers produced an immense visual repertoire.57 As we saw previously, Gallieni was intimate with British imperial practices and clearly drew inspiration from Anglo-Indian precedents. The topographic service of

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the new colony was assigned the role of collecting these images. This visual database was freely accessible to French officials. Gallieni offered prints and albums to high-ranking officers and members of the government, as well as reproducing them in his own publications.58 Photographs were also sent to the metropolitan press to illustrate the so-called pacification of the island. Gallieni carefully shaped the image of his management of the colony. In 1903, he wrote to his friend Jules Charles-Roux (1841–1918), one of the masterminds of the French Parti colonial  – an informal colonial lobby  – and publisher of the Revue de Madagascar: ‘Our album […] had only one goal; interest in our railway [...] its continuation [...] is a matter of life and death for us [...] we must therefore make sure the public opinion in France supports its completion.’59 Photography was instrumental to the project. Its systematic use was unprecedented. Gallieni’s overarching influence on French colonial thought and his links with other major empire-building figures such as Lyautey ensured that this project had a lasting effect. Gallieni’s visual inventory generally avoided images that were potentially too unstable or too violent. Such images did exist elsewhere, as Chapter 5 will demonstrate, but the public depiction of French colonisation remained effectively regulated. 1898–1901: crystallisations While the French clearly observed the British use of photography in colonial contexts, it is more complicated to corroborate whether the reverse was true, as far as Gallieni’s experiments were concerned. Regardless, visible differences faded in the late 1890s. Most high-ranking officers involved in European expansion understood the part played by the visual in the media environment that served as an echo chamber for their campaigns in Africa, Oceania, or Asia. Three main conflicts provide further opportunities to structure these converging practices. The first was the British campaign in the Sudan. It ended in 1898 with the defeats of the Mahdist troops in Atbara and then in Omdurman (2 September 1898). The photographic coverage of the conflict is unique in its quantity and quality, due to the combination of the number of operators present on the ground and the nature of the final battle near Khartoum.60 Its configuration – a charge of Mahdist soldiers on well-ordered British lines – made it almost graspable through the lens. The battlefield, strewn with the bodies of thousands of Sudanese combatants, offered a Dantean vision of how many people more than forty Maxim machineguns and eighty cannons could slaughter in a matter of hours. To recount and visualise this moment, thirty journalists asked for permission to follow the campaign. Half of them were present at the end of the expedition and most of these were armed with cameras. Officerphotographers also recorded the events, including Reginald Wingate, who was both

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chief censor and himself a photographer. Hundreds of images were produced, including some groundbreaking combat photographs. Francis Gregson, René Bull for the Black and White, and various officers, including Edward D. Loch of the Grenadiers Guard, got extremely close to the battlefield using portable celluloid-film cameras. Gregson, in particular, shot two innovative views taken from the British position at 6 a.m., when the Mahdist Army initiated its charge (Figure 4.6). Loch was in an ideal position, on top of a hill overlooking the battlefield. He was operating a heliograph (an optical system that allows messages to be sent from a distance) and could easily handle his camera at the same time, to the point of forgetting the danger: ‘I was nearly on their flank and had just got out my camera to photograph the line with the shells bursting over it when Peri […] shouted out look and I turned around […] part of the [Mahdist] First Army coming over the South side of Gibel Surgham not five hundred yards away […] it did not take me long to mount and move off with both camera and helio in my hand.’61 As Paul Fox has shown, the campaign of 1896–98 was one of the first wars of the Kodak age.62 Many participants in the campaign, from noncommissioned officers to journalists, brought cameras with them, hoping that their experiences of the war could be chemically fixed. The combat itself and physical violence was only one of many components in these visual inventories. Boredom, life in the sweltering hot bivouac, a passing dog, or the camp kitchen were all facets of the war to be photographed and compiled in albums. Such photos were placed alongside views from the most critical moments of the conflict, because photography was, first and foremost, a way to kill time. The realism permeating both the journalistic imagery and personal collections caused a shift in the visualisation of war. This was, as a consequence, a key moment in the mechanisation of war – described by one correspondent as ‘scientific slaughter on a gigantic scale’  – and its image.63 This Kodak-recorded annihilation signalled the advent of a form of armed violence that was coldly logistical, even down to its visualisation. The aesthetics of the enticing engravings and paintings of the past were becoming less relevant to photographers: war had become ugly. This sense of distance is exemplified in one spectacular engraving published in large format by The Illustrated London News in September 1898. The drawn representation of the battle allows for a synthetic vision that combines various moments and scales of the event into one image (Figure 4.7). Engravers and illustrators were able to adopt points of view that remained inaccessible to a photographer, behind enemy lines for example. This comparative advantage allowed them to represent combat without reality being too much of an impediment. The visually dynamic cavalry attack was an almost obsolete vision of battle in the late nineteenth century from a tactical point of view. Mass industrialised destruction had long made epic charges a thing of the past, even though the Battle of Omdurman actually offered a final opportunity to

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Figure 4.6 Francis Gregson, ‘September 2, 6 a.m.: the grenadiers during the fight’, 2 September 1898, gelatin silver print mounted on cardboard, 7.5 cm × 7.5 cm. This snapshot by Gregson, who was not a professional photographer, was taken as the Mahdist troops advanced toward the British lines. The dust raised by the advancing armies can be seen in the distance. The rough framing of the shot is undoubtedly related to the fact that Gregson took the photograph while trying to protect himself. The document was rare at the time because of its direct capture of the moment and its lack of aesthetic intent. The fact that it was selected to appear in albums given to the royal family and to be printed in volumes sold to the general public by periodicals such as Black and White indicates, however, that this photograph was given an additional value precisely because of its flaws. They became visual assets, providing multiple indications that this document was authentic and taken as close as possible to the fighting.

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Figure 4.7 Engraving based on a painting by Richard Caton Woodville, ‘The charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, September 2, 1898’, The Illustrated London News, 24 September 1898, centre leaflet.

launch one such spectacular attack, much to the satisfaction of Winston Churchill, who took an active part in it and killed enemy combatants.64 In contrast to photographs of the same battle, individual and collective heroism is within reach of such an image. Such heroism is magnified by the echoes of wellestablished pictorial standards. The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello immediately comes to mind. However, it would be simplistic to reduce late nineteenth-century war imagery to a conflict between two visualisations. There was no strict separation between photographic images and engraved illustrations at the turn of the twentieth century. The very same war correspondents who sent sketches to London and Paris to serve as the raw material for engravings were often photographers. Engravers would use photographs to make a detail, a uniform, or a face more accurate. Photographers, on the other hand, looked for ways to give a better sense of the totality of wars and battles. A pictorial split took place nonetheless, slowly and hesitantly. As noted by the anonymous author of an article commenting on the images taken by René Bull during the 1898 campaign in the Sudan, ‘Photography is quite a new feature in the work of depicting battle scenes and will probably supersede the war artist’s pen and pencil’.65 A glance at the Black and White War Albums series, an overlooked prototypical publication in photographic journalism, demonstrates that portraits and landscapes, which until then represented the overwhelming majority of the photographic records of a campaign, were beginning to give way to other genres and topics. In the volume devoted to Kitchener’s campaign in the Sudan, accumulated corpses, loot, the movement of distant enemies in the dust, and imminent death are captured in the instant (Figure 4.8). The volume offers a composite visual chronicle of a war, made possible by

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Figure 4.8 René Bull, Black and White War Albums: Sudan no. 1 (London: Black and White, 1898), 26. This page from the Black and White War Albums reveals the changes in storytelling and visualisation made possible by photography. The set of four images illustrates the medium’s supposed ability to capture the instant in its authenticity. At this point in the fight, thousands of Mahdist soldiers were lying dead or dying on the battlefield. Very brief captions do not shy from naming the crudest consequences of the deluge of fire that befell the vanquished. Some Egyptian soldiers strip the dead. Hundreds of corpses dot the ground. The authors of these photographs are not clearly identified, though René Bull, Francis Gregson, and Edward Loch provided most of the views. Among the buyers of this type of publication was Winston Churchill (see ref. CHUR 1/104A-G in his archives in Cambridge).

the multiplication of photographic operators on the spot and the compilation of their views in sequences that reflect the nascent narrative forms brought about by cinema. Revealingly, the Battle of Omdurman was also filmed, though unfortunately these images were lost. To some observers at the time, it was obvious that drawings depicting a dense clash of heroes and ‘fanatics’ would gradually give way to photographic and cinematographic perspectives on conflicts.66 These snapshots and realistic views of battle and campaigns revealed an aspect of the violence of combat that did not surface in the drawn representations of the metropolitan press. In the Black and White War Albums, photography works in batches, in series, and in accumulations to compete

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with the all-encompassing characteristic of drawings. Textual information, which still dominated page layouts in most contemporary publications, is here reduced to short captions so as to make space for visual data. Images are presented as self-sufficient. The unprecedented nature of the photographic coverage of the Sudan Campaign cannot be emphasised enough. This shift was also visible in the dissemination of the photographs taken during the military expedition. The victory was celebrated in every conceivable type of print media, and the event became an invasive media object at that time. Photography was central to the construction of the colonial event. As a consequence, the coverage of the Sudan Campaign attracted attention far beyond Britain. Copies of the Black and White War Albums were attached to French diplomatic reports on British activities in the Sudan.67 This passion for the photography of colonial ventures also characterised the Marchand Mission, which crossed Africa from west to east and arrived at Fashoda – the site of a well-known incident between the French and the British a few days after the victory of Omdurman in September 1898. Marchand and his fellow officers also took hundreds of photographs to give visual substance to their own adventures as constructions of imperial heroism reached their peak at the end of the century.68 The second crisis to materialise the intensifying photographic visibility of imperial wars took place in China in 1900. This crisis is known, rather inaccurately, as the ‘Boxer Rebellion’. It began with the massacre of Chinese Christians by local militias and continued with the siege of European establishments in Beijing and Tianjin. An international military force intervened and utterly defeated those involved in the movement, as well as the Qing Army, which had eventually sided with the anti-Western combatants. What swiftly transformed into a punitive expedition was reported via telegraph and extensively photographed, becoming a global event. On location, the number of cameras handled by soldiers, journalists, and locals was considerable. An impressive mass of images quickly circulated in various formats, including postcards, stereoscopic views, and journalistic illustrations.69 The photographic coverage of the hundreds of beheadings, a spectacular component of the repression organised under the auspices of the international expedition in the summer of 1900, is an object of study in and of itself. In effect, this terrible conflict signalled more than the establishment of imperial interventions as photojournalistic constructions. It was a truly international expedition that accelerated the circulation of photographic uses and visual material beyond national lines. The last war that contributed to a photo-inflation in relation to conflicts ravaged the Transvaal region (South Africa) between 1899 and 1902. The Second Boer War was a far cry from a ‘small war’ and was not easily captured by the camera.70 The second phase of the war in particular, made up of guerrilla warfare and fighting that was often impossible to record on film, could only be photographed at its periphery,

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before and after outbreaks of fighting. Nevertheless, a number of war correspondents travelled to the front lines under the increasingly strict control of authorities. The vast majority of these journalists were equipped with small cameras. Ernest W. Smith, employed by the Morning Leader, never travelled without one, as he pointed out in his personal notes.71 But this was no longer a war against so-called fanatics. Britain’s adversaries were the descendants of European settlers. It was a colonial conflict where racial differentiation was less intense than in other empire-building wars in Africa, and this had consequences for its photographic visualisations. The somewhat scattered efforts observed in the previous chapter found a first conclusion in the Boer War. Everyone involved had a keen awareness of the role of information and images. A first substantial reflection on censorship occurred at the start of the war. In 1899, Lord Stanley was appointed ‘chief censor’ of the campaign.72 Telegraphs, which made news of the war available in London in a matter of hours, naturally attracted the attention of the military. However, photographs also became a source of concern for military censors,73 whose zeal occasionally wreaked havoc. Numerous shots of the war were lost when boxes of undeveloped negatives were opened in Cape Town for verification. Celluloids were carelessly marked ‘opened under the regime of martial law’ and forever ruined.74 Professionals regularly complained about the restrictions, as a fierce competition between photographers built up. The enthusiasm of the press in Britain for authentic photographs, which were then favoured over engravings for their supposed truthfulness, created a growing demand for snapshots of the war. The sums at stake turned out to be increasingly significant, and the phrase ‘war photographer’ became increasingly prevalent. Reinhold Thiele (1856–1921) was one of the first to be referred to in such a way in 1899.75 This new profession further complicated the imagery of organised violence and armed conflict. The magazine Black and White, which adopted a bold editorial policy, published 532 photographs of the war over its duration, as opposed to only 127 drawings.76 The magazine employed fifteen war correspondents, all equipped with cameras, including René Bull. It also encouraged enthusiasts to send in amateur shots for payment.77 This strategy enabled its publishers to achieve half a million weekly sales during the war. In this burgeoning market of news images, the recklessness of commercial photographers was comparable to that of photojournalists in the second half of the twentieth century. As Albert de La Pradelle (1871–1955) noted in 1905, the incomes of the most gifted photographers in England could reach £150 a month, equivalent of more than £11,000 today.78 It is hardly surprising then to see many would-be photojournalists innovating in order to capture the unfolding war in its most spectacular dimensions. Exceptional photographs of the Battle of Tugela (February 1900) were taken by a photographer known only by his initials, J. E. M. (most likely John Ernest

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Middlebrook, who founded a photographic studio in Durban in the 1870s). The series covers the different phases of the British offensive on Pieters Hill. Handwritten notes precisely locate charging British troops, exploding shells, and Boer positions.79 Layers of visualisations started to accumulate. Aside from photojournalists, the army itself was conducting its own photographic experiments. It was no longer just the officers and doctors who were taking photographs but also rank-and-file soldiers.80 Because it was relatively affordable, an estimated 10 per cent of the British population owned a Kodak (or a similar camera) at the start of the twentieth century.81 The massive number of personal albums related to this conflict that are kept in the National Army Museum testifies to the popularity of photography and its transformation into an accessible medium for recording experiences during the war. These albums frequently offer perspectives on the conflict that are both less filtered and more trivial than the pictures that circulated in newspapers. The very materiality of these light cameras – they were more like extensions of the users’ hands than cumbersome machines – promoted a transformation of photographic gestures, making them faster, more inconspicuous, and capable of capturing movement as closely as possible. The Wellcome Library in London houses several examples of these visual mementos. Major Coutts, who ran the 1st Divisional Field Hospital, recorded dozens of views that he collected in an album from 1901 onwards.82 Convoys of wounded, bloodied stretchers, and close-ups of gunshot injuries paint a portrait of his own personal war, which was much more graphic than that visible to the public in the United Kingdom. Such a visualisation of conflict on an individual scale was a recent phenomenon. It rapidly became a widespread practice. Another illustration of these uses of the camera in conflict is offered by Lisle March Phillips, who participated in the last phase of the campaign, when Kitchener decided to encircle the Boers and systematically destroy their resources. Farms were burned and families were rounded-up and evacuated. As a witness of these abuses, he complained: ‘I wish I had my camera. Unfortunately, it got damaged, and I have not been able to take any photographs. These farms would make a good subject. They are dry and burn well.’83 This expansion of photography was beginning to change the public image of the war. An almost dialectical relationship seems to have been established between fragmented amateur gazes and the work of correspondents, some of whom were likely purchasing images taken by rank-and-file soldiers.84 Once again, there can be a tendency to think that, at the start of the twentieth century, there was neither a cultural space nor the technical capacity to show organised violence from this angle. Admittedly, direct views of battles and their victims remained a minor part of this production. However, the photographs taken after the British defeat at the Battle of Spion Kop (23–24 January 1900) and the photographic scandal surrounding the

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establishment of concentration camps by Kitchener testify to the growing exposure of armed conflict. Under the watchful eyes of French military attachés and public opinion in the world at large, the Boer War set several new precedents well before 1914.85 At the turn of the twentieth century, armed conflicts outside Europe were crucial sites of visual innovations. The establishment of war photography as a genre and profession was nearing completion, even if soldier-photographers maintained a monopoly on images of the most remote imperial wars. The increasing numbers of images and operators threatened the unity of the official narrative. Early conflict photography began to escape the control of empire-builders, who were forced to start thinking about regulating and censoring photography. This reflection found its conclusion during the First World War. 1900–14: a new visual economy Three main developments characterised conflict photography from the 1900s. The first was the professionalisation of the photographic coverage of war. A new generation of camera-wielding reporters established itself in the media environment. The second was the introduction, through photography, of victims of mass violence as a recurring topic. The abuses committed against civilians, and what is now euphemistically called ‘collateral damage’, became a photographic object. At the turn of the century, photography’s supposed power of attestation was harnessed to document atrocities and massacres committed against noncombatants. The third development involved the uses of photography by the military themselves, as the medium, which was initially a supplement to writing, topography, and cartography, was adopted as a mode of planning, recording, and visualising operations well before 1914. As Thierry Gervais has shown, the Russo-Japanese War (February 1904– September 1905), a conflict that involved neither France nor Great Britain, played a pivotal role in the history of photography.86 The ubiquity of cameras in this conflict challenges established chronologies that place the beginnings of photojournalism in the interwar period. From a military and strategic point of view, the Russo-Japanese War amounted to a colonial war. The two nations fought for dominance over Korea and Manchuria. However, this conflict was massively larger than those of the last decades of the nineteenth century. With more than 150,000 dead, the human losses were staggering, and the logistical and military expenses were also unprecedented. Additionally, the conflict shifted the centre of military modernity at the start of the twentieth century: this industrialised war was not waged by European powers. A ‘World War Zero’, it was a combination of disruptions, and it foreshadowed major tactical evolutions. These disruptions were all carefully examined by European and American military attachés, who reported back to Europe their observations

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concerning trench warfare and artillery. Most brought back photographs to illustrate their demonstrations and warn their superiors about the transformation of combat. The war was also a global journalistic and photographic event.87 The Japanese command was keenly aware of the stakes involved in published images and established a strict system of censorship while ensuring the production of elaborate photographic and cinematographic propaganda.88 Several war correspondents, nearly all photographers, did, however, obtain official authorisations. On the Russian side, where official oversight was less stringent, journalists were allowed to use their cameras more freely. The visual tropes and conventions inherited from the nineteenth century were gone. There was a growing interest in the machinery and logistics of war.89 Depictions of mass death and combat dynamics became increasingly common. Thanks to the stereoscopic views sold by the firm Underwood and Underwood, one could see the devastating consequences of the Russian and Japanese assaults on entrenched positions in three dimensions. Articles by Ludovic Naudeau for Le Journal and Jean Rodes for Le Matin did not overlook the huge human costs of the war.90 The Graphic in London, like other British illustrated periodicals, also published images that would have hardly made it past the editorial filter twenty years earlier.91 The deeply innovative work of James H. Hare (1856–1946), a reporter for Collier’s Weekly, also influenced the emerging consortium of photojournalists.92 He did not hesitate to belittle the photographs of his fellow correspondents, who were, for the most part, simple ‘button-pushers’ in his eyes.93 Hare showcased his own technical mastery and daring, making the photojournalist simultaneously the producer and subject of war photography. His photographs introduced new angles on armed violence by getting as close as possible to the battlefield, in the face of death and destruction. The gravitational pull exerted by combat on photographers inspired innovative solutions. Joseph Rosenthal, who also covered the war for the Urban Bioscope company and The Sphere, purportedly installed armored plates on his camera to get closer to the firefight. Other wars prior to the First World War with similar characteristics, that is, conflicts that were sufficiently distant in the eyes of the French and British so that graphic coverage did not raise immense political problems, made it possible to further anchor these ways of capturing such events. The Italian intervention in Libya (1911) was covered by the new generation of journalist-photographers. The imprudent freedom of movement given to these professionals revealed Italian methods of repression (Figure 4.9).94 Public executions were recorded on film. One cinematograph operator alone recorded the hanging of fourteen individuals. His photos were distributed by Pathé in Europe.95 When these practices were publicised, they triggered a wave of international indignation that forced the Italians to respond with photographic counterpropaganda and to show their own dead, killed in action, to counterbalance the images of slaughtered civilians.96

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Figure 4.9 Anon. ‘Ghastly war picture from Tripoli’, half-tone engraving from a photograph provided by the Topical Agency, Leeds Mercury, 4 November 1911, 12. This picture, which was sold by an image agency, documents the aftermath of the massacres of civilians by Italian troops in Libya. In the wake of the invasion of Tripolitana in 1911, Italian soldiers were tortured and killed in the Shar al-Shatt oasis in October. Italian troops retaliated indiscriminately. Several photographers were on the spot, and snapshots of the killings were eventually published in the European and American press, triggering a war of images between Italian authorities and critics of colonial violence in Libya. The caption is revealing of the changing vocabulary and tolerance thresholds at that time.

These aesthetic changes matured during the Balkan Wars (1912–13). Even though occasional attempts to maintain the aestheticism of the nineteenth century somewhat slowed the tide of realistic images that operators sent from the front lines, the advent of a relatively disillusioned view of modern warfare is unmistakable. Exoticism and nostalgic takes on the heroism of the past were fading. People infected with cholera, starving soldiers, retreats, and pathetic debacles flooded the pages of illustrated magazines. Georges Rémond (1877–1965), the special envoy for L’Illustration, wrote a book, Avec les vaincus (With the vanquished), about the Thrace Campaign (October 1912–May 1913) of the First Balkan War. Even he was surprised at the passivity of his photographic subjects: ‘not a rifle butt was raised […] against us Europeans, a few of us in Boer hats, who came to watch them like curious animals and to take photographs and cinematographs of their disasters and their sufferings’.97 Much, however, escaped these journalist-photographers. They were generally kept from areas where the fighting was the most intense. On all sides, the period of relative freedom enjoyed by these new types of correspondents was coming to an end; there was too much risk of the projected image of war escaping the control of authorities. Reporters themselves reframed the role of images in information. Herbert Baldwin (1880–1920),

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who worked for the Central News Agency, a rival of Reuters, came up with a relatively new idea during the conflict: separating the work of written journalists from that of photographers.98 The two of course were interdependent; however, bringing back quality images of the front should become, in Baldwin’s eyes, a distinct profession. The wars in the Balkans offered the camera a relatively unfiltered view of what trench warfare could mean. Unlike the Russo-Japanese War, where a portion of the fighting took place in sparsely inhabited areas, this was an all-out war, in which civilians were directly affected by mass violence. This was not an unprecedented situation. By this time, photography had already played a role in providing proof in debates concerning the scale of atrocities committed by one side or the other. The Armenian massacres of 1909, committed by the Young Turks in Cilicia, were denounced in part using photographic images. The corpses of victims floating in the Mediterranean Sea were photographed from the deck of the Victor Hugo, a French Navy ship.99 These images were published in May 1909 by L’Illustration.100 A few years earlier, Belgium had also faced an international campaign as a result of its abuses in its colonies in Congo. These abuses were exposed to public opinion; photography, as we will see later, played an eminent role in the media coverage. But while the movement toward using photographs as an element of proof of organised violence against civilians had begun, it was the wars in the Balkans that gave rise to a first real institutionalisation of this phenomenon. Confronted with these atrocities, several of the photographers who were present, as well as their editorial staff in metropolitan France, adopted a rhetoric and a layout for their images that amounted to a legal testimony. The photographs of Jean Leune (1889–1944), correspondent for L’Illustration, and Georges Bourdon (1868–1938), of Le Figaro, provide a visual dossier of the massacre of Greek hostages by the Bulgarians in August 1913. The journalists themselves posed in front of the bodies to further authenticate the scene (Figure 4.10). In an unprecedented fashion, newspapers even touched upon the topic of sexual violence, one that usually escapes the lens. A portrait of ‘outraged women’ was published on this occasion. This was unprecedented. The signatures of the special envoys were printed, in the manner of apostilles with legal connotations. On the British side, several illustrators also chose to show the horror, including The Graphic. Photography was likewise at the core of reports funded by the Carnegie Foundation to document the Balkan Wars that were published in the summer of 1914.101 Written by an international commission, these reports devoted multiple pages to atrocities against civilians, in particular to those committed by Bulgarian troops against the Greek population.102 The Greek authorities allowed reporters and photographers to work more freely than elsewhere in the region, allowing for a prolific and graphic coverage of mass violence in the area.103 The accumulation of these images signalled a shift in the gaze toward victims.

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Figure 4.10 Anon. ‘Dossier of the massacres of hostages by the Bulgarians’, half-tone engravings based on photographs by Jean Leune, L’Illustration, special issue, 2 August 1913, 1.

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The photographs printed by L’Illustration were taken on 21 July 1913. They document the executions of civilians not far from the town of Serres (in present-day Greece), where massacres occurred throughout the month of July. The Bulgarian troops carried out the first massacre on 5 July. Massacres of populations identified as Bulgarian by the Greek inhabitants followed. In this extremely unstable situation, hostages were taken and executed as shown on this page. As the comments of the French journalists in L’Illustration indicate, they took out their cameras: ‘We have photographed these gruesome debris, and these photographs will be published […] we know that these are, among others, victims of the regular army.’ Note that one of the reporters visible in the large format photograph is deliberately posing with his camera, a Richard Verascope, as further confirmation of the authenticity of the report. British newspapers also decided to publish similar images on several occasions. These included the Bystander, which published images of massacres of Macedonian villages in 1912, and The Illustrated London News, which apologised for publishing the pictures of the bodies of Greeks killed by Bulgarians in August 1913.104

Did these developments affect the wars and police operations carried out by France and Great Britain at the same time in their empires? French and British campaigns have been deliberately left aside in this chapter to describe the wider transformations in the visualisations of conflicts and their capacity to destroy or to humiliate. Before addressing this issue in more detail in the following sections, it should be noted that the interactions between photographic images of purely colonial conflicts and those of war in general are numerous and complex. The photographers who directed their lenses toward the frontlines of European expansion cannot be examined outside of a larger environment of evolving visualisations of organised violence. Some of them may have reported on conflicts in which neither France nor the UK had direct colonial interests before covering the ill-named ‘small wars’ of imperial expansion. They brought their equipment, their routines, as well as their experience and acted as links between different sites of conflict. The demand for ever-more striking views, the risks posed by the widespread use of photography to well-regulated narratives, the increasingly common exposure of distant suffering, and the emergent topic of the civilian victim created a new imagery of conflict. This ecosystem included what was strictly colonial and what happened beyond the boundaries of empires. Key differences nonetheless appear between what was shown and what was not according to the context, the victims, and the definitions of the enemies. And, while the immensity of the First World War often obscures the chronology of early conflict photography, this framework was established well before 1914. Such a wide panorama of photography’s evolution and its relationship to mass violence inevitably distorts the perspective, however detailed it may be. By selecting a scale, by picking one image over the other, the exceptions, anomalies, and hesitations that unavoidably characterised this particular history of vision are not emphasised as they should be. The photographic imagery of conflict did not evolve as a whole,

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in a single direction. In short, two visualisations of war coexisted in the 1890s and 1900s: the more dramatised narrative provided by drawings and the more documentary perspective provided by photography. This situation lasted long after the invention of photography and even after the development of techniques for printing photographed images. Engravers long played an essential role in transforming photographic images into printable objects. However, the self-referential framework of painting and drawing slowly lost its influence. A new repertoire, more graphic and direct in appearance, upset the balance. This repertoire consisted of a multifaceted combination of what soldier-photographers were able to record of their personal experiences, thanks to increasingly portable devices, and the production of professional reporters. New aesthetics and themes emerged from this nebula of images: the blur, the ungraspable battlefield of industrial warfare, the anonymous casualties, and the inescapable decline of individual heroism. More importantly, the visualisation of war and organised violence was not a privilege for the few anymore. Amateur views or professional images imperilled established narratives. The faces and bodies of civilian victims were made more tangible by photography. Combatants, sometimes figured as pitiful actors in a wave of destruction that they did not wish for, were no longer simply the vanquished or the victor. Some acted as anonymous witnesses by sending images to Europe to denounce violence, while others reserved potentially problematic photographic mementos from colonial fronts for a selected audience. The multitude of images, with or without obvious aesthetic qualities, that were in circulation demonstrate that everything necessary to observe the unprecedented effects of new weapons and colonial expansionism was available prior to 1914. However, photography – soon threatened in its realistic coverage of conflict by the emerging cinema – failed to act as the herald of coming disasters. This chapter and the previous one underlined the extent to which the history of conflict photography needs to be questioned. Outbursts of violence or the acme of combat do not seem to belong to the possible subjects of photography prior to the turn of the twentieth century, if not even later. It appears as if better optics, faster shutters, and more sensitive film finally made it possible to capture these paroxysmic events. Yet such a narrative gives technological progress a larger role than it actually had in the transformations of the medium. It places technical causation above other factors. Taking a detour toward colonial wars and Europe’s distant conflicts is a way to acknowledge the role played by experimentation in the evolving visualisation of organised violence. For many photographers and commentators in the late nineteenth century, the question was not necessarily what photography could do, but rather the anticipation of what it might eventually record. An entire segment of the imagery of violence was imagined and expected before it even existed. Specialised publications, such as The Photographic News, were on the lookout for the ultimate photograph that

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would capture combat at its most unfiltered.105 The desire to frame armed conflict and violence into potential photographic subjects prompted some operators to test the limits of their cameras to the extreme. From the 1870s, conflicts outside Europe offered them repeated opportunities to do so. Revealingly, wartime photography attracted historians long before the interwar period, when Gerda Taro and Robert Capa became heroic figures of the genre. This was already a well-defined visual field in the early twentieth century. As early as 1911, The Photographic History of the Civil War – a foundational work on the subject – set out in search of the first instances of war photography. The authors identified a blurry shot of Northern battleships taken in April 1863 from the parapet of Fort Sumter (South Carolina) as the first snapshot of battle.106 This quest for pioneers and an archaeology of conflict photography is a clear sign of its institutionalisation at the time. Like so many other aspects of industrialised modernity, the visual economy of conflict is marked by a collision of temporalities, a ‘discordance of times’, to use Christophe Charle’s expression.107 From the outset, the future of photography, its past, and its present were colliding.

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5 The public and the private: regimes of visibility Matabeleland officially became a British protectorate in 1891, when King Lobengula Khumalo (1845–94) was ruling over the Northern Ndebele people. A few months earlier, individuals supported by Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company had settled in neighbouring Mashonaland. Logenbula and the Company managed to live peacefully side by side for a time, but soon relations deteriorated and full-scale war broke out. The war, which lasted from 1893 to 1894, resulted in the defeat of the Ndebele Kingdom and the unification of Mashonaland and Matabeleland within a new entity, which, from 1895, came to be known as Rhodesia. The tensions continued, however. The inhabitants saw the arrival of large numbers of settlers on their land and suffered considerable losses of livestock – either due to theft by the British or to diseases affecting the herd. ‘Frontier’ violence erupted throughout the territory, with religious leaders mobilising fighters in March 1896. The Ndbele re-seized their cattle that same month, which led to an uprising. Hundreds of settlers were killed, and the Europeans took refuge in fortified sites. Militias were rapidly set up to protect the settlers and to fight back. Relief columns were sent from the south, but only the officers belonged to the British Army. The rest of the men, recruited locally, were ‘colonial troops’, which in the British Empire meant that they were either drawn from local police and paramilitary groups or were indigenous auxiliaries. These local troops fought with a ferocity that sometimes surprised the regular officers. Hundreds were killed on both sides, and the execution of some local chiefs by British officers and colonial troops caused a scandal in London. Far removed from South African jurisdiction, where proper trials could be held, the killings took place outside the framework of the rule of law, seen as one of the great benefits of British colonisation at the time. Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941), the founder of scouting, was one of those concerned about the execution of Uwini, a Ndebele leader, after a summary court martial.1 The photographs taken by the Barnett brothers during their stay at Fort Mangwe – one of the positions set up at the beginning of the revolt – demonstrate that the execution of prisoners was not an isolated phenomenon in Rhodesia, this outlying territory

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Figure 5.1 Joseph or David Barnett, ‘Shooting Matabele spies at Mangwe Fort’, 1896, silver halide print from a glass negative, size unknown.

that had been entrusted to a private corporation. One of the brothers’ photographs, probably taken in the spring of 1896, shows the bodies of several Ndebele who had been executed on the pretext of having spied on the British. In the background, four soldiers belonging to the local militia known as the Mangwe Field Force, then under the command of Cornelius van Rooyen, can be seen posing with rifles (Figure 5.1).2 Various observers who were visiting the fort were little moved by what was probably a common practice at the time.3 An 1896 Summons to Surrender issued by General Goodenough provided the framework for these killings by emphasising that ‘all natives found within the districts of Bulawayo […] Mangwe […] and Bulalema assisting in the rebellion directly or indirectly are liable […] to be sentenced to death, or lesser punishment’.4 Before finding its way to the archives of the South African newspaper, The Star, the image was for sale at the Barnett brothers’ studio in Johannesburg. The eldest of the two brothers, Joseph, had emigrated from Wales to Africa in 1889, and, as journalists, the two brothers did not hesitate to cover the conflict in Matabeleland. Their studio also produced numerous pictures of the Boer War. This particular image was therefore not a trophy hidden in some private album; it was openly for sale.

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The Barnetts exploited their collection of news pictures by supplying prints to the metropolitan press.5 Not everything reached the metropole, however. There was a significant difference between what was seen in the colonies and in Britain. What could be seen and consumed in Southern Africa was not necessarily seen and consumed in London. Informal collective self-censorship rendered those executed in Mangwe almost invisible. Readers of the metropolitan press only saw them as prisoners before their execution in the Review of Reviews (Figure 5.2). This newspaper, edited by William T. Stead – a reformist journalist who was often critical of imperial rule – was one of the few to document these excesses in pictures. As the caption indicates, four of the ten prisoners were executed after the photograph was taken. It is certainly their corpses that are shown in the other Barnett photograph. These two images are isolated reflections of a more general phenomenon: the coexistence of different ‘regimes of visibility’ within the empire. Gilles Deleuze, who developed the idea of ‘regimes of visibility’, endows the concept with a broad meaning. Reflecting on the work of Michel Foucault, Deleuze distinguishes between the utterable and the visible.6 Both are at play during a given historical period, but they obey different regimes that constantly seek to ‘capture’ each other. According to Deleuze, regimes of visibility are ‘multisensorial, optical, auditory, tactile complexes’.7 They are constrained by the limits of a given period, so they depend, for example, on the architectural choices or technological possibilities of the time. The full extent of ‘visibility’ cannot be grasped by an utterance; it goes beyond language. The relative importance of utterances and the experience of vision varies at different times. According to Deleuze, in order to understand regimes of visibility in terms of power and resistance, it is necessary to observe them based on a corpus, which is by definition partial. By adopting this approach in this chapter, we seek to analyse the mechanisms of concealment specific to certain colonial experiences, and not to propose a systematic analysis of a hypothetical, all-encompassing ‘colonial visibility’. The concept of ‘regime’ used here refers to the fact that the cases studied are not isolated; there are clear similarities in the way in which violence is presented, or concealed, in similar colonial situations. The sensitivity to violence of certain colonial societies (new communities growing up around colonial centres) and the way violence was represented there was sometimes different to that in European metropoles. Communities of European origin often developed their own tolerance thresholds in different parts of the empire.8 In Rhodesia, for example, realities or rumours of the mutilation of white civilians, panic over servants suspected of spying for the rebels, or outright racism all created an atmosphere that was conducive to summary executions. It was in these areas – settlements where a ‘fragment of Europe’ was engaged in stealing indigenous people’s

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Figure 5.2 Anon., ‘Matabele murderers and spies awaiting trial at Fort Mangwe. Four were afterwards shot’, halftone print produced from a photograph from the Barnett studio, The Review of Reviews, vol. 14, 1896, 107. The photograph, entitled ‘Ten Matabele, including chief Lang Appie, immediately before their execution at Fort Mangwe, 1896’, comes from the Barnett Collection purchased by The Star newspaper. We therefore have the name of one of the prisoners, ‘chief Lang Appie’, a rare occurrence during this war, as the voices and identities of local victims were generally erased in Western narratives. Lang Appie is described as ‘a Matabele chief captured at Mangwe, and a very old man, having been one of the Zulus who originally fled to that part of the country many years ago’ in the Black and White Magazine (vol. 12, 1896, 162). Langabi – his true IsiNdebele name – was an Indula (chief) of the Ndiweni family. He commanded over the Usaba izinduna (chieftaincy).9 The Barnetts took another photograph of Langabi right before his execution. These collective portraits, which show local militia standing and Ndebele sitting, often with their heads bowed, are a subgenre in themselves. William Rausch, who set up one of the first commercial photographic studios in the colony, took a similar photograph at Bulawayo prison in 1896.10 His work represents a very unusual break with typical photographs of this nature, which tended only to include men. In one of his photos, women, armed with guns, one of them even holding an infant in her other arm, stare resolutely into the lens. In this ‘frontier’ area, home to pioneering men and women, weapons were not only for men.

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land – that extreme forms of violence developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. William Harvey Brown, an American who fought with British troops during the conflict, explained the issue in his war memoirs: ‘People in distant countries are prone to criticise the residents of African colonies for bearing what is termed “race hatred” toward the blacks […] if those distant and well-meaning critics might have brought to their doors the dastardly outrages and pitiful tragedies enacted by the blacks against the whites in these frontier countries, there is not the slightest doubt that the white colonists would be regarded with more leniency than at present.’11 While British authors may not have used the same harsh rhetoric as their American colleagues, his reasoning is repeated in many articles and books published after the conflict.12 In this context, the troops and civilians under siege did not appear to have any great moral qualms over the hanging or shooting of Ndebele suspects, nor indeed over the portrayal of these actions in photographs. As mentioned before, these trophy images were not necessarily kept hidden. While walking past a barber’s shop in the town of Kimberley, the South African lawyer and politician Samuel Cronwright (1863–1936) spotted a large print on display for passersby to see (Figure 5.3).13 He bought it for a low price. The photograph was circulating in the surrounding territories, and a Johannesburg newspaper published the image in 1896.14 Baden-Powell also bought a print and pasted it into one of his diaries with the caption ‘Christmas tree’.15 The image was destined to travel from Southern Africa to Britain, outside the colonies in the strictest sense of the word. Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), Cronwright’s wife, was a novelist, and in 1897 she published a book entitled Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland. Appearing a couple of years before Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the book is a denunciation of colonial violence and of sexual abuse. Schreiner chose to use the photograph bought by her husband, reminiscent of the pictures of lynchings circulating in the American South at the time, as a frontispiece in the first edition of the book.16 The writer accepted a smaller royalty advance in anticipation of a libel suit by Cecil Rhodes, but in the end Rhodes did not go to trial. Although there was public debate about the image for a while, the scandal blew over.17 However, the support of Henry Labouchère (1831–1912), a Liberal MP and one of the first to denounce the abuses committed in Matabeleland in the British Parliament, was insufficient to prevent the image from being removed from later editions.18 What unfolded in Rhodesia was a special case, but not an isolated instance. A ‘frontier’ in the American sense, to the extent that some of the soldiers who took part in the fighting subsequently left for the Klondike in search of gold, the region had certain characteristics that explain why so many executions took place there and why they were photographed. Like Australia, it was a place where ‘settler colonialism’ was

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Figure 5.3 William Rausch (?); ‘The hanging of Matabele spies’ (also appeared with the title ‘From a photograph’), halftone print produced from an anonymous photograph taken in May or June 1896, frontispiece of the first edition of the book by Olive Schreiner, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (Unwin: London, 1896). According to Olive Schreiner, this type of photograph was intended to publicise the executions, since it was displayed in a shop in Kimberley. The tree in the frontispiece is a umganunkomo or false marula, a species common in the Bulawayo area. The onlookers are posing with their hands on their hips to avoid moving and becoming blurred, probably at the photographer’s request. The photograph is clearly posed. They are dressed in clothes and hats that were typical of members of the militia who were defending the European positions. Knotted ropes that may have been used as a means of restraint are tied around the ankles of the hanged men. The whole picture is in keeping with the first photographs taken in Matabeleland, and with the pictures of prisoners taken by William Rausch, who is certainly the photographer of this picture (entitled ‘During rebellion, 1896’ in his collection). Several stories and photographs helped turn the Bulawayo ‘Hanging Tree’ into a symbol after the independence of Zimbabwe. If this is the hanging site mentioned in several contemporary memoirs of the events, it was clearly used several times. In a book published immediately after the war, Frank Sykes, who took part in the operations in 1896, recounted that, ‘There is a tree, known as the hanging tree, to the north of the town, which did service as gallows. Hither the doomed men were conveyed. On the ropes being fastened to their necks, they were made to climb along an overhanging branch, and thence were pushed or compelled to jump into space [...] Their bodies were left suspended for twenty-four hours [...] Swift and decisive punishment was the only way to overawe the rebels.’19

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carried out with contempt for the indigenous peoples, who were seen primarily as obstacles. This practice was not characteristic of the British Empire as a whole. But while we should not lose sight of the many kinds of violence that occurred in the colonies, the photographs of the Ndebele dead allow us to identify a fundamental problem. What was actually seen or known about the extremes of war or repression in imperial metropoles was primarily determined by decisions and constraints within the many different colonial societies created by the expansion of European power around the world. The purpose here is to explore the functioning of these different regimes of visibility: photographs that were to remain private, those that were shared with a circle of comrades-in-arms, those for the family at home in the metropole, or even, as in Matabeleland, those that a whole group of colonists would accept. To understand these different strata of vision, we must return to the materiality of photographs, that is to say, to the specific media employed and the way they were used and circulated. There was a vast but inevitable chasm between personal photo albums and photogravures published by the press. But the two were nevertheless intertwined. And the wide range of intermediate media between these two extremes, such as postcards, made it possible to show certain aspects of organised violence to a limited audience. Less socially exclusive, these kinds of photographic uses were employed at the turn of the twentieth century and were used to construct a myriad of personal narratives. Some of them were only intended for closed circles, while others were shared with a wider audience. In the interplay of different kinds of circulation, the visibility of mass violence, war, and, in particular, colonial conflicts was never in doubt. A constellation of people in the metropoles and colonial societies received and saw these images, for professional or family reasons. But the photographs and their trajectories speak not only of violence; they are also a reflection of the deep underlying tensions within the British and French empires at the time. Private photographs: two albums compiled by rank-and-file soldiers Some of the most direct images of the violence committed in conflicts outside Europe at the time were never intended to be seen by more than a few people. These photographs were rarely intended for propaganda or as the visual appendage of a colonial system seeking to stamp its authority. They were meaningful mainly for the people who owned them, and they are often found in the private albums of those who participated in colonial expansion. These objects and their uses make up the first circle of photographs circulated. These personal albums, which included both photographs taken by their owners and prints purchased from professionals, were often constructed in a relatively

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uniform manner. While the individuality of those who created them is expressed, collective codes and shared expectations generally underpin the narratives conveyed by the images. Several studies have shown how many of these albums consolidated the social position of the colonists. Many of them depict a peaceful domesticity, with the owners surrounded by local servants.20 The capacity of photography to order memories and spaces was thus put to use in the creation of mementos that were rarely shared outside the family. The album is a souvenir, of which the nineteenth century was fond, whose purpose was to manifest a memory. Its materiality  – its format, the thickness of its pages, the captions handwritten by its owner, the traces of glue, and the care taken in displaying a given object – informs the way it should be read and understood.21 To understand these albums and other types of personal photo collections, it is important to keep in mind their tangible nature, even if isolating some of the images taken from these unique works means they may be seen in a very different manner. What is striking about the albums compiled by people who were both actors in colonial conflicts and observers of the violence they caused is the great consistency in the way these personal visual repertoires were constructed. The war or expedition album, documenting a stay in ‘distant’ lands, often obeys the same norms as the travel album, a form that had been particularly popular since the 1860s. The album frequently employs a structure that starts with the journey itself, in a sort of visual transit zone between the metropole and the overseas territory, before exploring the exoticisms and ethnographic types of the places travelled through. On occasion, a few pages will document the war, the fighting, and the fallen comrades more directly. The memories of the campaign thus give way to some reflections of violence. There are numerous variations on the theme, but there is a striking similarity in the visual paths reconstructed by those who created the albums. Like travellers and tourists, with whom they shared certain experiences, soldiers sent to conflicts outside Europe regularly used photographs to document their odysseys. Some built up large personal photographic archives, part of a more systematic project of self-documentation that may then have been addressed to a select social network. Marie Emmeran de Traversay (1852–1930), a photographer in his own right, produced more than twenty albums documenting his career, from Tonkin in the 1880s to Algeria in the early twentieth century.22 Charles Mangin (1866–1925) and Henri-Gouraud (1867–1946), two soldiers in the French Colonial Army, also amassed a large number of photographs.23 The images were filed afterwards, sometimes by companions, and give substance to experiences that were difficult to communicate because they were linked to distant places, inaccessible to those who had not been there. These visual repertoires of memories differed only in form from earlier means of recording individual experiences, such as diaries or sketchbooks. In many cases,

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both the framing and the subject matter were photographic variations on typical themes that had been represented for decades in drawings and paintings. Like travel albums, these photo albums may also have been part of a set of souvenirs, which could include ornaments and small trophies, brought back from the campaign and stored in a dedicated room. Little by little, photography and the placing of memories in albums seem to have transformed the very mechanisms of memory. The journey, the expedition, or the war, historically perceived by means of written accounts, paintings, or sketches, were now sometimes experienced as a succession of photographic images. Hubert Lyautey concludes one of the diaries he wrote during the ‘pacification’ of Madagascar as follows: ‘I lock up in a box in my brain the photos that I will develop in the form of a report at the first opportunity, and I load my cerebral camera with plates for the very different matters I will discover.’24 The aim here is to write a comparative history of imperial experiences, so let us compare the albums of two rank-and-file soldiers, one from France, the other from Britain. Neither were officers, whose albums are better represented in private collections and archives. The men compiled modest albums upon their return from war, a combination of their own personal photographs and some taken by comrades. They also included postcards and prints purchased from local studios. Both men were involved in the crushing of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, mentioned earlier. Many of the Western soldiers involved in these operations, which were photographed from many different perspectives, created albums while they were still in China or when they returned to Europe. Small, blank albums, whose covers were decorated with Chinese designs, were frequently used. Little is known about the French soldier. He was a marsouin, a soldier belonging to the marine infantry regiments that fought at Tianjin in the summer of 1900. His album, acquired by the Musée de l’Armée, bears the word ‘Goi’ and the date ‘1902’ on the spine.25 The compiler has not bothered to buy a real album, and the small booklet is similar in size to an octavo. He has made cuts to insert the corners of the prints, or he has glued them in. A few short captions comment on the images. It is an interesting object because of its modesty. Several photographs are from local studios; others seem to be amateur shots. The marsouin seems to have made a point of collecting images in China with the aim of organising them afterwards. What does he keep? There are pictures of junks, people in local dress, and views of Tianjin and Beijing. In some cases, the most iconic and inaccessible monuments of the Chinese rulers are seen in the hands of foreign soldiers, in a demonstration of power in which photography plays an essential role. As a counterpoint to the Chinese monuments and as proof of the abuses that the French have come to avenge, one image shows the ruins of the Tianjin Cathedral, destroyed during the Boxer Rebellion. Other foreign troops and their uniforms also play an important role in this collection. A major international event was

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being played out in Tianjin at the beginning of the twentieth century, attracting actors from Europe, America, and Asia, and this did not escape the notice of the anonymous marsouin, who kept a small record of his own. This album, a custodian of personal memories, has a portrait of a ‘congai’ (gallicised version of the Vietnamese con gái that referred to an indigenous concubine or prostitute) surrounded by marsouins, a not unusual type of photograph, since the arrival of thousands of foreign soldiers brought about a rapid growth in prostitution. Lastly, like many of his comrades, the marsouin could not resist including pictures of beheadings, of which there were many after the defeat of the Boxers (Figure 5.4). A veritable torture tourism took hold in certain

Figure 5.4 Anon., ‘Toilette d’un Boxer condamné à mort’ (Preparation of a Boxer condemned to death), circa 1900, gelatin silver developing-out paper, 10 cm × 8 cm. The end of the Boxer Rebellion provided ample opportunity to photograph scenes of executions in Tianjin. These images can be found in most archives on this conflict. There are French soldiers present in this photograph, as is quite normal for pictures of this type produced at the time. What makes this picture unique, however, is that it clearly demonstrates the emotions of the condemned man. His face does not show the impassivity that was then stereotypically attributed to the Chinese rebels, who were expected to die without showing any emotion. What does the original owner read in his modest collection of images? Albums are normally complemented by written comments, but there is nothing here to explain the picture.

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Chinese cities, and this anonymous marsouin’s album contains three photos of such horrific scenes. The National Maritime Museum holds an album by Frank G. Smith (1879–1952), the second of our two soldiers, who embarked on HMS Orlando in 1900 as a Royal Marine on a mission to raise the siege of the international legations in Tianjin. Like the anonymous marsouin, Smith collected souvenirs in China, which he put into an album and various notebooks.26 On his return, he created a veritable miniature personal museum. A matchbox collector, he glued Chinese matchboxes to the first and last pages of his album, as an invitation to his journey. A sort of portable cabinet of curiosities, his album contains writings, original photographs, postcards produced in China, and dried plants (Figure 5.5). As in the compilation by the marsouin, Smith includes stock photographs, but he also adds others, from bandaged feet to ‘freaks of nature’. There is also a portrait of his ‘Japanese girl’. Like the marsouin, he had no qualms about including pictures of torture and executions. In a montage that is particularly difficult to look at, he juxtaposes a picture of a dismembered ‘Boxer’ with a picture of a missionary’s corpse in a coffin. Crime is answered with punishment in this macabre presentation. Here again, the photo is a reconstruction. The image of

Figure 5.5 Frank G. Smith, full page from his personal album, various silver prints and dried plants stuck on cardboard, c. 1902.

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the Chinese rebel, which Smith entitles ‘Remains of a Chinaman Cut and Tortured to Death by Boxers’ was in fact several years old at the time and demonstrated the practice of lingchi, the ‘death by a thousand cuts’ that particularly excited some members of the European public at the time.27 Smith, who was particularly interested in beheadings, also included the same image of an execution twice.28 He inserted clearly amateur snapshots alongside images bought from studios. These seemingly more authentic pictures are unlike the formal commercial ones, as they reveal a more personal perspective on events. Smith thus takes control of the narrative of his own experiences and reconstructs them with images that he reinvents through his own captions. The highly elliptical nature of these handwritten comments, or their complete absence, shows that the compiler did not necessarily have an outside reader in mind. The narrative has gaps that only he can fill. The photographic souvenirs brought back by these soldiers resemble each other in many ways. The circumstances in China at the turn of the century produced similar narratives. Frank G. Smith’s album and that of the anonymous marsouin are by no means unique. Images were clearly exchanged amongst soldiers of the same nationality to the extent that a shared repertoire of ‘public images’29 emerged. The photographs brought back by soldiers of different origins seemed to merge in a first visual globalisation of the experience of war. Other soldiers sold negatives to local studios, who sold them on as prints to European or American customers. The albums echoed the themes chosen by the press or adopted in the series of stereoscopic pictures that were published a few months after the war.30 Personal photographs are juxtaposed with stock shots. In these albums, national differences give way to a more global approach that includes a number of frequently repeated subgenres: the boat ride, the expected ‘local colour’, the ready-selected monuments and places in the repetitious narrative of Western tourism. The photographic narrative of the Chinese Campaign created by these rank-and-file soldiers was based on similar visual cultures. Their collections lie at the intersection of the collective and the private, the banal and the exceptional. They constitute a symbiosis that is constantly readapted to create a personal narrative that fits in partly with those on a much grander scale. These two albums do not reflect insignificant or even isolated microhistories. Beyond the individuals who created them, they testify to the emergence of new ways of describing the conflicts that were being played out in places and on scales that were utterly alien to these European soldiers. Like thousands of soldiers caught up in the Boer War at the same time, they exchanged images and bought prints and postcards to create their own souvenirs. The new uses of photography that spread at the time do not necessarily fit into today’s categories. Categories are refined over time, and

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rightly so. The ‘colonial’ world and its internal gradations were distinguished from other spaces, informal empires where the influence of the great European powers was exerted more indirectly than in the officially subjugated territories. It should not be forgotten, however, that many of these soldiers moved between these areas without recognising such differences. Their experiences, and their albums, do not fit into our boxes. During their travels, photography, like a common thread, played an increasingly prominent role in private records of war and violence. These albums could not be shown to just anybody, however, because they contained images likely to be misunderstood or labelled as bad taste. Souvenirs of prostitutes, dark tourism, and photographs of atrocities all find a place in the albums, but they are only intended for a select audience. Beyond the repeated forms and themes typical of many of these personal war albums, it is these pictures that were meant to remain private that can also reveal what violence meant to their compilers. The rarity of these revelations does not detract from their interest. Fault-lines and fragments sometimes say more than sturdy architecture. Regimes of visibility and colonial experiences In some cases, personal photographic collections drastically differed from collective narratives. Extreme photographs that could not be revealed to more than a close circle, for fear of prompting a scandal, were deliberately hidden within these private albums. Like the photographs of executions that were implicitly reserved for settlers in Rhodesia, some photographers had pictures of particularly brutal images that they knew had to be kept out of sight. The collection of Edgard Imbert (1873–1915) is a perfect illustration of this phenomenon. Edgard Imbert, who took part in the ‘pacification’ operations in the south of Madagascar at the turn of the twentieth century, was one of the many official photographers requested by Joseph Gallieni (governor of Madagascar from 1896) to create a photographic record of the time. Imbert’s meticulous work – thousands of carefully preserved negatives and positives produced during his stays in the colonies  – has come down to us without too many changes. Imbert died suddenly on the Western front in 1915, leaving an apparently complete and well-organised collection. Passed down through his family from generation to generation, most of the collection is still intact. It is currently kept at the Établissement de communication et de production audiovisuelle de la Défense (ECPAD). Imbert was an excellent photographer. His technical mastery enabled him to produce countless images of his time in the colonies. The formats and media he used were chosen carefully depending on his objectives. He explored the nude with large formats, for example, and favoured the Verascope and stereoscopic plates for the

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shots taken during his expeditions. The photographs were filed meticulously and commented on in rigorously kept notebooks. The written word is essential: Imbert’s photographs can only be understood alongside his notes. They make up a veritable edifice, a personal photographic museum in which all the styles of what might be called colonial photography are represented: archaeological views, anthropological portraits, carto-photography, exoticisms: nothing seemed to escape his lens. His oeuvre is fascinating because it follows a range of different regimes of visibility. It includes stock shots that demonstrate the progress of French colonialism in Madagascar with pictures of ceremonies, modern buildings, and infrastructures. It also includes pictures that obey the canons of exotic photography of the time. His most classic images reached a wide audience, with some sold to postcard producers such as Paul Couadou from Toulon and others ending up in L’Illustration or the colonial press.31 His images were also used in lectures.32 The photographs that were seen by the public fit into an established framework and nourished his superiors’ discourse of a triumphant colonialism, protector of the subjugated peoples and their cultures.33 A second set of images is arranged in albums that are annotated in his own hand. They depict his life in the colonies and the social ascent made possible by his military career in distant lands (Figure 5.6). He reveals the interior of his house in Hanoi in the 1900s, and there are pictures of his wife, his network of friends, and their life in the capital of Indochina. He constructs a narrative that makes almost no reference to the often-troubled context in which the French were living in the colony at the time. His albums, like those studied by Susie Protschky in the Dutch East Indies, aim, at least in part, to perform ‘certain domestic ideals’.34 The images in the albums reflect a ‘colonial habitus’ that can be found in many other albums compiled by European settlers at the time.35 These were the subjects that could be shown. Photographs, whether pasted in an album or displayed on one’s walls, played an essential role in representing one’s life and in endowing the colonial situation with an air of stability. There were few traces of troubles in these sets of semi-private images. Violence, which was never far away in Indochina, as we have seen, only makes a few occasional appearances in Imbert’s albums. Imbert, however, kept another selection of images that are very different from the rest of his photographic oeuvre. These are disorganised, unnumbered, and clearly at odds with the rest of his collection. There are four groups of projection plates that show executions. The first is entirely dedicated to a lingchi execution. A second series shows a beheading in Indochina in August 1908. A third shows the execution of Malagasy rebels by firing squad; while a fourth includes three pictures of the decapitated head of a ‘rebel’ on a spike (Figure 5.7). With the exception of the pictures of the Chinese torture, three of the series illustrate particularly extreme episodes from Imbert’s own

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Figure 5.6 Edgard Imbert, page 10 of Indochina album, 1905–08, five aristotype prints, pictures no. 606–10. Boulevard Carnot in Hanoi, where Imbert’s house was located, was at the heart of the European quarter in the capital of Indochina. In these photographs, the lieutenant demonstrates his social ascent and his recent marriage. In the upper right-hand corner, Madame Imbert sits on a rickshaw pulled by a coolie. This type of image, showing various means of transport pulled or carried by locals, can be found in many family albums from the European colonies. Household staff serving food and drink is also a common theme. These images reinforced the social order that was being constructed in these spaces at the time.

experience in the colonies.36 In each case, the images depict the killing of individuals who have opposed French authority. The images from Indochina, for example, show the execution of Ha-Hien, who had been accused of attempting to poison the Hanoi garrison in June 1908. At a time when local servants were handling the food of Europeans on a daily basis, the affair caused real panic. The images from Madagascar date from the period when Imbert was accompanying Lyautey as he attempted to ‘pacify’ the south of the island in 1900–02. These two accidental traces of executions confirm testimonies published years later on the macabre images produced in certain ‘cercles’ – the name given to administrative entities in the French colonies. Lyautey, in his book, carefully omits any mention of these abuses.37 But Calixte Savaron, who worked for Charles Le Myre de Vilers, resident-general of Madagascar from 1886 to 1889, and who then stayed on the Grande Île, tells

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Figure 5.7 Edgard Imbert and anonymous, ‘Au marché’ (At the market), Madagascar, 1900–02, silver chlorobromide glass plate, 6 cm × 13 cm. One of the plates is captioned ‘Tsiza-Rona’, which may be the name of the person executed. Tsizaraina is a family name, while Be-Tsizaraina was used at the beginning of the twentieth century as the name of a village located in the Ampetika plain, southeast of Antananarivo, in an area that Imbert was travelling through at the time. The photograph, taken with a Verascope, is obviously staged. The head of the supposed rebel is photographed from three different angles, and the event is choreographed. In this picture, a crowd of villagers looks on. Both the shots and the display of the head are intended to draw attention to the punishment inflicted on the ‘rebel’. Few people outside the circle of troops and inhabitants involved in the conflict saw these pictures, as they were kept separate in Imbert’s private collection, and there is no evidence of wider circulation.

of having witnessed extreme violence in areas that were less well controlled. He commented that heads were placed on spikes on the outskirts of Ambatomanga, a village fifty kilometres from Antananarivo, and regularly replaced by new ones.38 These macabre series reveal the existence of forces attempting to oppose colonisation. Ultimately, they bear witness to resistance, to incidents of extreme violence, and so it is no coincidence that they should be kept separate. They were part of a broader movement that was still in its infancy at the time: image management. Imbert was, of course, not alone in keeping particularly disturbing images in the pages of albums reserved for discreet viewers.39 Several of those involved in the 1896–97 British expedition to the Langeberg Mountains (present-day South Africa), for example, are seen posing around the corpse of Luka Jantjie, leader of the Batlhaping people, who were then fighting the European settlers.40 These images were stuck into albums reserved for a closed circle, as these practices, as we have seen, risked sparking outrage. One of the soldiers involved in the repression kept Luka Jantjie’s skull as a trophy, however, and this caused a scandal.41 In 1906, soldier-photographers in the colony of Natal documented the campaign against the Bambatha Rebellion. After emigrating to Africa, William Harte (1874–1915), originally from Ireland and a member of the Natal Carbineers, put

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together an impressive personal collection of photographs.42 Like Edgard Imbert, he catalogued his pictures carefully. He gave them clear captions and then completed lists of negatives and prints. Alongside classic images of camps and marches, there are some discordant images. Several are ‘tableaux vivants’ showing European militiamen dressed in clothes and weapons taken from the nearly 500 rebels they had just killed on 8 July 1906. Others depict prisoners. One shows a rebel whose mouth has been blown off by a piece of shrapnel. He is wearing bandages and appears to be receiving treatment in a field hospital, but one can see the legs of a man who is pointing the rebel’s head towards the lens. Such images were usually kept in private albums or circulated amongst select circles. Their authors understood the pictures might confirm the rumours about the behaviour of the settlers fighting in the region at the time and undermine their aims. Even those who were particularly aware of the effect of images sometimes kept unexpected photographs in private albums that would contradict narratives praising colonial order should they come to light. One example is an album created by Hubert Lyautey, whose acute awareness of the need to control the narrative of his colonial ‘pacifications’ has already been mentioned. In the album on operations in southwest Morocco in 1908, he placed a picture showing him standing together with Captain Maury and General Baïlloud (Figure 5.8). The corpse of an enemy soldier can be seen directly behind them. The picture was not a random snapshot; the corpse provides the backdrop to a celebration of military victory. This photograph is almost unique in Lyautey’s archives, the documents of a man who, right from the beginning of his career, was preoccupied with his legacy, classifying and controlling his correspondence, his collections of images, and his manuscripts. The image exposes precisely what this ardent and sincere defender of measured colonisation (and of a kind of conquest that was as nonviolent as possible) refused to mention about his work in the colonies: the recurrent resistance of local people and the chaos of battle. Insignificant blind spots? What purposes did these images serve for their owners? There may have been many reasons for keeping the photos, not least because albums were sometimes compiled years later, in new contexts. Often, photos were collected out of pure curiosity. Many of the photographs were less a sign of a desire for possession or domination than a desire to prompt surprise. They may have satisfied a macabre voyeurism made possible by the invention of photography. But there is nothing ‘colonial’ or ‘imperial’ about this per se. Some soldiers kept pictures of dead enemies during the First World War, which were clearly nothing to do with European expansion in Africa or Asia. The photography of death goes beyond such categories. This does not mean that we

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Figure 5.8 Anon., ‘Sur le terrain de combat de Menabba, 16 Avril 1908’ (On the field of combat in Menabba, 16 April 1908), silver print from a glass negative mounted in an album entitled Béchar Guir-Zousfana Saoura. In his book La Chambre claire, Roland Barthes refers to the concept of the punctum, the detail that undermines the rhetoric of the image and that is often identified after the event. Behind this portrait of officers involved in the French military penetration of the Moroccan Middle Atlas Mountains, one can see the corpse of a harka combatant who had been fighting against the French advances near Mengoub. The image is quite exceptional amongst Hubert Lyautey’s photographs. A proponent of ‘pacification’ based mainly on collaboration with locals and a limited use of force, he criticised the brutality employed by the officers in the ‘Sudanese’ school who conquered West Africa from the 1880s onwards. Both in his practice and in his pictures, he was careful not to overuse violence. This photograph, however, together with other equally disturbing pictures in the same album, testifies to the intensity of local resistance and its capacity to disturb such schemas.

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should discount these photographs, even if they are outnumbered by a mass of other images. It should also be said that the photographs did not necessarily aim to demean the victims in the eyes of those who survived them and who may have identified with them. The pictures may never have been made public, and the desecration would thus have remained private. In some cases, former comrades were brought closer together by these mementos that were impossible, or too dangerous, to share with nonveterans. Shocking photographs, such as trophy images of soldiers posing with dead enemies, could embody the shared experience of exposure to moral extremes or borderline situations and the pact of discretion that surrounded them. They also made it possible to overcome the inability to express and write down the intense feelings produced by the violence of combat and the spectacle of particularly unbearable events. Like group portraits, the purpose of this type of photography was to prove that one had been there and, for some, to bear witness to war as ‘the ultimate refuge from the disgust of a banal and flat existence’.43 The exchange of photographs amongst soldiers bound the community together. Photographs also seemed to play a significant role in the way military units recorded their own history. Some regimental albums, a tradition firmly established in Britain since the end of the nineteenth century and deserving of more attention, occasionally include photographs of this nature alongside portraits of officers, group photos, and pictures of barracks.44 The silence may be linked to the fact that direct combat experience was often only talked about amongst former soldiers. It could also be attributed to the rapidly changing tolerance thresholds and geopolitical contexts that made it difficult to express the memory of certain wars that had subsequently become a cause of shame. The choice to incorporate brutal images that were quite unlike the stock images was linked to the feeling of having experienced events that were impossible to communicate to noncombatants. In fact, many of those involved expressed the idea that it was impossible to explain what they had been through because it was so geographically and mentally alien to their interlocutors. Walter Ford, who fought in the Boer War with the Army Ordnance Corps, confessed to his sister that nobody could understand what a ‘Tommy’ had to go through.45 Another reason for the soldiers’ discretion may have been that the pictures showed events that ran contrary to official messaging. For example, the album of an anonymous soldier of the 1st Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment, stationed at Vryheid in the Transvaal between 1900 and 1901, contains several pictures of Zulu allies of British troops during the Boer War.46 Alongside more traditional shots depicting these fighters as primitive warriors, some pictures show them next to cannons or handling a Maxim machinegun. This contradicted public discourse, which was often silent on the use of these troops, who were at best presented as archaic.

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The purpose of some albums was to bridge the gap between the perception of war by family members who only read about it in the news, and the soldier’s actual experiences.47 The revelation to others of images documenting the horror of their experiences made it possible to reveal the ‘true’ face of war. Charles Foulkes (1875–1969), a pioneer of military photography, compiled albums long after his return from the Boer War. The enemy had often seemed impossible to pin down in this guerrilla war, but at the Battle of Driefontein on 10 March 1900, Foulkes finally

Figure 5.9 Charles Foulkes, ‘Real Boer, battle of Driefontein’, c. 1899–1900, silver halide print, 9.8 cm × 6.2 cm. Foulkes was an outstanding photographer who rarely had trouble developing his negatives. Here, however, a problem in the process partly obscures the enemy corpse. Was this a complete accident or the result of his unease over the subject? The error is what makes this image special: its imperfection and its subject matter make it almost unique in the work of this officer.

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took a photograph of an enemy corpse, a picture he stuck into one of his albums. It is not a trophy photograph, however; Foulkes adds a caption that presents the reader – his family first and foremost – with a ‘real Boer’ killed during this modern guerrilla war (Figure 5.9). A similar image can be found in an album created by John Archer (1871–1954). The album covers his entire military career, spent in the far reaches of the British Empire, from Sudan to Mashonaland. It brings together in one place what historical research often divides into areas, or into contemporary distinctions between what is colonial or not, imperial or not: what remains is a career spent fighting all over the world.48 Archer took or collected dozens of amateur shots for his private album, particularly from the Boer War. He clearly demonstrates the brutality of the conflict: here, the body of a Boer, there, pictures of burnt farms (the end of the conflict was characterised by a scorched earth policy), and elsewhere, Boer women being taken to concentration camps. The war shown in Archer’s photography is strikingly different to that shown in the engravings in the illustrated magazines of the time. The album, parts of it created much later, was designed to communicate his own experience to his family, without censoring the harshest aspects. On the first page, a handwritten note refers to his daughter, Betty, reflecting the link created between him and his family by means of the album, which represented a writing of the self. Of course, the use of photography by soldiers and other witnesses of mass violence is not unique to the age of colonialism. Similar analyses could be made by looking at the private albums of soldiers in later conflicts. But several simultaneous phenomena, in particular the democratisation of photography and the essentially extra-European geography of war between the 1870s and the 1900s, meant that the violence linked to the expansion of European influence in the world was now being caught on camera. This forces us to rethink the chronology of war photography. The European actors in these conflicts were amongst the first to experiment with these uses of photography.49 The context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when war was largely conducted outside Europe, saw a shift in the way war was presented; it was now recounted through the eyes of participants, not those at the top of the hierarchy. Photography, sometimes presented as a ‘demotic art’, thus played a part in changing perceptions of violence, and the photographic album acted as a receptacle for these new depictions. These albums, kept within networks of veterans, friends, and relatives, included amateur images showing what was rarely revealed by the mass media. The changes, however, were not only found in these private albums; other media and other photographic forms made it possible for these images to reach a wider public.

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Privatisation of war: reflections on Morocco We need to go back to the nature of the photographic media used to understand a second way in which photographs were employed in communicating experiences of organised violence. Photographs were often used in the correspondence sent by both witnesses and actors. It is not unusual, for example, to find prints attached to letters in private collections. More commonly, however, it was via postcards bearing news from the field that images were connected to the written word. These forms of illustration provided a more vivid and better documented personal account of the campaigns and repression that accompanied the expansion of the British and French empires. As cameras became more portable and pictures easier to develop, it became more common to attach photographs to letters. Images enabled actors to offer an insight into the realities on the ground. Negatives and prints circulated between photographers, while small-scale improvised markets enabled people to build up collections of prints. André Maux (1886–1915), a colonel and doctor in the 1st Marching Regiment of Moroccan Tirailleurs, accompanied the Tadla Campaign in Morocco in 1913. He took photographs himself and sent numerous prints to his family. When he had the time, he tried to capture the operations as closely as possible. In March 1913, he wrote: ‘I have had some wonderful lenses, but I have also had other things to do […] Nevertheless, last night, I photographed another execution […] My picture will not be very good, because some smoke got in my way when I was taking the photograph.’50 A few months later, he sent ‘a certain number of small photos taken by a captain of the Spahis during the last march […] You will see various aspects of the crossing of the Oum in Rbia, during which we had 17 men drown […] These deaths are obviously not included in the official figures.’51 As the expeditions progressed, he gave a detailed account of what he observed, emphasising how his version did not correspond with communication from the commanders: ‘After Mogador, they didn’t want to know anything […] Everything must be calm since Morocco has been pacified.’52 As with albums put together some time after the event, and in contrast to these necessarily more fragmented dispatches, letters explaining events had a complex relationship with the more official forms of communication. Clare Harris has shown that Frederick Bailey, one of the noncommissioned officers on the Younghusband Mission to Tibet, enclosed photographic prints in letters to his mother.53 Some of these were so gruesome that he expressly asked his family not to circulate them. Of course, these evocations of the violence of conquest are, again, only a few examples of a highly varied set of reflections on the experiences of these soldiers. It is impossible to establish any meaningful quantitative analysis at this time, as many of these personal collections are now held in various private archives. It is true that these

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scattered traces of new ways of looking at war are drowned in a stream of much more classic images usually dominated by tourist motifs and snapshots of soldiers’ travels. But they nevertheless reflect the beginning of a transformation in visualisations of violence. In this field, as in many others, there was a gradual shift towards photography as a means of providing evidence of events. In our exploration of photographic media and their circulation, it is impossible not to mention postcards. As Gilles Teulié points out, it was at the turn of the twentieth century, and during the Boer War, that the format was standardised in Europe. Initially artisanal products, they subsequently benefitted from increasing industrialisation. All you needed to produce them was a collotype printer, which could rapidly pay its way. The hundreds of millions of postcards sent around the world each year between 1900 and 1910 played an essential role in maintaining ties amongst acquaintances and family members who had moved to other parts of the world. This was true both of settlers who had left for Asia or Africa to seek their fortune, and of soldiers, some of whom had to travel the world in a manner that was previously unheard of. Inexpensive and available to all, these snippets of text and images had a different function from albums, which employed a more linear narrative. The cheaply produced captioned photographs played a role in the construction of new colonial identities. They visually situated European societies established in the conquered territories, both for family and friends in the metropole and for others living in these new spaces. New communities were invented using numerous media, including photography, especially in its more modest formats. It is therefore not surprising that there were studios selling a wide variety of postcards in most of the colonies and major crossroads of the first globalisation – like Hong Kong or Alexandria. Soldier-photographers were involved in both the production and consumption of these images, with the photographic studios buying pictures from soldiers to broaden their supply. Jules Sénèque (1866–1915), an officer who managed the Bara region in Madagascar at the beginning of the twentieth century, and who subsequently settled in Indochina in 1907, sold several series of photographs to local postcard producers, such as H. Cattin in Fianarantsoa. One of the main postcard producers in Indochina, Pierre Dieulefils (1862–1937), was quick to buy images from officer-photographers. There were numerous examples of this kind of collaboration in both the French and the British empires. These ‘colonial’ postcards, and those featuring nude women, have been the subject of much – sometimes fraught – analysis.54 They generally perpetuated colonialist ideologies and exotic perceptions rather than revealing more troubling facets of travel, exploration, and colonial domination. These image-texts – the link between the illustration, its caption, and the text written by the sender is essential for making sense of the postcard – often have the effect of making what is presented in the non-European

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context appear timeless. The landscape, the ruin, the ethnic type appear frozen in time. In fact, postcard producers regularly recycled pictures, sometimes from decades earlier, to the extent that some of the designs created at that time survive to this day. Some postcards, however, provided shocking perspectives on war, repression, and the instability of the colonial situation. Occasionally, these images were available shortly after the event. These discordant photographs were a minority at the time, although they were not altogether exceptional. They followed a particular geography and did not emerge in all places. Their existence reveals a diversity of contexts which we must attempt to make sense of. One of the most important series was produced after the bombardment of Casablanca in 1907 during the French conquest of Morocco. Several professional photographers, who also made postcards, joined the manoeuvres and documented the campaigns over several years. They clearly had authorisation – whether official or informal – as some of the images reveal how close they were to the combatants and the fighting itself.55 Paul Azan (1874–1951), then a captain, accompanied General d’Amade on the campaign against the Beni Snassen in northwest Morocco in 1907. In his Souvenirs de Casablanca, which contains a foreword by d’Amade, Azan provides a detailed account of his practice as a photographer, Kodak in hand as he observed operations up-close.56 Some of his pictures showing the French in difficulty were even published in the metropolitan press. L’Illustration and Le Petit journal reproduced similar graphic photographs of dying and wounded French combatants by Jean du Taillis (1873–1932).57 One of the most active producers of this type of card, Marcelin Flandrin (1889–1957), took and bought pictures of the 1912 campaign, which he sold from his studio in Casablanca. Other producers, such as Joseph Boussuge, documented the French military advances in Morocco from 1907 onwards.58 Those who produced these series did not shy away from showing the most violent aspects of the fighting. On the contrary, in some cases, they showed mutilated bodies and mass graves without the filters typical of visualisations of other colonial conquests (Figure 5.10). Many of them came close to the aesthetics of the emerging profession of war photojournalism, getting as close as possible to the gunfire. While it is impossible to measure the number of postcards produced on the Moroccan campaigns, their ubiquity in the archives indicates that they were popular with soldiers.59 Several inevitably inconclusive hypotheses about the repeated appearance of brutal images in these series can be put forward. Most of the cards were stamped by the military postal authorities, meaning they were sent in full view of the commanders. It seems, therefore, that the officers encouraged, or at least tolerated, this manner of privatising the war. Where the contemporary observer sees the horrors of war, some of the consumers and readers of these postcards see a kind of pedagogy of violence. On the back of a postcard published by Maillet in 1912–13, one soldier

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Figure 5.10 Anon., ‘Ensevelissement des cadavres marocains, tués aux combats de Beni-Ouzien et Bou-Denib’ (Burial of Moroccan corpses, killed in combat at Beni-Ouzien and Bou-Denib), 1907–08, postcard, Geiser, Algiers. Beni Ozayem and Boudnib are oases located in what is now the Drâa-Tafilalet region in Morocco. They were attacked in 1908 by a French column commanded by General Vigny. The first attack, on 13 May, was a disaster. But better artillery preparation enabled the French to take these positions the following day. The photographer is unknown, but we do know the studio that printed the card: the Geiser studio. Pictures of Moroccan corpses became commonplace from 1907 onwards, at a time when France was intervening directly in the region following the Algeciras Conference of 1906 and the bombardment of Casablanca in August 1907, which triggered the long Moroccan Campaign (1907–30s). This picture is like many others that sought to depict the enemy as radicalised ‘fanatics’. The conflict in Morocco was also internal, between the central power – the makhzen – and the centrifugal forces of the local alliances, a situation that tended to exacerbate the violence.

wrote: ‘I am sending you the latest pictures of the Mogador Campaign in Morocco. There is talk that French troops are to conduct a similar one in Germany.’60 At a time when military correspondence was full of references to an imminent, and at times intensely desired, European war, demonstrations of force and their effects on real enemies were not fortuitous, particularly in a Morocco long coveted by Germany. Photography provided evidence of the destructive capabilities of the French Army. These postcards revealed a harsh but desirable, or at least conceivable, war. They were perhaps also a means of demonstrating the likely nature of the imminent war, like the cards produced and sent during the Boxer Rebellion or the Russo-Japanese War.61

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This demonstration of French firepower was also aimed at local societies, especially those populations living in the cities where the studios selling and displaying these images were located. These pictures of the humbling of rebel leaders, mass graves, and manoeuvres were far from invisible in Morocco. In a country where there was known to be considerable resistance to photography, it was a way of reinforcing the violence meted out during the conquest.62 Collected by Charles Mangin, who commanded one of the French columns involved in the most intense fighting in 1912–13, and pasted into his albums, these pictures were considered to be an acceptable reflection of what was happening in Morocco from the point of view of a commander (Figure 5.11). They also demonstrate that there were shifts in the threshold of what could be shown in North Africa at the time. A few words written on the image itself or on the back of the card, however, could give a new and unexpected meaning to the violence seen in the photograph. Like André Maux, mentioned above, rank-and-file soldiers used postcards to tell their own stories of war, which often differed from those of their commanders. Sergeant Bousquet of the 2nd Foreign Regiment wrote on the back of a postcard produced by P. Grébert (Casablanca): ‘Liberation of the capital by our impressive forces after three months’ siege […] We had to give them not only our sweat and blood but also our flouss [money].’63 Like many other combatants, he needed only a few lines to describe an especially trying conflict. The horror of the mutilation of corpses by enemies, and sometimes by one’s own friends, was also described on postcards. One soldier, sending a picture of three decapitated corpses to his parents back in Laon, wrote: ‘I am sending you this card which will give you an idea of the atrocities that have taken place in Morocco.’64 The Service historique de la Défense in Vincennes holds another example of the dissonant use of postcards during the Moroccan campaigns: the modest Journal de marche du 14e bataillon de chasseurs au Maroc, 2e compagnie.65 The journal, which is anonymous, is not an official document and was the work of just one individual, a participant in the fighting, who wrote it during the campaign or shortly afterwards. Whether the work was for his own consumption or intended to be seen by his fellow soldiers, it is a bitter text that relates the harshness of the war. Rumours circulated at the end of 1912 during fighting near Dar el-Kadi that buried comrades had been ‘dug up and horribly mutilated’, ‘their heads promenaded amongst the tribes’.66 At the end of a night in the trenches of the kasbah of Dar el-Kadi, the soldiers commanded by General Brulard and besieged by Moroccan troops contemplated the battlefield: ‘A frightening spectacle […] From the Casba [sic] one can see nothing but completely naked Moroccan corpses and, next to them, rotting Frenchmen. It is horrible to see [...] The riflemen dug a vast hole where all these corpses were buried and set on fire.’67 The account departs significantly from the official discourse and

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Figure 5.11 Charles Mangin, albums of pictures of the campaign in Morocco from 1912–13, postcards mounted on cardboard. The handwritten notes in this album are in the hand of Antoinette Charlotte Cavaignac, Charles Mangin’s second wife, a sign of the role of the album within the family. Present during the campaign, her appearance in the album represents an unusual transgression of the codes of the imagery of these colonial wars, in which European women were generally absent. The arrangement of the postcards on this page dedicated to the events of March 1913 in Morocco has a narrative dimension. Pictures of the battle are followed by pictures of corpses mutilated by the enemy. In the background, the troops are seen restoring order to a territory subjected to uncontrolled violence. War is presented as the solution to chaos. The violence of the images contrasts with the final postcard, which shows the Marabout of Boujad, an ally of the French and a potential guarantor of stability.

openly criticises senior officers. In the spring of 1913, the author comments on a particularly harsh battle: ‘There were a hundred dead, three hundred wounded, and we never found out how many disappeared: this was the price of Colonel Mangin’s violent heroics.’68 At the end of the notebook, there are several postcards from a series

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published by P. Mailler entitled ‘Maroc, colonne de Mogador’ (Morocco, Mogador column). When illuminated by the text, the pictures of the humbling of Moroccan leaders, burning villages, burials of those who ‘died for the fatherland’, and mutilated corpses take on a dissonant meaning. As appendices to a soldier’s-eye view of the events, the photographs tell of a war that is much harsher than that described in official records and photographs published in the metropolitan press. Once again, the images of organised violence escaped the control of the perpetrators. These modest photographic media enabled those who participated in colonial conquest themselves to challenge the established narratives.69 This was not only the case in Morocco. Between 1904 and 1905, amidst the flood of exotic images of colonial landscapes and cities, postcards sent by German soldiers involved in the genocide of the Herero and the Nama in present-day Namibia sometimes revealed the brutality of the repression to correspondents in Germany.70 Later, it was the northern frontier of British India that provided pictures of particularly bloody spectacles on postcards produced by the Mehra studio in Peshawar.71 Like the prints attached to letters or placed in albums, these images  – always linked to a text and always to be situated within the context of a specific social group – brought insights into the wars waged outside Europe to French, British, and German recipients. The violence of war was not entirely invisible. Between the photographs that were seen by people other than their intended recipients, such as the images of the conflict against the Ndebele, and those that reached family and friends in the form of cards, a network, albeit a small one, saw the effects of the organised violence associated with these extra-European conflicts. In the absence of extensive digitisation and cataloguing projects, it is impossible to establish a precise cartography of the pictures circulated in this way. But several subgroups in metropolitan, colonial, and colonised societies all saw images and texts that showed the conflict from a new angle.72 Gradations, censorship, and self-censorship Images of violence were produced in some places and not others, even though there may have been major operations and brutal repression taking place there too. It is impossible in a book of this length to do full justice to the diversity of contexts. In order to explore them, it is up to the reader to take advantage of the references. The scale here is necessarily small, and one must accept that by adopting such an angle some detail is lost. However, there are several elements that are worth highlighting. The most shocking images of manifestations of force were not produced everywhere. They corresponded to a specific geography which, being as fluid and complex as it was, cannot be reduced to one single category of ‘colonial’ territory or ‘imperial’ space. Populations were subjected to extreme forms of violence. This was particularly the

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case in border areas, for example in Matabeleland and the northern border of British India. But not all areas where force was used produced the same types of organised violence, nor therefore the same spectacles. To lump practices of war or punishment into a single category of ‘colonial violence’ is to overlook the variety of contexts, to level out the varying degrees of ‘coloniality’ in territories under European influence.73 Not all areas where a conflict led to the use of armed force were the same in this respect. As will be seen below, not all opponents were viewed in the same way. The intensity of resistance or the resilience of a rebellion could lead to a change in sensibilities regarding violence, both in terms of its concrete use and the way it was represented in the media. It is unsurprising to note an apparent overlap between the hierarchy of presentable violence and the hierarchy of races and their supposed fanaticism. The ‘small wars’ in Africa, for example, provided numerous opportunities to display atrocities. Experimentation in photography was often in step with the exploration of different manners of conquering and subduing local populations. Far from the centres of power, the inevitable improvisation and the widespread use of auxiliary troops and militias encouraged excesses. The most shocking private and public images, even for the time, came from places where the control of the metropolitan authorities and headquarters was weakened by distance, lack of communication channels, and soldiers’ own initiatives. At the same time, the use of photography was also less controlled. There were thus gradations in the depiction of violence in images and in words. Existing collections reveal, for example, that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were fewer direct images of violence from areas such as British India – with the exception of the northern frontier – than in other areas.74 The emergence of vigorous protest movements capable of effectively reappropriating images certainly played a role in the relative restraint of those who took and disseminated photographs.75 In other areas, the resistance of settlers or local populations to the use of photography meant that problematic subjects were less likely to be captured, whether violence – which almost always eluded the camera – or other scenes that were forbidden to the outsider.76 Thus, another important aspect to keep in mind is that these types of events were sometimes deliberately not photographed at all or, if they were, pictures of the events have not yet emerged. A new representation of organised violence was constructed during wars or acts of repression that only indirectly involved France or Britain. They were documented more openly, since there was no risk of specific policies of power projection being called into question. It was less risky to show the detail of other nations’ wars. The Spanish–American War (1898), the Philippine–American War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Balkan Wars, the Italian Campaign in Libya, and

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the atrocities in the Belgian Congo were thus exposed by the French and British with less concern than the conflicts they were involved in themselves. From this point of view, one can note a geography of visualisations of violence. Within the global economy of the photographic image that developed at the turn of the twentieth century, conflicts or situations of repression that were sufficiently remote from European viewers, such as wars waged by foreign powers, constituted a first space of the transformation of perspectives on mass violence. A second space brought together operations that can be described as ‘imperial’, in the sense that they involved actors with whom one could identify, but in which there was no one single nation leading the offensive. The Boxer Rebellion, in which various national perspectives were blurred, is an example. A last constellation of images was related to strictly ‘colonial’ situations. In this last category, the appropriateness of forms of projection of national power was clearly in question because the territory in which the problem occurred was under the direct responsibility of one European power. Pictures of atrocities or pictures that revealed political and military difficulties posed more problems here. The phases of colonial conquest, as well as the subsequent periods of ‘pacification’ and ‘development’, were relayed in such a way that (rare) defeats, setbacks, abuses of power, or any other form of major difficulty did not seriously call into question or change public opinion about expansionist projects. There was no system for controlling these images in the late nineteenth century on either the French or British side. While there were those who promoted empire within each society, they did not always constitute homogeneous and stable groups. Most of the high-ranking officers who led the conquest, and a number of the civil administrators who succeeded them in time, developed a necessary awareness of the weight of public opinion in decision-making mechanisms. George Goldie (1846–1925), for example, the vice-governor of the Royal Niger Company, a chartered company that by agreement with the British Government exploited a territory similar to that of present-day Nigeria, kept a close eye on the writings of the metropolitan press on the subject of the Company’s African enterprises. A believer in discretion, unlike his colleague Cecil Rhodes, Goldie noted with relief in a confidential report in 1897 that a majority of the press in the whole country supported the Company.77 In 1901, Hubert Lyautey wrote from Madagascar to his friend Max Leclerc: ‘We know perfectly well that opinion is with us [even] if there is a well-trained and rabid anti-militarist coterie against us, which, even here, is out to denounce us.’78 On both the British and French sides, this did not necessarily mean that well thought-out mechanisms were in place to prevent news or pictures of abuse reaching the general public. Whether they improvised or copied others, interested parties’ ability to limit the circulation of problematic information was nevertheless very real. The relative absence in official documentation on what were generally considered to be isolated incidents is by no

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means a sign that they did not exist. Rather, it is a sign of the relative efficiency of the systems of conquest, government, and policing, which were keen to keep the most problematic aspects of their activity under wraps. In a context where, in France as in Britain, colonial projects only benefitted from tenuous support and were regularly threatened with losing their funding, the ignorance and indifference of metropolitan public opinion could be an asset.79 Faced with revelations that risked undermining established discourses, governments and officials often issued denials. In March 1887, for example, when the beheading of dacoit rebels by police in Burma and the display of the heads as trophies was condemned by the MP Charles Cameron in Parliament, the allegation was immediately denied.80 Some time later, however, the authorities admitted the beheadings had taken place, but said that this was only for the purpose of identifying the individuals. The trope of blunder was often used, and abuses were presented as exceptional. Sudden attacks of fever were often called upon to explain the chaotic behaviour of colonials in climates deemed to be hostile to Europeans. The expressions ‘soudanite’, ‘africanite’, ‘guyanite’, and ‘cochinchinite’ (Sudanitis, Africanitis, Guyanitis, and Cochinchinitis) had been coined in France, and in 1913 Dr Bérillon finally grouped them under the common name of ‘colonial neuropathy’, a diagnosis that became fairly popular.81 In Britain, ‘diseases’ of this nature were also blamed for the breakdown in ‘civilised’ behaviour. Herbert Ward, at one time close to Roger Casement, a figure involved in one of the major campaigns to denounce colonial atrocities in the Congo at the beginning of the twentieth century, wrote in 1910: ‘When, added to such physical discomfort and privation, we consider the influence of a malignant climate, which affects the spleen and liver, which racks the frame with burning fever or exhausting dysentery, which dispels sleep and fills the disordered mind with morbid thoughts, and which engenders violent angry passions: it may be understood that no man can act a part: all men must perforce reveal their latent qualities, good and bad.’82 Other explanations appeased those who discovered some of the less acceptable practices of the troops and police involved in colonial expansion and settlement. However, those directly involved in the process also pointed to the existence of a double discourse that prevented what was happening on the fringes of the empire and far from the centres of command from becoming known to too wide an audience.83 There were several cases of this double discourse in the French colonies. Often, one must look beyond the institutions traditionally dedicated to the conservation of colonial archives to find them. The Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, for example, has several interesting collections in this respect. The papers of Charles Le Myre de Vilers, for example, include a letter dated August 1900 and addressed to Paul Vigné d’Octon.84 The latter, a deputy for the Hérault department, frequently denounced abuses in the colonies. He had just published a book entitled La Gloire du sabre (The

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glory of the sabre), which blamed a series of atrocities in Sudan and Madagascar on French colonial officers. The letter, which had been written by Albert Martin, attaché to the office of the governor general of Indochina in the early 1890s, explained: ‘As you have so well pointed out, almost all the Europeans who have been in the colonies share a special mentality, a sort of tacit understanding that they will not reveal the abominations they have witnessed.’85 Later on, when referring to this feeling of impunity, he explains that when others speak of the ‘example of the English’, they say that they ‘behave even worse’.86 Albert Martin’s letter is only one in a substantial file that matches press cuttings with letters contradicting them. The cuttings substantiate Vigné d’Octon’s accusations, while the letters, including one from Joseph Gallieni, attempt to undermine the author’s credibility. Le Myre de Vilers, then deputy of Cochinchina, had collected these documents to prepare a speech that he delivered in the Chamber on 30 November 1900. A moderate, he did not deny the existence of crimes, but he also accused Vigné d’Octon of exaggeration. Albert Martin’s letter and the rest of the file show that the subject was embarrassing to the authorities. Colonial violence caused controversy, but it was quickly extinguished. Those who were blamed for it were quick to write to the newspapers to dispute its existence. Others indiscriminately denounced the abuses without always being able to prove them. Le Myre de Vilers reconciled these points of view in order to propose a new form of colonisation. A veil of forgetfulness was once again drawn over the matter. The same obfuscation took place in other parts of the empire. Henri-Félix de Lamothe, who succeeded Savorgnan de Brazza as governor of the French Congo in 1897, summed up the situation in a letter when he spoke of those ‘who spread the myth of the peaceful occupation of the French Congo’. He wrote: ‘I am fully authorised to affirm that it is really only a myth [...] We fought, killed, and burned there as elsewhere, only the instruction was not to speak of it.’87 Auguste Terrier, one of the men at the heart of the French colonial lobby, kept the notes taken by William Merlaud-Ponty when he was private secretary to Colonel Archinard. Archinard led a violent campaign against the Tukulor Empire in the early 1890s in present-day Mali and Senegal. Merlaud-Ponty kept a diary during his time with the expeditionary force. News of how the French treated captives and profitted from slave structures eventually reached the metropole, but Merlaud-Ponty’s diaries offered a direct perspective on the issue. He wrote: ‘5 January: Tomorrow, the men will be divided up, but the women of high birth and the prettiest ones have been taken and will be allotted to native and European officers. The staff will be given vouchers with the following wording: “Mr X... Voucher for... captives (sex) to be redeemed as appropriate”. What a lovely collection of slave vouchers. I can see from here the gossip that this would cause in France if it were to get out.’88 Once again, the admission was not intended to go beyond the circle of insiders.

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With regard to photographs, regimes of visibility of violence also obeyed powerful self-censorship mechanisms. This explains why many of the images analysed here were strictly limited to private use or to restricted circles. This is particularly true of colonial wars in which there were only a small number of Europeans directly involved. The strength of interpersonal networks was sometimes sufficient to prevent compromising information or images escaping these well-defined spheres, but profound divergences within the group sometimes led to leaks. The control of information and images was made more difficult by the scale of certain conflicts, in which the proliferation of portable cameras used by soldiers and the presence of numerous war correspondents increased the risk of dissonant discourses emerging. Extra-European conflicts, in particular colonial situations in which there was wide-scale use of police and military force, were thus spaces where new systems of information and image management, as well as censorship, were tested out. This was true in several different respects. The first affected the producers, those who documented events in situ. In France, soldiers who wished to deliver lectures or reports – and many ‘colonials’ did – had to request authorisation from their superiors. Although postal censorship was not systematic, mail sent by troops from Africa or Asia could be opened. Soldier-photographers who sent negatives to be developed in metropolitan France were sometimes surprised to see them arrive without problems.89 None of those whose albums and personal collections are examined here were unaware of the existence of these more or less clearly formulated prohibitions. Soldiers, journalists, and commercial photographers authorised to accompany a campaign or to document an event took these constraints on board. Their decisions about what could be kept, shown, or even disseminated and sold were made within the wider context. Both technical constraints and aesthetic imperatives – what is in bad taste or what is not yet considered photographable – played a role in the way events were recorded. But the regulatory framework also defined what should be kept to oneself, or not kept at all. The idea of official secrets was gradually refined in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Following the Prussian humiliation of France in 1870, a law approved on 18 April 1886 established ‘penalties against espionage’. A decree extended it to the colonies in 1894. The issue of the links between photography and military secrets was subsequently addressed more frequently in the 1890s.90 In Britain, it was during the Egyptian Campaign of 1882 that the British command established ‘rules for newspaper correspondents’ which obliged them to request authorisation directly from the general in command of the operations.91 A long way from metropolitan headquarters, and in the absence of definitively established rules, the role of high-ranking officers in the management of journalists and photographers was crucial. The Official Secrets Act passed by the British Parliament in 1889 created the first outlines of a modern culture

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of official secrets. The issue of photography only appeared in official regulations at a relatively late stage. The Boer War, during which the issue of espionage photography arose, forced commanders to supplement the prohibitions by mentioning photography specifically.92 In 1905, a bill on the publication of information related to the navy and the army was drafted by the Committee of Imperial Defence. Faced with difficulties raised by the wording of the bill, its secretary, George Clarke, asked the journalist Sydney Brooks to conduct a wide-ranging survey of British newspapers in 1906 to sound out the press on the issue of military secrecy in wartime.93 These efforts resulted in an updated Official Secrets Act in 1911 that contained one of the first mentions of photography in a British parliamentary law.94 In France, awareness of the issue developed along similar lines. The Russo-Japanese War revealed the difficulties that photography could pose. In a 1906 letter, lieutenant-colonel Charles Corvisart, military attaché in Japan, showed a keen interest in Japanese laws on the protection of military secrets.95 A few years later, lieutenant-colonel Fournier, military attaché in Belgrade, photographed the First Balkan War (1912–13) in relative freedom, but he transmitted the following comments about journalists and military observers to his superiors: ‘In a future war, we should completely prohibit the presence of both groups’. He suggested supplementing these rules with the ‘very strict operation of a press censorship office’.96 On both sides, photography went from being a pleasant pastime for officers in the field to a cause for concern. The recognition that photography could present a problem was also seen in the management of news in empires. Colonial spaces, even outside times of conflict, were places where legal solutions for political censorship were tested out. Revealingly, it was in India, as early as 1910, that a text regulating censorship of the local press made explicit reference to the censorship of photographs.97 In the French colonies in Africa, the July 1881 law on the freedom of the press generally only applied to settlers and was governed by local by-laws. As a rule, the effectiveness of censorship led to a kind of photography that gave pride of place to exotic features and to the representation of apparently timeless local traditions and ethnic types, which were intrinsically less destabilising than a more direct engagement with ongoing events. Images of violence only came to the fore in these contexts for particular purposes, to complement the use of force, for example, as we have seen in the case of Indochina or Matabeleland. The boundaries between the visible and the invisible were defined by multiple forces, ranging from individuals’ private souvenirs, at the one end, to official constraints, at the other. These boundaries were fluid, however, since photographs, like other traces, revealed a relationship to war and organised violence that didn’t fit into overly simplistic categories. In one place, by means of postcards, a rank-and-file soldier documented and criticised a conflict that had been presented in France as a necessary labour of civilisation. Elsewhere, a relatively homogeneous colonial society

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allowed gruesome pictures of executions to circulate, without anticipating the inevitable controversies that would arise when they were seen far from the expansionist outposts in which they were taken. In yet another place, photographs showing abuses and deaths were kept within the closed circle of interpersonal networks. From photographs displayed in shops, to postcards and private albums, a new repertoire of depictions of violence was emerging by means of the most modest photographic media. This repertoire lay at the intersection of highly individual experiences, increasingly recorded and thought about through photography, and a global subject  – conflicts and their victims – that the first globalisation, largely driven by imperialism and its colonial expressions, made unavoidable. The experiences of the French and the British were very similar in this respect. Faced with similar problems and sometimes engaged in the same wars, their uses of photography overlapped. On both sides, there was an initial awareness of the importance of communication via images well before 1914. As they groped around and gradually became aware of this thorny issue, some actors invented and improvised a system of control. And when war returned to Europe in 1914, the framing, the subjects, and the tools of censorship were already there, at an experimental stage.

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6 Subversion, denunciation, and manipulation I have in front of me five accusing photographs taken in the Bakel bush, on the border between Senegal and the Sudan. One shows a display of severed heads, guarded by a young negro. The four others show a pile of frighteningly stiff black corpses, caught in the throes of death [...]. Why these mutilated corpses? Why these severed heads? Why have these men been killed with their hands tied behind their backs? Let anyone answer if they can; let them dare tell the story of this massacre. Georges Clemenceau, ‘Pour quelques anthropophages’ (For a few cannibals), La Justice, no. 5189, 31 March 1894

When Clemenceau penned these damning words in a scathing article on the civilising pretensions of France, the events were already long past.1 The photographs, which he was unable to show to readers of the unillustrated La Justice, had been taken in January 1891 on the banks of the Senegal River, in Bakel (Figure 6.1). They are one of the most disturbing illustrations of the consequences of late nineteenth-century French colonialism in what was then called the French Sudan. During the conflict between the French Army, supported by numerous local auxiliaries, and the Tukulor Empire led by Ahmadu Tall, the African leader had been forced to flee his capital, Segu, which was taken by the French on 6 April 1890. In early 1891, Louis Archinard, commander of the French forces, conducted a campaign against the last Tukulor strongholds. The settlement of Nioro was taken on 1 January, but Ahmadu escaped again, while survivors of his army were hunted down and sometimes executed. The campaign plunged the region into violence for weeks. In April, several photographs of extreme brutality emerged from the fog of war that enveloped the region. They had been taken by Joannès Barbier, a photographer who had recently arrived in the new colony. Originally from Lyon, Barbier had come to Rufisque, not far from Dakar, in 1884, with the hope of becoming a trader. When his plans came to nothing, he decided to earn his living as a photographer in Dakar. He then moved along the coast and subsequently into the interior.2 In a landscape of more conventional images, his photographs would break new visual ground. On

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Figure 6.1 Joannès Barbier, untitled, aristotype print from a negative taken in January 1891, 10 cm × 14.5 cm.

11 April 1891, L’Illustration published a series of engravings inspired by Barbier’s photographs entitled ‘L’œuvre de la civilisation en Afrique’ (The work of civilisation in Africa) (Figure 6.2). The Under-Secretary of the Colonies, worried about the image of the French colonial adventure in Africa, immediately set out to understand how this media crisis could have happened.3 To grasp the context in which the photographs were produced, we must first understand the nature of French intervention in West Africa at the end of the 1880s. The violence employed in the conquest of the French Sudan was so extreme that it was even reflected in official reports.4 Louis Archinard governed the territory without his masters in Paris being able to interfere in the actual decision-making process at the local level. Although Archinard had the support of the capital, operations were conducted without its direct control. He did not conceal his belief in a particularly aggressive form of war against Ahmadu’s Tukulor Empire, which had been consistently described as a force of oppression and chaos by the French colonisers. The widespread use of Bambara auxiliaries by French officers seeking to exploit inter-African rivalries meant that abuses were frequent during the conflict. The debate over the methods used by French officers in the campaign against the Tukulor Empire extended as far as Paris, which had received reports of events in the Senegal River area and beyond.

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Figure 6.2 Henri Thiriat ‘Indigène venant d’apporter à Bakel des têtes de prisonniers capturés parmi les fuyards des bandes d’Ahmadou’ (Native who has just brought to Bakel the heads of five prisoners belonging to Ahmadu's bands, caught while fleeing), engraving based on a photograph by Joannès Barbier in L’Illustration, 2511, April 1891, 312. This engraving is based on one of the five photographs purchased by L’Illustration. The engraver has reproduced the original photograph as faithfully as possible. Unlike other photographs of the massacre, which are overexposed, this one has been well executed. Barbier arranged this macabre composition in the town of Bakel. The scene, which was clearly staged, could not have been organised without the approval of the French officers there. There is probably a link between these images and a short item in the Bulletins de la société d’anthropologie de Paris that reported that Émile Roux was offering six skulls to the Musée Broca. They ‘come from Ahmadou’s army’.5 Five of the victims had been ‘executed in Bakel on 25 January 1891’.

In early 1891, the situation in the area around Bakel worsened. Marine infantrymen had been isolated and were believed to be ill. The local population was described in the archives as being terrified by the possible arrival of Tukulor troops fleeing from Louis Archinard’s army. Confusion reigned. On French orders, dozens of soldiers belonging to Ahmadu’s army, now in disarray, were executed and beheaded not far from the post that had been under Captain Émile Roux’s control from mid-January.6 Joannès Barbier was in Bakel at the time and took several photographs of the atrocities. The photographs

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ended up in the Paris offices of the newspaper L'Illustration, which published engravings from them on 22 April 1891. Photography had entered the colonial debate for the first time. In 1890, Joannès Barbier had obtained permission from the governor of Senegal, Henri de Lamothe, to embark on a patrol boat in order to document the effects of a flood caused by the Senegal River. When he arrived in Kayes, Barbier fell ill. He left the settlement at the end of December. His arrival in Bakel a few days later coincided with the executions of the Tukulors that set off the crisis discussed here. Like many officer-photographers, Barbier sent photographs to his family back in France to be sold, and it was his brother, Louis, who was responsible for distributing them. Imprudently, he offered five of the gruesome pictures for sale. The photographs triggered an unprecedented sensation. Four photographs show the corpses from several different angles, first in the bush and then on the bank of the river into which they were to be thrown. Barbier could not have acted without official consent: in one of the photographs, a group of auxiliaries, including a man in uniform, poses for the photographer near a pile of bodies. Captions on two more read: ‘Executions of prisoners of war (near Bakel)’ and ‘Bodies dragged to the riverbank to be thrown into the water’. The fifth photograph was taken separately, in Bakel itself. According to a handwritten caption, it is of a ‘native who has just brought to Bakel the heads of five prisoners belonging to Ahmadu’s bands, caught while fleeing’.7 According to one of the letters sent by Henri de Lamothe, a colonial administrator who was seeking to find out what happened, ‘Barbier arranged the heads to make a macabre scene’.8 The photograph is visibly more staged than the other images. From a purely formal point of view, it is similar to the exotic scenes Barbier usually photographed.9 The arrangement of the heads, the presence of a living person, and the carefully chosen angle of view all show that he took great care in composing the image. That the photograph was staged in the centre of a village is proof that, for Barbier and the other French people present, the act of photographing this kind of scene was not problematic in itself. It was only the distribution of the photograph to anyone outside the circle of the initiated that seems to have been in question. Émile Roux, the commander of the Bakel cercle,10 noted: ‘In Bakel, Barbier showed me several of his photographs. I pointed out to him how immoral it would be to sell them, and he made a formal promise before the officers that he would never do so.’11 Significantly, however, Barbier rapidly developed his negatives and showed prints of them to inhabitants of Bakel. They were therefore first circulated among colonials present in the area. As the agents of French expansion pointed out, in a region so far from mainland France, different rules applied.12 L'Illustration published the engravings based on Barbier’s photographs as part of a two-page article in April 1891.13 The article begins with an engraving from a

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photograph taken on the banks of the Senegal River. The engraver transformed the original image by adding a decapitated head in the foreground and hiding the corpses’ exposed genitals with loincloths – what is acceptable to viewers differs from era to era. The second page conveyed an indirect message through a clever use of layout. The juxtaposition of a portrait of Mahmadou Racine, the most famous Senegalese tirailleur of the late nineteenth century, with a photograph of a group of French officials in charge of the region and the macabre scene discussed above, points at who was responsible without saying it explicitly. A spectacular double-page illustration concludes the article. The engraving by Émile Tilly shows the moment when the corpses were tied to boats to be thrown into the river downstream from Bakel. Tilly combined elements from the two Barbier pictures to produce the composite image. As early as 10 April, even before the incriminating issue of L’Illustration was published, a telegram was sent from Paris to Saint-Louis in Senegal to try to establish how the images had reached Lucien Marc, the chief editor of the newspaper.14 Eugène Etienne, the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, was keen to monitor the situation closely. At a time when colonial expansion was by no means universally popular, the promptness of his reaction was indicative of his fears. He requested any information that would enable him to counter the article, which, in his eyes, could only have distorted the ‘facts’ it appeared to describe. De Lamothe then sent a telegram to Bakel via Kayes. He, too, feared for the ‘very future’ of the French Sudan.15 L’Illustration had revealed embarrassing information to the ‘French public’ whose support – or perhaps ignorance – was crucial for French expansion projects in West Africa.16 The local administrative bodies grasped the urgency of the matter, and messages were exchanged rapidly without the facts being clearly established. At first they tried to convince themselves that it was villagers in the Guidimakha region, north of Bakel, who had carried out the executions and brought in the decapitated heads as proof of their actions.17 A letter from Émile Roux explains that things were not so simple. The heads photographed by Barbier in Bakel were indeed trophies brought back from neighbouring villages, but the mutilated bodies thrown into the river belonged to Ahmadu’s soldiers, who had been executed by auxiliaries. Roux himself had also ordered twenty more soldiers to be executed following interrogation.18 While Barbier tried to clear his compatriots’ names, the commander of the Bakel cercle claimed part of the responsibility for what happened. Archinard, who at first denied the facts, finally confirmed that he had indeed recommended ‘that all post commanders should exercise the greatest rigour in putting down the Tukulors’. In his words, ‘Captain Roux did a great service to the Sudan’ by ordering the executions.19 On 13 April 1891, even before receiving the exact details, the Under-Secretary for the Colonies issued a note refuting the story via the Havas press agency.20 It read: ‘The

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publication of these drawings and the account that accompanies them are presented in such a way as to give the impression that the execution took place at the instigation of representatives of the French authorities. We are authorised to declare that this is by no means the case.’ Lucien Marc published the note along with his own counterrefutation. He stated that the photographs, as well as letters describing the events, were at the disposal of the authorities.21 In spite of the precautions taken by the authorities, the article caused a scandal, and questions were asked in the Chamber of Deputies.22 Barbier’s photographs were now out of his hands. The images were interpreted differently by different observers, revealing a wide range of attitudes towards the violence involved in French advances in Africa. Octave Lebesgue, also known as Georges Montorgueil, wrote an article in the newspaper Paris in reaction to the publication of the illustrations.23 The text was reissued in 1903 in an anti-colonisation anthology entitled Patriotisme, colonisation (Patriotism and colonisation) and prefaced by Élisée Reclus. In the polemicist Henri Rochefort’s publication L’Intransigeant, attempts to stifle the scandal over the photographs were compared to the censorship in 1883 of Pierre Loti’s descriptions of massacres of prisoners in Annam. More radical criticism arose in Paris. Anarchists were quick to illegally print placards about the Bakel events and paste them on walls around the city shortly before 1 May. The placards addressed the soldiers as follows: ‘May the commanders who caused so many victims to perish in Bakel perish themselves [...] they ordered the corpses to be tied to the boats [...] a photographer can’t kill men and tie up their corpses [...] the scene really happened and when you see pictures of it, soldiers, you will not be able to repress a cry of horror.’24 The printer placed reproductions of engravings from L’Illustration in the middle of the accusatory poster. Two men, Eugène Mursch and Jacob Sluys, anarchists from eastern Paris, were caught pasting the placards and arrested.25 Furthermore, the article in L’Illustration provided a wealth of details about the executions that had not been revealed previously by Barbier. The discretion that had prevailed in the colony until then was undermined. Barbier’s first customers were members of the diverse community living in Senegal; not all of them, however, were admirers of Archinard’s campaign against the Tukulor. The photographer suspected that some of the settlers were behind the leaks.26 Contacts had been established in the 1890s between the creoles in Saint-Louis, who were opposed to the expansion of army prerogatives in Africa, and the group least convinced of the benefits of conquest in the Chamber of Deputies. One of the most influential of these creoles, Gaspard Devès, had forged links with the French radicals in the late 1880s.27 Perhaps it was Devès who sent the photographs mentioned by Clemenceau in his 1894 text to France. Devès was in correspondence with the Senator of Guadeloupe, Alexandre Isaac, who together with Clemenceau had founded the Société des droits de l’Homme (Society of Human Rights) in 1888. Devès may have been able to publicise the existence of the images

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through him. The Bakel scandal, therefore, took on many forms. It reverberated in Senegal, and then in Paris, because the planned changes in the management of the colonies, and in particular the strengthening of the prerogatives of the Under-Secretary of State – accused by some of planning campaigns on his own initiative – discomfited an opposition that was more in favour of a nonmilitary administration. Barbier’s photographs came at just the right time to weaken the arguments of those who supported military rule. In the early 1890s, four years after the British had been forced to deal with the Hooper affair in Burma, the rapidly expanding French empire in Africa experienced one of its first media scandals involving photography. The medium’s capacity to destabilise was now clear; its days of innocence, if they had ever really existed, were over. Controversies caused by problematic photographs or the risk that images could be used for manipulation were now a reality. The photographed image began to play a decisive role in the media. The episode of the Bakel pictures also provides an early example of the extent to which discourses were by no means uniform. Public opinion in France, and in the military, commercial, and religious networks involved in the process of conquest and development, all had different opinions about colonisation. Critical voices were immediately raised, although there was no organised dissent. In France, as in Great Britain, a constellation of groups denounced some of the most brutal aspects of imperial growth, while beyond the strict framework of colony and empire, the whole question of war and mass violence began, partly as a result of images, to be subjected to debate and mobilisations of a new type. Finally, empires compared and observed each other through photography. Demonstrating the brutality of one’s imperial competitors was a way of gaining legitimacy. The interplay between these different levels is crucial for understanding the role of photography in displays of suffering and destruction. The objective of this chapter is to explore the nebulous world of these subverted and subversive photographs. Whether in the form of false images created to give an effect of truth, or truths about atrocities supported by images, the aim here is to gain an understanding of the inevitable manipulation of the medium in discourses on mass violence. From the turn of the twentieth century, photography’s capacity to bear witness or provide proof was called into question as a result of the way violent photographs were used. At the dawn of a century in which the relationship between photography and truth would define the contours of war for the vast majority of people, it was the meandering development of photographic imagery that helped to determine the nature of that relationship. Three main types of images are discussed here. First, the ‘reverted’ image: a photograph whose meaning changed according to its context and those who viewed it. The Bakel images, Hooper’s shots of Burmese convicts, and Olive Schreiner’s photograph of the executed Ndebele are all examples

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of this. Others examined here demonstrate the extent to which the media environment was transformed in the 1900s. A second category consists of photographs used to denounce. Produced and disseminated to fuel criticism or reveal an atrocity, they began to play a significant role in debates and news shortly before 1914. The third category  – heavily manipulated photographs  – may be seen as a variation of the first two categories. Created from scratch, heavily altered, or subverted by a simple caption, this category of photograph had only a distant relationship with its initial subject, if at all. It also played a crucial role in shaping the way conflicts and organised violence were presented in the media. Reverted images We now shift our focus away from empire in the strictest sense of the word in order to discuss one of the most striking examples of photographs revealing the internal fragility of British imperial power. The pictures in question were taken in Egypt in 1906. On 13 June of that year, five British officers went pigeon-hunting near the village of Denshawai, north of Cairo. An altercation between the soldiers and the villagers turned violent. While fleeing from the attack, one British soldier, Captain Seymour Clarke Bull, died of sunstroke, and the others were injured. Nearly fifty villagers were subsequently arrested. After a three-day trial before a special court composed of Egyptian and British magistrates, four men were sentenced to be hanged, while several others were sentenced to fifty lashes and a term in prison. To serve as an example, the punishments were conducted not far from the village. In theory, Egypt was not strictly speaking a colony, but it escaped no one – not least the Egyptian nationalists who were mobilising at the time  – that the severity of the punishments was an expression of Britain’s imperial influence over a state that was a de facto protectorate. Tight control was exercised over the Egyptian government and the Khedive by Evelyn Baring, the Consul-General in Egypt. Despite repeated requests for mercy, the punishments were carried out in front of the assembled inhabitants of the village on 28 June 1906. Hassan Aly Mahfouz, Youssef Hussein Selim, El-Sayed Issa Salem, and Mohamed Darweesh Zahran were hanged in front of their families, not far from their homes. Between each hanging, the other condemned men were whipped. The exceptional nature of the punishments and the procedure reflected the British authorities’ fear of insurrection.28 The draconian retribution they staged was designed to set an example. The whole process, from the trial to the executions, was captured by several photographers. The Graphic reproduced photographs by Frank Wade, about whom little is known other than that he sold photographs of Egypt.29 An Italian photographer, Fortunino Matania, covered the trial.30 The Bolak agency – one of the many sources of

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press illustrations that flourished at the time – also sold photographs of the hangings to various British publications, although their creators remained anonymous. An Armenian photographer, founder of the Melik studio located in the town of Tantah, thirty kilometres from Denshawai, managed to obtain several close-ups of the executions, which he sold in the form of a pamphlet with comments in Turkish.31 One of his pictures shows a Westerner standing in front of British guards and aiming the lens of a Kodak camera at the gallows. Since it took only a few days for the photographs to reach London by steamship from Alexandria, The Graphic, The Illustrated London News, and The Sphere all devoted full-page articles to the affair at the beginning of July 1906. The photographers acted openly: one of the images published by The Sphere, for example, shows the families of the condemned trying to escape the camera (Figure  6.3), while another photograph was taken at the front of the procession of prisoners, in full view and with the consent of the British officers on either side. It seems that postcards of the executions were also circulating at the time.32 These photographs rapidly fuelled accounts that differed considerably from the narrative put forward by the British authorities. With photographs to back them up, the press asked questions. Were the punishments ‘too severe?’ enquired The Illustrated London News in mid-July.33 A wave of protests in Egypt, and then in Great Britain, condemned the executions. The summary proceedings, as well as the choice of whipping and hanging at the place the crimes were said to have been committed – a practice abandoned in the United Kingdom decades previously – drew opprobrium. The photographs themselves also drew criticism. They were an integral part of the public display of punishment, a fact that was not lost on John Gordon Swift MacNeill (1849–1926), a member of the House of Commons, a Protestant, but also an Irish nationalist, who spoke out on the subject in August 1907. ‘These were authorised photographs, the object being to educate the public mind.’34 The government defended its decision to allow photographers to be present, although their arguments did not convince everyone. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922), a famous anti-imperialist figure in Great Britain, wrote a pamphlet denouncing the affair in the months that followed. He was horrified by the presence of ‘amateur photographers’ who were ‘pressing the buttons of their kodaks’ during the executions.35 What was supposed to be a lesson in imperialism began to backfire on those who carried out the punishment. The photographs, initially circulated in the press as illustrations of just punishment and a return to order, were now seen as evidence of British brutality. Blunt, MacNeill, and, later, George Bernard Shaw, all advocates of Irish autonomy, helped to crystallise harsh criticism of the British Empire. This was not surprising, as in the discourse of nationalists and supporters of Home Rule – a less radical form of emancipation than independence – the Irish question was often linked to the way the British exercised power in the world. Little by little, the photographs

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Figure 6.3 Anon, ‘The punishment of Egyptians at Denshawi’, The Sphere, 14 July 1906, 35.

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This set of photographic illustrations is laid out in reverse chronological order. It starts with the punishments, with the newspaper not hesitating to show a convict before and after the hanging. The image in the centre shows the village women. Out of fear of a general uprising, and in order to set an example, the British chose to carry out executions at the place where the crimes took place. The caption explains that the women were fleeing from the camera. The camera thus plays a direct role in the staging of the scene. The photographer was not merely an invisible observer; his intention appears to have been to force the relatives obliged to attend the scene to react. The angles of view in the different photographs suggest that he acted with the consent of the authorities. The image at the bottom of the page demonstrates British authority: the soldiers of the Inniskilling Dragoons guarded the prisoners, who had numbers hanging around their neck in order to humiliate them. The Inniskilling Dragoons was the regiment that was subjected to the anger of the villagers at the beginning of the affair.

of the execution took on a life of their own. From confirmation of British power over the ‘fanatical masses’, they mutated into icons of the oppression of Muslims. Misled by their sense of power and initially convinced that the images could only serve to extend their control, the British authorities – especially the officials in Egypt – could now only look on at the damage the photographs had caused. Within months the photographs, or images inspired by them, were circulating in Egypt and the Muslim world. This can be seen clearly in a lithograph by A. H. Zaki published in Cairo in 1908 (Figure 6.4). Years later, in 1915, German propagandists used the pictures in an attempt to destabilise the British in the Mashriq, by distributing a pamphlet in Arabic and English illustrated with six reproductions of the execution shots.36 The first decade of the twentieth century marked a real turning point in terms of visual culture. Photographs of organised violence took on an increasingly important role in public debates, particularly in imperial or colonial contexts. William Wallace Hooper’s macabre photographs of Burmese people being executed in 1886 and the images of the Bakel massacres in 1891 were certainly significant milestones, but their effect did not last long. A decade later, however, the omnipresence of portable cameras, the development of the agency market, and, above all, the growth of a range of different anti-imperialist movements accelerated these developments.37 The beginning of the century was an ambiguous period in this respect. As we have said, military and civilian authorities were beginning to understand the media potential of images that showed forms of organised violence, but this awareness developed in an uneven manner, as did tolerance thresholds. During periods of repression or all-out war, many Europeans recorded and disseminated images that brutally depicted the use of military or police force without imagining that the practice could ever cause problems, probably because many perceived photography as a Western technology, the mastery and understanding of which could not easily be extended to the colonised world.

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Figure 6.4 A. H. Zaki, ‘The modern civilization of Europe’, lithograph published as a supplement of Al-Siyasah al-Musawwara, 1908. Close examination of the engraving reveals that the illustrator had seen photographs of the execution. The gallows, in particular, is inspired by the pictures published in 1906 by the British press. This pictorial denunciation of Franco-British co-imperialism is thus an example of the subversion of the visual rhetoric employed by European powers. The detail of the French uniform and the image of the corpse of the Moroccan suggest that Zaki also had access to the images that were circulating in the press after the French bombing of Casablanca in 1907.

A period was beginning in which, as illustrated by the Denshawai incident, photographs of violence could be turned against those who published them. For example, the scandal played a role in the decision to replace Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer) with Eldon Gorst as Consul-General in Egypt. The French were not exempt from these changes. The war that began in Morocco in 1907, and which was to last nearly thirty years, provides an illustration. The previous chapters have shown how the campaigns conducted by French troops in Morocco were depicted in photographs of corpses, destruction, and mutilation. The reasons for the capture and circulation of these images are complex. The brutality of the photographs was partly a response to the apparent savagery of the enemy, but images also served as a sort of education

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on violence for a variety of different publics, not only in Morocco but also in Europe, where the army was able to demonstrate its combat capabilities. A photograph, however, could easily mutate into a public denunciation of French actions in the region. In June 1913, during fighting in the Meknes region, L’Humanité published two photographs of French soldiers posing with the decapitated heads of Moroccans (Figure 6.5). The accompanying article states that Jean Jaurès, then involved in an indictment of French policy in Morocco, had mentioned the images in the Chamber of Deputies. According to the newspaper, the photographs had been sent by the family of a private involved in the military campaign who had ‘a generous and outraged heart’.38 Whether the account of the trajectory of these photographs is true or false, the sudden use of these images as part of a discourse critical of colonial conduct is a reflection of the growing tensions over France’s actions outside Europe. If L’Humanité is to be believed – the Bakel photographs prove that this means of circulating images was not unheard of – some of the soldiers involved in the fighting were seeking to denounce military actions in a public but anonymous manner. In October 1913 the newspaper published a similar picture of soldiers posing in front of enemy corpses,39 a motif found on various other postcards published at the time.40 The dissemination of this type of picture does not indicate the birth of a united front against the consequences of France’s campaigns abroad, however, as opposition to French colonial policy was not homogeneous. Jaurès himself was sometimes very isolated in his denunciations, perhaps because he had defended colonisation in the 1880s and 1890s. In fact, the effects of such publications tended to vary in both Great Britain and France. This chapter focuses on the transformations of public spheres brought about by the distribution of these photos, rather than their potential effectiveness, a question explored in the last chapter. These new uses aimed to raise public awareness. Images had long played a role in the debate on the merits of French and British influence outside European borders. From the early nineteenth century, for example, engravings were employed in the struggle in British India against the ritual of sati, in which the wife of a deceased man was obliged to die with him on the funeral pyre. The use of pictures changed radically at the beginning of the twentieth century. Organised violence was depicted in a medium that was presented as almost real. The rules of evidence had changed. The distribution of photographs did not stop at the borders of France and Great Britain. The debate on the expansion of the influence of European powers – or war and mass violence in general  – extended beyond national borders. Illustrations, books, and reproductions reached the colonies and areas in which possible atrocities had been committed. The capacity of non-European societies to use these materials was surprisingly underestimated by the Western powers. As Arthur Asseraf has pointed out, the news reaching Algerians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from increasingly far afield, albeit in diluted and patchy form.41 In

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Figure 6.5 Anon., ‘Notre civilisation au Maroc’ (Our civilisation in Morocco), L’Humanité, 21 June 1913, 1. The article accompanying these images states, ‘An officer and a non-commissioned officer had been killed and atrociously mutilated ... to avenge them, one of the commanders had twenty Moroccan corpses decapitated and the heads displayed on a wall [...] pictures were taken.’ There

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are pictures of this type in several private albums and it is not impossible that they came into the hands of contributors to L’Humanité. The originals have probably disappeared in this case. A similar image appeared on the front page of La Bataille syndicaliste on 2 September 1912. The commentary mentions the suicide of a soldier ‘out of horror’ at the crimes committed.

1897, a member of parliament from Oran expressed his concern about photographs that had come from British India. Authorities in the Raj itself had similar concerns. Unfortunately, the often fragmentary and scattered nature of the archives where such uses might be documented gives us only a partial view of the question. This does not, however, obscure the fact that there was no longer a strict division between a West that was master of these technologies and a subjugated Asian and African world. For example, the Ottoman authorities understood early on how important images could be in the management of international crises. Faced with an unprecedented wave of indignation over the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ committed by the Sultan’s troops at the end of the 1870s, they told Basile Cargopoulo, one of the Sultan’s official photographers, to produce images of Turkish ‘broken faces’, presented as the victims of Christian torturers (Figure 6.6). The relationship of images of suffering and other forms of representation to photographic modernities was not created in an isolated West. We must decentre perspectives to appreciate that the phenomenon was transnational and older than we imagine. We must not forget, for example, the denunciation of the Armenian massacres as early as 1895: photographs taken by William Sachtleben, an American who set out to travel through Turkey by bicycle, were published in The Times on 16 November 1895 and in The Graphic on 27 November 1895. Photographic denunciations Alongside photographs that escaped the control of those who created them, there were also images that were taken specifically to denounce abuses. Photography was employed at an early stage by those who were aware of its capacity to provoke outrage and reveal scandals and abuses. Although such practices were not exclusive to the colonies, competition between empires created many opportunities to use the medium to that end. Indeed, while it is often believed that real opposition to European colonisation did not emerge until the twentieth century, or even the interwar period, people tend to forget that anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist views were already being expressed in the late nineteenth century. France against Germany, the United Kingdom against Belgium: when they were not preoccupied with their own affairs, the first critics of imperialism were empires themselves. Opponents in the race for influence attacked each other with discourses and images that were sometimes truly virulent. Although this may seem like stating the obvious, it is actually a critical

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Figure 6.6 Basile Cargopoulo, ‘Blessés turcs et leurs médecins’ (Wounded Turks and their doctors), engraving based on a photograph misattributed to the Abdullah studio by Le Monde illustré, 3 February 1877, 6. © Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Ottoman Army was regularly accused of committing atrocities during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. The brutal repression of the Bulgarian insurrection by the Sultan’s troops in 1876 gave rise to one of the first major humanitarian campaigns in the European press.  Basile Cargopoulo , who took this picture, owned one of the great studios in Istanbul at the end of the nineteenth century. He was appointed official photographer of the Sultan in 1876. This image, circulated by the Ottoman regime, shows wounded men whose noses had been cut off. The presence of a European doctor serves as a form of confirmation that the atrocity took place. Suspicions of the mutilation of Ottoman soldiers by Montenegrin fighters were reported in the newspapers as early as 1877. Well aware of the potential impact of the photograph on public perceptions, the journalist states that ‘the Turks are concerned to show that they are not the only barbarians on the Balkan peninsula’.

point: this mutual criticism was the source of many of the arguments and rhetorical images used in the denunciations of the 1920s and the more mature anti-colonialist movements. The first targets of photographs taken to denounce were the ostensibly archaic empires that European intervention was supposed to reform or wipe out. The

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confrontation also played out in photographs that sought to bear witness to alleged backwardness or to chaos that needed to be stopped. A favourite target was China, where torture and violent lawlessness were increasingly exposed at the turn of the century. Photographs of ‘Turkish atrocities’ were distributed in Europe showing Ottoman soldiers posing next to decapitated heads like trophies.42 In France, photographs were published that revealed the terrible fate of Jilali ben Driss Zirhouni al-Youssefi, known as El Rogui (pretender to the Moroccan throne), who was displayed in a cage before being dismembered and fed to lions.43 Evidence of the violence of one’s competitors or potential protectorates was particularly useful, since it could serve as a negative reference point for comparison with one’s own, in principle, more civilised practices. The French officers involved in the conquest of West Africa, whose propensity to experiment with photography we have already discussed, produced several such images. A good example of this is an exceptional album produced by Major Lartigue during the war against Samory Touré’s Wassoulou Empire, which extended over part of the present-day territories of Guinea, Mali, and Côte d’Ivoire. Lartigue, like Henri Gouraud, who also participated in the campaign, was a photographer. His collection contains 160 photographs in various formats. Some were taken by Lartigue himself, but others were acquired from other photographers. In particular, they document the capture of the Almamy (leader) Touré, who had been defying the French for years and who had succeeded in developing a state structure that had disrupted local power relations even before the arrival of European troops.44 In addition to images of Samory – captured, tried, humiliated, and due to be sent into exile shortly thereafter – the album contains photographs of the devastation he had caused. The last in the series of campaigns leading up to Samory’s defeat was particularly violent. Campaign reports by Lartigue and other officers recount apocalyptic scenes during the final days of Samory’s leadership. Villages destroyed; women and children from the groups that had remained loyal to him dying of hunger; French Army auxiliaries recruited from cannibal groups attacking the exhausted populations: the fall of this empire seemed to plunge an entire section of West Africa into chaos. A ‘black legend’ was created that painted Samory Touré as the man behind a predatory economy, a ‘vulture of the bush’, as Louis Sonolet would write years later.45 Lartigue included pictures in his album that echo these narratives (Figure 6.7). There are shots of freed slaves; one page contains images of fugitive camps, cannibals ‘expressing joy’, women dancing, and a view of a village ravaged by Samory. It is impossible to know whether the caption describes the truth or not, but this is beside the point. The final phase of the fighting offered many opportunities to capture the distress of the people caught up in the conflict. The image of a destroyed village full of dying people was not restricted to private collections. Probably taken by Henri Gaden, it was distributed in the form of a postcard that was sold at the turn of the century.46 The almost humanitarian motif

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Figure 6.7 Henri Gaden et al., four pictures taken before the capture of Samory Touré, September 1898, printed on baryta paper from negatives on glass plates (top left: 8 cm × 9.8 cm; top right: 7.2 cm × 11.5 cm; bottom left: 7 cm × 9.4 cm; bottom right: 7.8 × 9.4 cm), page 12 of an album belonging to Major Lartigue. The photographs in the first part of the Lartigue album provide a pictorial account of the capture of Samory Touré. The collection begins with several views of the imprisoned leader, while this page contrasts the disasters of the war with the joy of the liberated inhabitants. French accounts of the end of the conflict involve Dantean descriptions of mass slaughter. Some of the noncombatants who followed Samory in his flight died of hunger. In the interpretation provided by the European officers, the capture of the enemy leader signalled the end of the unrest and this photographic composition complements the official narrative.

of the liberation of peoples subjected to the predation and brutal violence of a local regime was well exploited by the photographers who accompanied European expeditions of the late nineteenth century.47 British and French expeditions in the 1890s sent back written and pictorial representations of human sacrifice in Benin City and the Kingdom of Dahomey that were much in the same line – a kind of a colonial horror show that constituted a real trend at the time.48 Similar themes can be found in the photographic coverage of the British expedition to Benin in 1897 and the conquest of Sudan in 1898. At a time when photography was first starting to be used for humanitarian purposes, those involved in colonial

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expansion also took advantage of images that denounced suffering. In a break with previous pictorial traditions, they used motifs similar to those used by missionaries and ‘indigenophiles’, in some cases even before they were adopted by the latter. There is nothing particularly surprising about pictures of violence perpetrated by the states that lay in the path of European colonial expansion in Africa or Asia. Things become more complex when it comes to European criticism of other European empires. Here, as elsewhere, it was easier to point to the excesses of others. Two colonial powers became perfect targets for criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century, and photography played an essential role in such accusations. Described as a ‘place of suffering’, Libya, invaded by Italy in 1911, was a useful counterexample for the French and British. The excesses of Italian repression in Tripolitania were recorded by several photographers, including Gaston Chérau for Le Matin, Ellis Ashmead Bartlett for Reuters, and Francis McCullagh for the Daily News. The most extreme pictures were filtered by the press, however; the publisher of McCullagh’s book on the ItaloLibyan War, for example, chose not to publish the most violent images.49 As a result of these unequal representations, Italy lost the image war. The country became a symbol of the abusive use of force and enabled the other colonial powers to divert attention from their own activities for a while. It was the Belgian Empire, however, that was the first to be subjected to a fully organised photographic attack campaign. From the 1890s onwards, the Congo Free State, under the direct rule of King Leopold II, was condemned as a hotbed of torture and mass executions. Articles began to circulate claiming that indigenous auxiliaries, following orders from their European commanders, were cutting off the hands of locals who refused to participate in the transport and collection of rubber. At the beginning of the twentieth century, photography entered the debate around abuses in the Congo. Protestant missionaries laid the visual foundations for this combination of photography with humanitarian efforts.50 French observers understood the specific role played by these missionaries in the British media, but noted that there was no such protest over colonial activities being expressed in France.51 In fact, there was a real difference between Britain and France. In 1904, an alliance of clerics, ‘indigenophiles’, and merchants involved in trade with Africa formed the Congo Reform Association under the leadership of Edmund Morel (1873–1924). Its aim was to denounce atrocities committed under the sovereignty of Leopold II. One missionary couple in particular, Alice Seeley and John Harris, took dozens of photographs of individuals with amputated limbs and mutilated bodies at the turn of the twentieth century. Initially distributed in a limited fashion by the missionary press, these images became the core of a campaign designed around photographs from 1904 onwards. A Foreign Office report by Roger Casement, the British consul in Boma, shed a harsh light on the atrocities in the Congo Free State which led to concerted condemnation of Leopold’s rule.52 For several years,

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images of atrocities circulated in the form of magic lantern slides at public projections and in a variety of printed media.53 The activities of the Congo Reform Association are an example of the extensive humanitarian use of photography in the twentieth century. The disruption caused by this campaign forced Leopold’s agents to counter the work of Morel and Casement with their own photographic propaganda.54 The portrait of Epondo, a child with an amputated hand who had become an emblem of the campaign, was denounced as a fake. Counterarticles claimed that the injury had been caused by a hunting accident.55 In January 1908, Frederick Joubert Duquesne (1877–1956), a Boer who had led a particularly murky life as a spy, claimed in the New York Times that ‘there are thousands of photographers in New York who can create original pictures showing any atrocity, anywhere, in the Congo, China or Russia, without leaving their studios [...] the Congo is a perfect hunting ground for imaginative missionaries [...] they do not stop at the dead, their zeal leads them to create their own photographic evidence.’56 The supporters of the Congo Free State had been caught out by photography’s capacity to communicate suffering in distant territories. Rather than engravings based on photographs, these photogravures were much more realistic. At a time when France and Great Britain were having to tackle accusations about the management of their own empires, the Congo provided a negative image that diverted attention away from their behaviour; on both sides, images of Belgian atrocities were more readily relayed than compromising reports on their own activities.57 It is not necessarily surprising that the British and French made little use of these new pictures of suffering to weaken each other. There was a certain discretion and a form of ‘co-imperialism’ between France and Britain that Martin Thomas and Richard Toye have defined as ‘the exercise of imperialism as a collaborative project between multiple imperial states; the movement of personnel and translation of expertise between imperial systems; and the geopolitical and environmental circumstances that have invited this phenomenon’.58 The French and British avoided resorting too systematically to the use of outrage as a means of criticising the activities of their immediate neighbour and competitor, although there were spectacular exceptions: a pro-Boer passion gripped part of France at the turn of the century, and images played a central role in the anti-British discourse that developed around the reconcentration camps.59 Anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist networks in both countries were ready to condemn the supposed excesses of the competing empires, but what is striking about the period from the 1890s to 1914 is the relative restraint on both sides. It has been pointed out, for example, that the British authorities kept silent about the Bakel massacre in 1891, although they were well aware of the story, and there was fierce Franco-British competition in the Niger Bend at the time. Media coverage of one French operation at the turn of the twentieth century provides another illustration. In 1900, French troops and their local allies crushed Rabih

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Fadlallah’s sultanate in the Lake Chad region. They and their local allies employed a degree of violence that may well have disturbed a European public, but the British press simply relayed the French account rather than dramatising the atrocities. British newspapers did mention the death of Rabih, whose decapitated head was put on show and photographed by the French after their victory at Kousséri in April 1901.60 The Sphere, for example, devoted a full page to it, but did not emphasise the extreme nature of the proceedings.61 Instead, the British newspaper reprinted an engraving from L'Illustration published months earlier showing the remains of Béhagle, a French explorer killed by Rabih. The exhibition of the head of the defeated sultan appeared therefore to be just revenge for his bloody misdeeds. The narrative established in France was thus relayed directly in Britain. Frederick Lugard, the High Commissioner for the neighbouring Northern Nigeria Protectorate, also remained relatively silent about the practices of his competitors, although he did have information that could damage their reputation. He wrote a report in the spring of 1901, shortly after the French victory, based on the account of a fugitive from Rabih’s army. He recounts that Rabih had been killed in cold blood by the French.62 Although he was concerned that the French should not extend their influence too far in Nigeria, he nevertheless refrained from exploiting this information, even though it could have been substantiated by the photograph of Rabih’s head. The reverse was also true. When British troops entered Khartoum after their victory at Omdurman in 1898, the remains of the Mahdi – the founder of the state that Kitchener and his soldiers had come to defeat – were desecrated: his bones were thrown into the Nile and there was also talk of sending his skull, apparently preserved in a jerrycan of petrol, to the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Although the Fashoda Incident in the same year – which saw a confrontation between Commandant Marchand and Kitchener’s forces  – had exacerbated tensions between the French and the British, little use was made in France of the opportunity provided by the treatment of the Mahdi to denounce what had shocked many observers in Britain.63 The Entente Cordiale, finally signed in April 1904, subsequently encouraged a degree of moderation when opportunities arose for either of the two countries to weaken their neighbour across the Channel. Le Temps and the Bulletin du Comité de l’Afrique française tended to relay the British authorities’ version of events,64 and more open criticism was limited. Lastly, the French war in Morocco from 1907 onwards did not arouse any particular outrage on the British side, despite the abundance of violent visual material circulating at the time. There were, therefore, differences in the way empires handled the reporting of violence. The Belgian king, Italians, and Germans came off worse than France and Great Britain in these inter-empire comparisons. By treating each other more gently, the two powers kept their wars and repression outside Europe at a distance. From the French and British point of view, the selective denunciation of abuses made it possible

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to limit the visibility of the violence linked to their own ‘advances’. This was not a systematic approach as such, but rather a series of expedient media decisions.

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A matter of scales Photographs that were described as ‘harrowing’ were not only used to denounce imperial violence or to break deliberate silences over the use of force in colonial environments. In fact, the 1890s saw the emergence of a vast internationalist and pacifist movement dominated by English-speaking networks. The influence of this constellation of anti-war groups was greater in the United Kingdom than in France in a number of respects.65 Highly active British missionary networks had been sharply critical of European imperial practices for decades, but photographs now played an important role in campaigns organised by various groups linked to the Universal Peace Congress. It should be emphasised once again that pictures of organised violence were used on a number of different, interlinked levels. The use of force in empires was indeed criticised, and so one can say that there was a specific discourse against empires or colonisation, but a more general denunciation of war and atrocities committed against civilians also emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The frame of reference expanded to encompass the entire world and all its misery. With the geographical scope now so wide, it was sometimes difficult to distinguish pacifism from criticism specifically directed at practices that could be described as colonial. Roger Casement, for example, who revealed the violence in the Congo, was first and foremost an internationalist and a pacifist; for Casement, the colonial dimension of the problem was only a secondary element. He continued his quest for justice in the Amazon, where his photographs revealed atrocities committed by employees of the Peruvian Amazon Company against the inhabitants of the Putumayo district.66 The first photographs to record suffering in distant territories appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Although they were superseded by other iconic images in the twentieth century, they nonetheless formed a substrate, now eroded, on which contemporary understandings of war, its victims, and abuses of all kinds could be built.67 The new aesthetics of mass death moved away from the engravings of the nineteenth century in favour of photography. Of course, some of the subject matter came from the colonies, but for those who were beginning to look at the world as an interconnected whole, English-speaking evangelists or French internationalists for example, the insanity was not only found in the clashes between empires, or colonial violence in particular, but in war itself. Images of the Russo-Japanese War, which was especially bloody, fuelled a pacifist discourse in a range of different visual formats, particularly postcards (Figure 6.8). And we have already seen that the fate of civilians was also highlighted in the Balkan wars, another crucial episode.

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Figure 6.8 Knight Brothers, ‘Russo-Japanese peace conference’, c. 1904, postcard, Underwood and Underwood, Leonard A. Lauder. This postcard celebrates the August 1905 Portsmouth Conference, an event that brought a diplomatic end to the Russo-Japanese War. The tone of the publication is visibly pacifist, with portraits of the diplomats set against two images of Russian and Japanese dead. The two pictures document the fighting around Port Arthur. The Russian soldiers fell on a ‘203 metre hill’ in November 1904, while the Japanese soldiers were bayoneted during an assault on a Russian

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fort during the Battle of Port Arthur. Neither of the two photographs are attributed. The firm of Underwood and Underwood, a leading producer of stereoscopic views at the time, included them in its series on war. The stereoscopic view of the trench filled with Japanese dead is entitled ‘The Horrors of War’. Photographs of this conflict, which represented the event as being particularly deadly, gave rise to a wide range of discourses against war in general, both in Asia and in the rest of the world. In France, one of the manifestations of this pacifism in images was a collective work prefaced by Anatole France and illustrated with artists’ engravings denouncing the war.68

In the eyes of contemporaries, however, these visual fragments that documented destruction and suffering had a complex relationship with the truth. A new concern arose among those who distributed such images as well as their audience. As photography became established in the European media as a way of bearing witness to the crises that gripped the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, its very capacity to record reality more accurately than other forms of documentation was called into question. Tendentious images Photography, if reduced to a simple mechanical operation, appears to have a fixed relationship to the world. One of the commonplaces in the history of photography is that there was a kind of naiveté about the medium’s supposed ability to show the truth that survived its first few decades of existence. However, discussions around photographic manipulation started early on. The debate on retouching, for example, began as early as the 1850s.69 And at the end of the 1860s there was a controversy over the photographs taken by William H. Mumler (1832–84). Like many American studios at the time, Mumler photographed the spirits of the dead. Using a double exposure technique, he produced hazy pictures of spirits that seemed to float around the bodies of those that had come to seek proof of the eternity of the soul. Abraham Lincoln’s wife called on his services; but the hoax, revealed in a trial that reverberated all the way to Europe, left a lasting impression and further undermined the myth of a medium that could not be altered.70 In discussions over the impression of reality given by photography, photographs of physical violence had a specific role to play. At the turn of the twentieth century, when the camera was just beginning to capture these extremes of human experience, two main questions were raised: first, could photographs depicting war, atrocities, and catastrophic destruction – long inaccessible to the direct gaze – be trusted? Second, was the manipulation of images necessarily an obstacle to good information? The first question frequently resurfaced at the end of the nineteenth century. Remarks by several commentators, in both French and English, sought to offer an initial affirmative response. Clemenceau’s comments about the photographs of the

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Bakel massacres, which he described as ‘accusatory photographs’, are just one example. Another is the increasing use in English of the terms photographic ‘proof’ and ‘evidence’ with reference to the documentation of organised violence. As we saw in Chapter 2, there was a fierce debate in Britain in 1906 over the treatment of Bhambatha kaMancinza’s Zulu warriors in Natal. Photographs taken by H. W. Armstrong, who was a member of the Natal Medical Corps, were sent to London and published by The Illustrated London News.71 The article was entitled ‘Are wounded Natal rebels properly treated by the British? Photographic evidence that they are’ (Figure 6.9). As in the case of the Congo, the photographic debate revolved around the media furore related to imperial excesses. It has also been pointed out that the claim to photographic veracity changed perceptions of war, battles, and their consequences. Despite this rhetoric of photographic verisimilitude, however, many in Europe expressed doubt over the information transmitted by images, particularly those of wars outside Europe. One of Pathé’s first stars, Charles Petitdemange, played the comic character Rigadin on screen in the 1910s. One of the shorts in which he appeared was Rigadin aux Balkans, released in 1912 at a time when war was raging in the Balkans. In order to earn money to buy jewellery for his fiancée, the hero answers an advertisement for a great reporter to ‘bring back pictures of the Balkan war’. Once hired, he sets off with a camera and a tripod. After a few hundred metres, however, he abandons his journey to the war zone and films extras in Balkan dress in the Bois de Vincennes instead, a less risky proposition for the novice journalist.72 This surprising mise en abyme by Pathé plays on the theme of falsification, which was already a well-established part of the discourse on moving and photographed images at the beginning of the twentieth century. A flourishing market in fake battles, both photographed and filmed, developed during the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion.73 Producers boasted about these excellent substitutes for reality.74 As it was not always possible to film war, despite the growing ability of photography to reach the front and document some of the most striking aspects of battle, images were created that made up for the shortcomings. In fact, many of the stereoscopic images produced during the Transvaal War can be categorised as fake. Survivors pretending to be dead, action scenes that did not really happen, and bogus attacks are all immortalised. One might think that these kinds of image were made with a cynical eye to financial gain. But viewers were not necessarily fooled by the artifice.75 On the contrary, many of them wanted invented images to complete their repertoire of pictures. Since it was sometimes impossible to depict elements that were seen to be essential, photographs gave the ‘fake’ the lustre of truth. Several collections contain photographs of fake battles taken from perspectives that would have been impossible in real combat conditions. Everything was acted out or replayed for the camera in order to show in photographs what photography had been unable to record

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Figure 6.9 Anon., ‘Are wounded Natal rebels properly treated by the British?’, halftone print, Illustrated London News, 21 July 1906, 99. Sigananda kaZokufa (c. 1815–1906), the prisoner seen in these photographs by Herbert Armstrong, was an ally of Bhambatha kaMancinza (c. 1865–1906) in the revolt led by KaMancinza in 1906. The aim of the display was to respond to the controversy over the treatment of Britain’s

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enemies during the campaign against the Zulus. The newspaper adds ‘clear evidence’ of the death of Bhambatha – who appears to have been decapitated in this image – which some of the local population were already questioning (see Chapter 2). Sigananda, who was almost one hundred years old, died shortly after being captured.

in reality. In many cases, these photographs did not serve any particular propaganda purpose but were kept in private collections or sets that were only distributed to a small audience. For example, René Bull, who managed to capture several British campaigns in an unprecedented manner, took several shots of an imaginary attack on a ‘Gurkha outpost’ during the Tirah Expedition in 1897–98 (Figure 6.10). An even more theatrical staging can be found in the collection created by Gallieni after the conquest

Figure 6.10 René Bull, ‘A Gurkha outpost attacked’, 1897, print on baryta paper from an album owned by Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton (1853–1947), 9.5 cm × 7 cm. René Bull took several shots of this ‘attack’ in 1897–98. They were all acted out for the camera. This shot does not appear in the album on the campaign published by Black and White (see Chapter 2). The version for sale contains another view with the same ‘actors’, who, according to the caption, are ‘tracking a sniper’. It is easy to see that the position of the photographer, with his back to the enemy, would have been rather dangerous in a real confrontation.

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of Madagascar.76 The scene, entitled ‘Angavokely. Attack on the caves’, supposedly shows an episode in the ‘pacification’ of Madagascar. In October 1896, Lieutenant Victor Duruy (1874–1914) chased the ‘rebels’ into a mountain range riddled with caves that served as refuges. He later wrote of these battles, ‘It was war at close range, with delicious feelings that made one experience the most intense sensations just for a moment’.77 Perhaps it was Duruy, an amateur photographer, who staged the photo to relive these feelings. It depicts French officers and riflemen grappling with local fighters armed with assegais, all in almost comically rigid poses. These private and public substitutes for the real thing can be found in a wide variety of collections. In May 1907, The Illustrated London News published a photograph taken during a celebration in honour of the Navy in Portsmouth. A ‘mock’ operation was re-enacted for the event. The headline announces a ‘mock war made real by the camera’.78 This image was one of a number of popular re-enactments of battles with favourable outcomes that were already common knowledge. These pictures of battle could be said to exist in a grey area, somewhere between reality and spectacle. One of the motivations for these manipulations, which were less concealed than one might expect, was a nostalgia for engraving and painting. The photomontage image, in particular, was a hybrid that joined the narrative capacity of nineteenthcentury war correspondents’ sketches to the realism of photography. The image thus combined the performance of technological modernity of photography with the drawing’s synthetic potential. A rare document helps us to understand how certain photographers constructed these ‘in-between’ pieces that were sometimes published in the press: pages of notes written by Colonel Frederic Harvey (Royal Medical Corps) during the Boer War (Figure 6.11). Harvey supplemented his income by working as a correspondent for Black and White, a magazine that published numerous photographs. He carefully reconstructed the ‘Battle of Botha Pass’, which took place on 8 June 1900, in a photomontage. His sketch helped him to put together photographic fragments in order to create a true ‘panorama’ of the battle. The final result, an artificial montage of real images, depicts a carefully dramatised moment. The war needed to be recreated and re-enacted not only because the promises of the new technology had not yet been fully realised, but also because the subject was still sometimes seen in terms of the aesthetic frameworks inherited from the nineteenth century. This kind of profoundly transformed image not only played a significant role in representing war, but in showing violence in general. It was now possible to recreate what the written word had captured but photography could not, with a view to overcoming the limitations of the camera. With a little effort, nothing escaped the photographer’s lens (Figure 6.12a, b, c): atrocities against the Boers, bloodthirsty Dahomey ‘Amazons’, or the cruelty of the Moroccan sultan who displayed his enemies’ heads on

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Figure 6.11 Frederic Harvey, ‘Battle of Botha’s Pass’, 1900, photomontage and drawing, 20.4 cm × 12.6 cm (drawing) and 17.5 cm × 9.2 cm (photomontage). The drawing at the top is a plan for the final photomontage. Harvey cut out several photographs to recreate an overall view of the battle and added silhouettes by hand. The sketch shows that he also planned to complete the image by adding ‘shell explosions’ that would lend his photographic narrative more drama.

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Figure 6.12a Abraham or Élie Benichou, ‘Oujda: les remparts, les têtes coupées’ (Oujda, the ramparts, the decapitated heads), c. 1907, postcard, photomontage. The heads of rebels displayed on the walls of Oujda were a recurring motif in French images of Morocco at the beginning of the twentieth century. The satirical newspaper L’Assiette au beurre published a drawing entitled ‘Maroc, rayon maroquinerie’ (Morocco, Moroccan leather department) in December 1903. There was an ‘authentic’ postcard of this macabre scene sold by J. Geiser circulating at the time, but the Benichou studio obviously did not have an original negative. To meet the demand, however, they produced a rather rudimentary photomontage. Decapitated heads were cut out of other images and stuck to a view of the ramparts, while the blood was painted on. It is quite possible that the Benichou studio used photographs taken in China during the Boxer Rebellion for the heads in this picture. The photomontage thus combines two of the atrocities that fuelled the visual culture of violence during the Belle Époque.

the gates of Oujda. The market for this form of photographic sensationalism, which became viable at the turn of the twentieth century, created a new demand. Artists needed to be able to show what could not be seen, to bear witness to things that the brush or the pencil were unable to record analogically. Nevertheless, photographers and those who published their work did attempt to draw a line between what was false and what was true. From the 1900s onwards, the conditions in which photographs were taken – under fire, as close as possible to combat or to the execution of a rebel – were frequently included in captions. Manipulation, reframing, and inventive captions that gave images new meanings – all ways of distorting the reality of organised violence – were thus well established before 1914. During the Belle Époque, viewers were distanced from reality

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Figure 6.12b Frères Neurdein, ‘Destruction des fermes boers’ (Destruction of Boer farms), c. 1900, postcard, photomontage. This postcard, which echoes the sympathies of many French people for the Boers during the Transvaal War, consists of a complex and well-crafted photomontage that tells a clear story. The group in the foreground, played by extras, are lamenting the arrest of the men and the destruction of their homes, while two ‘Tommies’ look on.

in two ways. First, geographically. As has been pointed out, war was ‘elsewhere’ for the French and the British. Political brutality and violent repression were often observed from afar. Press reports and official documents in France and Britain had no difficulty finding examples of abuse in other empires or other ‘civilisations’ that were set up as countermodels. Second, the medium itself also kept viewers at a distance. Photography did not necessarily fulfil its promise of recording factually, without interference. The new spectacle of war and the suffering it created were inevitably distorted. In the face of war, conquest, and the exercise of force against an enemy or rebel, photography was a mechanism of control and information that had not yet been fully mastered or institutionalised. From the 1890s to 1914, during a succession of real and pictorial crises, photography’s ability to provide proof of authenticity was called into question. A number of military and colonial officials became aware that any given image could be interpreted in more than one way. The selective disclosure of shocking information, whether through images or not, could even serve as a tool for the institutions that managed colonial empires. A single leaked fragment could be used to divert attention from more systematic difficulties. Other individuals, however, despite early warnings, continued to be surprisingly unaware of the power of photography, as the

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Figure 6.12c J. Vitou, ‘Jeune guerrier achevant les blessés’ (Young warrior finishing off the wounded), in Frédéric Schelameur, Souvenirs de la campagne du Dahomey (Paris: Charles Lavauzelle, 1896), 137. The image is taken from a book on the Second Franco-Dahomean War (1892–94). The figures of the Amazon and King Béhanzin’s bloodthirsty warrior are central to the stories surrounding this campaign. In the end, human sacrifice and clear pictures of the enemy’s cruelty were rare. Here it is clear that the photographer has reconstructed a fictional episode in the studio, since he has not taken the trouble to crop the picture; the white backdrop is clearly visible.

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Denshawai episode shows. While some people understood the medium’s capabilities, others remained unconcerned, seeing the medium as too new to be truly problematic. But although awareness increased unevenly, the seeds of doubt had been sown. For those who denounced war in general or the excesses of colonial expansion in particular, the photographic image became a new tool that they no longer hesitated to use systematically, following the example of certain Protestant missionary movements. The early twentieth century was thus a time when conflict and suffering that could be photographed attracted attention. Images began to clash with one another. For that reason, photographs of organised violence are crucial sites to observe French and British perspectives on wars outside Europe and the problematic consequences of European dominance in Asia and Africa. Though necessarily misleading, they nevertheless reflect the real conflicts of the world and the extreme violence occurring in the French and British empires at the time. At the end of this process, several emblematic images emerged from the visual confrontation between promoters of empire and its critics, between militarists and pacifists, or between the French and the British: emaciated children in Cuba, trenches full of corpses in Manchuria, Boer women and children in concentration camps, the supposedly inevitable violence of non-European regimes. The twentieth century would cover them up with many other collective references and forget them, but the cartography of suffering from a distance was already established prior to 1914.

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7 The enemy’s body When Robert Baden-Powell returned to Africa in 1896, his camera was always within reach. He owned a Bulldog Eastman that was packed in his saddle bags and ready for use. Joining the troops fighting what was called the Second Matabele War at the time, in what is now Zimbabwe, he was careful to record his experiences through the lens, and it is likely he was already thinking of using the photographs for a book about the campaign. When the book appeared a year later, it revealed a bloody and unconventional conflict. Local Ndebele fighters resisted settlers’ advances through their lands in what mostly amounted to guerilla warfare. Militias, supervised by imperial officers from the British Army and aided by mercenaries, fought a brutal conflict against them. It was, in part, a private war waged by the British South Africa Company headed by Cecil Rhodes. With little oversight from the central British  Government,  conditions were ripe for the emergence of extreme forms of violence. This war gave Baden-Powell an opportunity to further develop his reconnaissance and exploration techniques, which were eventually fundamental to the Scout movement he founded in 1907. One of the tasks of recruits like him was to locate an elusive adversary in what modern observers now call asymmetrical warfare. Frederick Selous (1851–1917), then a captain of the Royal Fusiliers but also a famous explorer and big game hunter, was one of the most well-known of these European soldiers trained in such campaigns. Selous, who had fought in the First Matabele War in 1893–94, knew the terrain well and brought his hunter’s methods to the fight. The observation that the semantic fields of war and hunting overlap in Baden-Powell’s writings about the operations is therefore not surprising. His book on the war, published in 1897, reads: ‘The longest march seems short when one is hunting game. Your whole attention is fixed at the same time on “distant views,” and on the spoor beneath your nose. Your gun is ready, and every sense is on the alert to see the game. Lion or leopard, boar or buck, nigger or nothing, you never know what is going to turn up.’1 In June 1896, while he was tracking enemies with a group of soldiers, BadenPowell spotted a fighter and promptly reacted: ‘I was under the tree when something moving over my head caught my attention. It was a gun-barrel taking aim down at me, the firer jammed so close to the tree-stem as to look like part of it. Before I could move

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he fired, and just ploughed into the ground at my feet. He did not remain much longer in the tree. I have his knobkerrie and his photo now as mementoes.’2 The British officer took a snapshot of the corpse of his opponent almost instinctively (Figure 7.1). Unnamed and defeated, the man lay there, twice shot. The rifle quickly gave way to the camera in what amounted to a coherent process, one still unfolding in big game hunting rituals to this day. Baden-Powell’s photograph suggests a connection between cynegetics, or hunting, and the unaptly named ‘small wars’ of the late nineteenth century that often ruled out frontal combat as an option for local fighters.3 Through the photographic act itself and his reflective writing on this episode, Baden-Powell opened up an analogy between the body of his enemies and wild game, between ‘sports’, in the Victorian sense of an outdoor activity, and warfare.4 In this regard, this snapshot reflects the specificities of colonial violence in this part of Africa at the time. First, Baden-Powell took the picture: the gesture in itself is unique to extra-European conflicts of this period. Second, this photographic trophy  – Baden-Powell used the term ‘memento’  – was selected for publication in a book that became a bestseller in 1897. A chain of decisions made it an icon, not just a forgotten picture stacked in a private album. As such, ‘The biter

Figure 7.1 Robert Baden-Powell, ‘The biter bit’, photoengraving, in Robert Baden-Powell, The Matabele Campaign, 1896 (London: Methuen, 1897), 61. The caption reads: ‘I had stopped for a moment under a tree, to look at a man who had just been shot, when there was as slight movement among the branches above me, and a Matabele who was hiding there fired down, but missed me. He was immediately afterwards shot – and I photographed him later.’

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bit’ is a crucial record of what took place during this conflict. It is part and parcel of this war, not just a document but an act. It also testifies to the evolving tolerance thresholds in the industrialised world that both Baden-Powell and his editors anticipated. This triangle between war, hunting, and imagery might not epitomise what happened in the British Empire as a whole but does raise a crucial issue. This book demonstrates the interlinkage between photography and organised violence. Colonial wars and the brutality that often surrounded them  – from ‘policing’ operations to exemplary demonstrations of physical chastisement  – were not homogeneous processes. Colonial acts of violence cannot be subsumed under a single, all-encompassing label. Their heterogeneous expressions should be duly underlined, even if violence in general was at the heart of colonial enterprises in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, the examination of Baden-Powell’s trophy snapshot points to a critical difference between colonial warfare and what Europeans considered to be civilised uses of force in their own conflicts. Was there a juncture between vision and violence that was particular to imperial contexts? Can photography testify to specific forms of physical devastation and coercion in colonial terrains? The photographic processing of the enemy’s body is one significant point of entry into this line of questioning. Photographs both look at and show expressions of blunt force. They not only document what they record but also materialise how perpetrators wanted to freeze and visualise their actions. If a present-day reader feels a legitimate shock when witnessing the expressions of conflict in the colonised world, such outrage brings little to the understanding of the process. It is a tautology: as horrible as it is, killing is an essential component of war. As unbearable as they might seem, public displays of violence against the bodies of the disorderly were not unknown to British and French audiences at the time. To overcome the epistemic limitations of raw emotions, one needs to move from the subject of the photographs to the photographic event and the circulation of the pictures. In sum, observing that Baden-Powell was unmoved by the death of his adversary is unsurprising. The fact that he took his camera out seconds after the kill, photographed the corpse, and later illustrated his book with this picture is, on the contrary, remarkable. In effect, by way of an additional desecration and complete erasure of the fighter’s identity, Baden-Powell’s lens and its capacity to expose became an instrument of what Achille Mbembe calls colonial ‘necropolitics’; i.e., the use of death as a form of decisive political power.5 What becomes of the enemy’s body is central to the practices of violence in war. Much like the punished bodies studied by Michel Foucault, the adversary’s corpse is a surface for the violent inscription of messages. Jacques Sémelin has underlined how, in the context of mass violence, ‘the ways bodies are seized […] are, intrinsically, cultural actions’.6 These meanings were profoundly modified and their echoes amplified by the development of photography. As examined earlier in this book, views

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displaying the bruised and destroyed bodies of soldiers and victims of armed conflicts appeared at an early stage in the development of the medium. Tragedies ravaging Asia, America, and Africa offered opportunities to experiment with new visualisations of the disasters of war from the 1850s. Demand grew steadily from the 1890s with the emergence of a sensationalist press in the industrialised world. As explored earlier, atrocity photographs and other forms of graphic imagery became part of the media landscape well before the interwar years, which are often considered critical to the development of photojournalism. These early colonial images of the enemy’s body are symbolically charged: photographs of the adversary, whether he is fallen, wounded, killed, imprisoned, or punished, constitute a discourse with multiple meanings.7 Portraying the enemy is one of many ways to define him. Framing local opponents in the colonial conflicts fought by France or Britain was never a straightforward process. ‘Conventional’ conflicts between Western-styled state structures, such as the Russo-Japanese War, were seemingly more clear cut. Uniforms and intricate military organisations were key to differentiating between institutionalised belligerents. The situation was radically different in terrains touched by conflictuality driven by European colonial expansion. At times, some adversaries were part of a structure that, in the eyes of the French and British, might resemble what they considered to be an organised state with an army. The Mahdist regime in Sudan, for instance, fell into this category. The jibbeh – a quilted coat used by Sudanese soldiers in the nineteenth century – was understood to be a uniform, an attestation of the existence of semi-regular troops, by the British fighting in the area. However, in most cases, those resisting European encroachment were not part of a community that the colonisers categorised as a seemingly advanced state. They were considered irregular fighters, or ‘unlawful combatants’ to use, quite anachronistically, the vocabulary developed in the last two decades in the United States of America. Memos and letters from European officers engaged in imperial wars are replete with qualifiers and categories to refer to these adversaries. The term ‘pirate’ was popular in Indochina. It was a catchall phrase that encompassed both actual outlaws and real political movements fighting French rule in the area, denying the latter any ideological substrate or legitimacy. In Burma, the British liberally applied the phrase dacoit to their opponents. This concept was derived from a Hindi word referring to bandits. Every attempt to resist foreign expansion was thus comfortably dismissed to a derogatory category. The irregular enemy was little more than a criminal in colonial contexts. His nudity and exotic appearance were understood to be external signs of his lesser standing in the Western hierarchy of fighters. His erasure in war or the destruction of his body through punishment were part and parcel of a broader attempt to impose a new order, where the boundaries between the battlefield and the gallows were often porous. Both dimensions are thus addressed simultaneously in the following sections.

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This chapter aims to observe the photographic records of several extra-European conflicts to envisage how British and French agents displayed, classified, and staged their own uses of violence. It also examines how they looked at others applying radical force. Another key problem relates to reciprocal influences between different spaces of conflict in this period; i.e., between colonial campaigns and more conventional interstate wars. The first section delves into a photographic genre that was extremely popular from the 1890s to the 1910s: the portrait of the defeated enemy leader. This section might seem to steer away from the core topic of this work because the adversary’s body is not altered in many of these photographs. Yet, violence is visibly lurking within these pictures. Restrained by the frame, and sometimes by ropes or chains, fallen kings and queens of Africa and Asia are seemingly subjugated by photography. The second section analyses pictures of punishment and demonstrates how photographs of inflicted suffering and death in the late colonial era amount to a cartography of pain. The last section addresses the most extreme uses of photography in war, testifying to the substantial fluctuations between different colonial contexts. Reframed bodies Full-length portraits of defeated leaders are among the most common renderings of the enemy’s body in late nineteenth-century colonial photographic productions. Archives and illustrated prints of the time are full of such portraits. They might seem benign pictures, falling well out of the scope of this work, because they rarely hint at immediate physical violence. Yet, as stated earlier, such shots took place in a wider process of registration and control. In many colonial conflicts, images of the defeated king or of an imprisoned rebel chief were nonetheless a way to ‘stage war without actually showing it’, as underlined by Fabio Viti.8 Many African and Asian potentates were willing photographic subjects and freely chose to have their portraits taken.9 Numerous others were captured in defeat in portraits that signalled the downfall of local power structures and the victory of the imperial newcomers. We must go back to a prototypical portrait to grasp how what is either apparently insignificant in a picture or what lies out-of-field, i.e., outside the frame, signified restraint and sometimes violence on the bodies of the defeated. How should one read the portrait of Cetshwayo kaMpande (1826–84) photographed on the deck of the ship that was taking him into exile a few months after he was captured in August 1879 during the Anglo-Zulu War (Figure 7.2)? Dressed in traditional clothing, partly wrapped in a blanket, the formidable king, or rather his persona, certainly looked exotic to a Western audience. His partial nudity resonated with well-entrenched clichés and obeyed the canons of the portraiture of indigenous people. At first glance and to European eyes, the picture displays an African sovereign in his authentic

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Figure 7.2 Crewes and Van Laun Studio, Photograph of Cetshwayo on board the HMS Natal, September 1879, albumen print, 12.7 cm × 9.0 cm, from an album compiled by W. S. Anderson between 1879 and 1915. This portrait was first sold in several studios in Cape Town and then in England in carte-de-visite format. The Penny Illustrated Paper (18 October 1879) published an engraving from Crewes and Van Laun’s photograph. The portrait, a best seller, also circulated on magic lantern slides, such as the ones produced by the London Stereoscopic Company, one of the major photographic editors in nineteenth-century Britain. This specific print was bought by W. S. Anderson (RMA Woolwich, 60th Rifles), a British officer who fought several imperial wars from Afghanistan to Egypt in the 1870s and 1880s. Cetshwayo kaMpande’s image therefore circulated on an impressive array of photographic objects.

foreignness. There was actually a large audience for this portrait. It enjoyed wide circulation in Britain starting in 1879. However, that first reading comes short of grasping what went on during this specific photographic event. A closer examination shows that the king did not look directly into the lens. His right foot is blurry: the photographed subject was unsteady. As hard as it is to interpret body language across time and cultures, tiny details point to his reluctance to be in front of the camera. Did he realise what the picture could mean in terms of a humiliation that could become both physical and symbolic?

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Luckily for present-day observers, there is a recollection of the scene that was brilliantly analysed by Hlonipha Mokoena.10 It substantiates these hypotheses. Crewes and Van Laun, two Cape Town-based commercial photographers, shot the portrait. They embarked on the Natal, the ship that was taking Cetshwayo and his relatives into exile. Days later, they published a rare article titled ‘Cetywayo Photographed’ that described how ‘He appeared to be very nervous […] He seemed to dread the camera, and did not like the look of the lens […] He was more at ease when he found that it was done without his being hurt.’11 While stereotypes of the soul-stealing camera were rife at the time, the report seems relatively accurate. The king apparently decided to put an end to the photo shoot after two pictures were taken. He was visibly aware of the manipulative potential of the camera. When the photographers asked him for a group portrait with his wives, he declined, suggesting that Crewes and Van Laun ‘could cut’ the first photos ‘and then place him wherever we liked’.12 Cetshwayo expressed his disappointment at his photographic portraiture weeks later.13 This might explain why he chose to control his own image in 1882. Then in England, he paid Alexander Bassano, whose studio was a must-go for the upper class of London at the time, to take his portrait, this time in a Western suit.14 This example from the 1880s illustrates how the photographed subject could be well aware of the pressure exerted by the camera. A leader on the road to exile, Cetshwayo easily grasped the potential degradation that the lens might create. Placed in a subjugated position, pressured by the victor’s gaze, his body is the focal point, the very expression of his defeat. Yet, in this instance, the king’s body bears no trace of physical violence. His captivity is signalled by a buoy in the background, a metonymy of his forced removal on a British vessel. Such visualisations of fallen leaders became a popular subgenre up until the First World War. Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, the Ọba (king) of Benin, was similarly captured by a camera in 1897, unquestionably sitting on the deck of the ship that was deporting him to exile in Calabar.15 Interestingly, this time, Jonathan A. Green, a pioneer of African photography, was behind the camera.16 Samory Touré was another notable subject of French photographers looking to record a defeated enemy. He was photographed from every angle by officers who were all trying to be the first to capture him in his downfall with the view of sending proof of their accomplishment to French newspapers. There are countless examples like these. Exile was a much-used instrument of imperial rule. Photography became integral to the process as a tool to reconfigure the adversary’s body according to the standards of European civilisation. Prempeh (1870–1931), the Ashanti emperor exiled to the Seychelles in 1896 after he was defeated by the British, was also photographed on the deck of the ship that took him from his kingdom.17 Mwanga II, King of Buganda (present-day Uganda), was also immortalised on his road to exile by British officers in 1898.18

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None of these portraits are as exotic or benign as they seem. These photographed bodies sometimes bear visible marks of restraint and violence. This was often the case when the goal was to deprive the portrayed leader of all outward signs of legitimacy, as with rebel figureheads whose bodies were often visibly restrained. Such figureheads were not protected by the aristocratic status that sometimes benefitted African and Asian kings and princes, particularly in the British Empire, which was always careful not to deny local nobilities their standing. One example of such harsher portraiture is Birsa Munda’s photograph. It is one of the few pictures of the leader of an anti-imperial movement in India at the end of the nineteenth century. Birsa Munda (1875–1900) was a spiritual and political figure who led an uprising against British authorities and missionary activity in Northeast India (today Bihar and Jharkhand). He was captured in August 1895 and photographed in the following days, most likely by an Anglican missionary (Figure 7.3).19 The picture falls somewhere between criminal identification and the degrading exposure of the body of a fallen rebel. Significantly, Birsa Munda was tried in public before the population immediately after his capture in an attempt to combine the effects of the camera and the judicial spectacle of his downfall to destroy his religious aura. He is frozen as a captive with his hands bound with rope. The photograph expresses power relations where the body, in its actual and symbolic shackles, becomes the vanishing point. Similar portraits of emaciated ‘rebels’ in shackles are contained in other parts of the colonial photographic archive. For instance, Kadungure Mapondera’s portrait, taken in 1896, shows him in handcuffs.20 The Shona leader was captured by the British during the Mashonaland War of 1896. The camera, yet again, was an instrument of his demise. The 1897 photographs of Nehanda Nyakasikana and Sekuru Kaguvi fulfilled the same goal. The starving bodies of the svikiro (mediums), central actors in the local struggle against British expansion in present-day Zimbabwe, were thus desacralised. Both were executed a few weeks later. This photographic demise has nevertheless been assigned contradictory meanings over time. Reframed and retouched many times over, the portrait of Nehanda Nyakasikana and Sekuru Kaguvi has now become an icon of Zimbabwean nationalism. In an analogous exhibition of bodies marked by defeat, Reginald Wingate, the director of British military intelligence during the Sudan Campaign, had several portraits made of Mahmud Ahmad, an emir of the Mahdist state wounded by a bayonet and captured at the Battle of Atbara in April 1898. One shows him minutes after the fight ended. It shows a camera on a tripod, ready to be used: evidence of the wellplanned visual coverage of the battle.21 Another more elaborate picture was taken and reproduced in several books, including an account of the campaign published by Bennet Burleigh in 1898.22 Significantly, in an additional acknowledgement of his defeat, it appears that Mahmud Ahmad was asked to sign an original print of his

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Figure 7.3 Rev. G. H. Lusty (?), ‘Birsa Munda,’ photoengraving, in Sarat Chandra Roy, The Mundas and their Country (Calcutta: Asia Publishing House, 1912), 106. This portrait was likely taken by G. H. Lusty, a British missionary, soon after Birsa Munda was captured in August 1895. It resonates with echoes of ethnographic photography and more specifically with many of the pictures published in The People of India, a great taxonomic project that was conceived as a photographic encyclopaedia of the populations of British India (the first volumes were released in 1868, see Chapter 2). Birsa Munda eventually became a symbol of opposition to British colonialism in Indian memory during the twentieth century. Initially shown as a captive, he became a figure of resistance. For instance, his portrait can be found on an official 1988 Indian stamp with the ropes carefully erased from the picture.

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second portrait, where he stands, bare-headed and surrounded by Egyptian auxiliaries, in a bloodied jibbeh. These pictures, in various shapes and forms, enjoyed wide circulation at the time. Some obviously ended up in the personal albums of the soldiers that took part in these imperial campaigns; however, many circulated well beyond the networks of colonial veterans. Such pictures were designed from the start to publicise victory both on the spot and in the imperial metropolises. Black legends, meticulously built by the French and British press, thus found a visual conclusion, a photographic endpoint. Pictures of the enemy’s captured and humiliated body were meant to be exhibited and shown around. To an extent, they closed the parenthesis on an instability that European empires were careful to depict as temporary. In this regard, these photographs are all indicative of unspoken tensions within imperial structures. A portrait of a captured opponent functions as an outlet. The amount of visible physical humiliation in these pictures is often correlated with the intensity of the challenges embodied by the deposed leader. Frustrated by their failure to capture Hoàng Hoa Thám, the organiser of an effective guerrilla war against French troops in early twentieth-century Indochina, colonial authorities had to make do with the capture of his father-in-law in 1907 (Figure 7.4). Photographs of the captive circulated on postcards, and L’Illustration reproduced a large-format picture of the visibly exhausted old man being carried in a basket by local auxiliaries. From this angle, the rebellion seemed to have lost its edge. At the bottom of the page, however, a smaller picture shows three decapitated heads of Hoàng Hoa Thám supporters. The graphic image can be found in some private albums, an indication that it circulated as a photographic trophy among French soldiers on the spot.23 Despite its graphic reflection of the horrors of war, the editors of the illustrated paper decided to publish it: it was an acceptable representation for widespread use at the time. The juxtaposition of these two images illustrates the tensions that characterised photographic discourses on colonial expansion. They cast the shadow of an ever-unstable colonial order. The instability of European power often lay ‘out-of-frame’ of these images, never exempt from glaring contradictions, manifested in the wide distribution of seemingly justified atrocity photographs. The photographic device makes it possible to convey what feels like the actual presence of the beaten body. Its nudity, fatigue, and humiliation were and are expressed more directly through the lens than by drawings or paintings. The portraits of fallen kings or rebel prisoners aggregated into an immense virtual gallery of traditional power discarded by European modernity. The capacity of the medium to enhance the adversary’s downfall was well known by some colonial officers. All around the French and British empires, ceremonies of submission signalled unprecedented shifts in power. By adding to the theatricality of submission, photography came to play an

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Figure 7.4 Anon., ‘Le beau-père du Dé-Tham et têtes de pirates des bandes du Dé-Thám’ (Dé-Tham’s father-in-law and heads of Dé-Tham pirates), in L’Illustration, 26 June 1909, 443.

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essential role in many of these rituals. Photographers were often placed for everyone, local inhabitants included, to see. Joseph Gallieni, then the Governor-General of Madagascar, was particularly astute in his use of the medium to these ends. He staged several ceremonies of submission to demonstrate his authority over the leaders of the Menalamba uprising of 1897. Rainitavy, Rainibetsimisaraka, and Rabozaka were all captured by the camera after their defeat while they kneeled before French officials.24 Gallieni organised a full-blown ritual in front of the Le Myre de Vilers school in Antananarivo, located in the disused royal palace. Several officers, armed with cameras, recorded the scene. This sent a strong signal to the spectators, many of them Malagasy, a signal that those who would see the pictures printed in French newspapers could easily grasp as well: the old power structures no longer existed. Gallieni actively promoted the circulation of these photographs, and some of them were added to albums he often offered to visitors of rank. A vast collection of images was made available by his staff to anyone who needed illustrations. He also reproduced images of these ceremonies in his own books to publicise his successes in France.25 Photography provided evidence that the phase of active conquest and war was giving way to what he called ‘pacification’; i.e., the slower action of colonial development. Gallieni was not the only prominent European colonial officer to believe in photographic propaganda. Several others, both British and French, explored the ability of the medium to convey political submission in the 1890s. Again, the leaders’ bodies, unarmed, sitting or kneeling in front of European officers, were the focal point of many of these pictures. Jean-Marie Collomb, Louis Archinard’s doctor and photographer during the conquest of what is today Mali, thus immortalised the submission of Aguibou, the son of El-Hadj Umar and brother of Ahmadu, the leader of the Tukulor Empire that the French fought and defeated in the early 1890s.26 In 1900, Cecil Aspinall, a British officer, photographed the different phases of the War of the Golden Stool against the Ashanti people for The Sphere. His coverage is a mixture of the main genres of colonial photography at the time; however, one specific picture shows Ashanti leaders surrendering, white flag in hand.27 Frederick Lugard, who administered Nigeria from 1900 to 1906, also paid attention to photography as an instrument of power and a way to materialise the transition of power. Lugard chose Muhammadu Attahiru II as the new Sultan of Sokoto after his predecessor, Muhammadu Attahiru I, fled before the British advance in the spring of 1903. A ceremony was organised in March and carefully recorded by a photographer. Once again, armed violence lingered in the background. Lugard deployed his troops in three rows in front of the royal residence of Sokoto, a Maxim machinegun well in view.28 At the centre of the photograph, the new Sultan and his dignitaries are sitting on the ground, facing Lugard and his officers, in a symbolic recognition of British paramountcy. Original prints are to be found in private albums of imperial soldiers involved in the campaign;

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however, the photograph also circulated on a much wider scale. For instance, it was published in 1906 by The Graphic.29 These codes of submission were trans-imperial. They were shared between the French and the British and with other European colonial empires. Photography reshaped the aesthetic canons of submission and political transition. The bodies of the defeated leaders were systematically the focal points of these pictures. Photography, in these situations, had a double effect. The physical participation of the camera in the ceremony and its ability to project images in distant locations made it an essential element of colonial publicity. In most of these examples, the enemy’s body was only symbolically subdued. However, the colonial photographic archive holds records of much more visible expressions of violence. As mentioned earlier, various colonial terrains became testing grounds for radical experimentation with photography in relation to retribution. The bruised and punished bodies of colonised subjects, and, more specifically in this work, the bodies of those actively resisting European expansionism in Asia and Africa, became popular photographic subjects by the late nineteenth century. The punishing lens: glossaries of retribution It was, once again, Joseph Gallieni and his staff who pioneered an innovative articulation between punishment and photographic technology in 1896 to propagandise the colonisation of Madagascar. The island officially became a French colony in the summer of that year. Hippolyte Laroche, the French Resident, was ousted in favour of Gallieni, who set up a military government. An uprising, the so-called Menalamba insurrection, threatened Antananarivo, the capital. French authorities feared high-ranking officials within the Malagasy elite were part of a widespread conspiracy. Gallieni had several dignitaries arrested. On 15 October, an expeditious trial before a military court – the minutes of which were never fully archived – sentenced Rainandriamampandry, a prominent minister, and Prince Ratsimamanga to death.30 Gallieni thus sent a clear signal to the insurgents and local leaders, as well as to his government and even public opinion in France. The execution of two major local figures was also a message to non-Catholic missionaries in Madagascar. Both victims were of Protestant faith, which fuelled the suspicions of many French officials who feared British interference in Madagascar. Significantly, a Norwegian missionary bought a complete series of photographs of the execution in the months that followed: his views of the punishment certainly differed from the French discourse.31 To him, Rainandriamampandry and Ratsimamanga were instead martyrs of Malagasy Protestantism. Gallieni authorised, or at least tolerated, the presence of photographers in and around the execution. This created an echo chamber, the discourse of punishment

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thus gaining an unprecedented visual impact. The brutal performance was photographed from at least two angles. One photographer was placed metres away from the condemned and close to French officials (Figure 7.5). Standing as he was in the middle of a group of officers, he could not have acted without authorisation or informal acknowledgement. Another photographer overlooked the scene. An unwanted intruder, however, spoiled this picture at the fateful millisecond (Figure 7.6). There are no written records of the official planning of this photographic coverage; however,

Figure 7.5 Anon., ‘Feu’ (The gunshot), 15 October 1896, baryta paper mounted on cardboard, 10.9 cm × 8.3 cm. This print was reproduced from one of the albums compiled under Joseph Gallieni’s instructions. It was the main reference for an engraving published in L’Illustration on 22 November 1898. The fact that it took only a few weeks for original prints to get from Madagascar to Paris is in itself revealing of the undocumented networks interested in propagandising Gallieni’s achievements. The newspaper indicates that three unnamed individuals provided the photographs. One, Charles Pagnoud, can be positively identified. He managed a trading company that became the Compagnie Lyonnaise de Madagascar in 1897. He was also a member of the board of directors of the Madagascar Committee, a structure created in 1894 to promote the territory and to campaign for its transformation into a French protectorate. This committee defended French colonial interests in Madagascar after the conquest and was granted a subsidy by Gallieni as early as 1898. Pagnoud was therefore part of a ‘colonial’ network that organised the publication of photographs in the French mainstream press.

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Figure 7.6 Anon., ‘15 octobre 1896: exécution de Rainandriamampandry’ (15 October 1896, execution of Rainandriamampandry), albumen print on cardboard, 8.5 cm × 11 cm, from André Savoie’s album (Savoie was a medical officer in the Service de Santé des Armées). This is a critical document for several reasons. It reminds the spectator of William Wallace Hooper’s 1886 photographic ‘prowess’ in Burma (see Chapter 3). The photographer tried to capture death, but a passerby blocked the view. The angle, unfortunately, makes it impossible to see the other photographer who stood closest to the execution; however, one can see the entirety of this photographic event: the crowd gathered in the distance, watching the scene. This second image breaks the mould of the first one. The camera functioned as an extension of the spectacle of punishment. The execution became a double event: the punishment itself and its photography, an organic component of the process that was being played out.

it obviously required some form of agreement, at least implicitly, from the colonial authorities. The photographs were compiled in the official albums of the colony created under Gallieni’s orders and were managed by his topographical staff.32 This photographed performance of retribution was visibly inscribed in continuity with the aforementioned ceremonies of submission. Photography not only documented the violent ritual but also fully participated in it and allowed it to be projected further. A few weeks later, an original series of views of the execution was opportunely sent to France. They were published by L’Illustration as part of an article celebrating Gallieni’s iron hand. The sequence of photographs also circulated in private collections.33

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Gallieni was well aware of the huge potential contained in the combination of punishment and photography. This articulation could instill greater intensity in what James Hevia calls ‘imperial lessons’, those moments when imperial agents performed acts of humiliation for both local and European audiences. Extraordinary by nature, these violent pedagogies were part of a system. The radical expression of force and its publicity materialised the asymmetry of the new power relations. Photography helped disseminate this imperial discourse to an unprecedented extent. To its practitioners, such applications of organised violence were also expressions of ‘progress’, even if these violent pictures might not reflect any advance to present-day cultures. In Gallieni’s eyes, the execution in Madagascar fell well within the standards of European judicial norms. It was a demonstration of how order could be established when backward or even barbarian conventions of retribution were erased by colonisation. Its photographic coverage could therefore be public, unlike the much less ‘civilised’ violent practices sometimes documented in the private collections of some colonial agents. In this regard, and despite obvious differences between the two countries as far as capital punishment practices were concerned, one should be careful not to discriminate too much between British and French uses of organised violence in imperial terrains, specifically when local perceptions are considered. People were guillotined in France and hanged in the United Kingdom, where the last public execution took place in 1868. French authorities banned the practice in 1939, a much later date. However, in the context of extra-European conflicts or policing in colonial contexts, these differences fade away. The 1898 international intervention in Crete offers a stark illustration of these proximities. Several European powers, including the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Russia, sent an international force to pacify the island after they were officially asked to by the Ottoman Empire during the Greco–Turkish War of 1897. For several months, Crete was governed by a European ‘Council of Admirals’. In September 1898, British troops settled in Candia (Heraklion) and assumed control of the customs house in order to start collecting taxes. A segment of the Muslim population, upset by what it considered to be an insult, attacked the Christian population of the town as well as the British soldiers on 6 September. The rioters ran to the residence of the British vice-consul and burned it down, killing the official. At least 500 people were killed in the process, among them fourteen British nationals. Leading figures of the uprising were handed over to the British by the Ottoman authorities to be court-martialled. They were executed in mid-October. Most of them were hanged in Heraklion at an elevation that overlooked the city. William Price Drury (1861–1949), of the Royal Navy, took part in the intervention and later justified the spectacular retribution: ‘In England a public execution is unthinkable; as an example to the fanatical hordes of the

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East it is often imperative for the common safety.’34 In a move to expose the execution even more, British authorities apparently asked local commercial photographers to take pictures of the gallows (Figure 7.7). One series documented the different phases of the execution at close range, another captured the gallows from afar. The first clientele for these images were British marines. The most graphic photographs were not reproduced in the metropolitan press, which chose engravings to illustrate its articles on the crisis. On 5 November 1898, The Graphic created an interesting parallel on its front page. One, ‘from a photograph’, showed the flogging of several Sudanese individuals, the other, ‘from a sketch’, showed the hanged bachi-bouzouks (‘broken heads’: irregular soldiers of the Ottoman Army) of Heraklion: two imperial lessons for the price of one and a celebration of the new imperial-global order Britain warranted. The cheaper Penny Illustrated Paper published another similar engraving with a resounding caption: ‘a Warning to the Turks’.35 Analogous imagery and discourse circulated a year later when British authorities in Sierra Leone hanged several ‘leopard men’. These men were members of a local secret society that became a sensation of late-nineteenth-century colonial fantasies of Africa. They had stood accused of having a part in the deaths of hundreds of people. Among them was the sokong (king) of the local Imperi population. The men had their necks broken on a scaffold built in the main square of the town of Bonthe in November 1899. A few weeks earlier, during a conflict called the Hut Tax War, insurgents had captured William Hughes, no less than the British governor of the colony. He was tortured and killed in the village of Gbanbaia in April 1898. The local population was summoned to witness the execution of the individuals suspected of having had a direct involvement in this murder. Once again, photographs were openly taken. Prints were then sent to England and published in The Sketch, a famous weekly. They show three different stages of the execution in a public display of the ‘civilised’ management of seemingly justified deaths set against the background of the atrocious mutilations inflicted on the governor.36 The treatment of the punished body is to be distinguished from what happened on the battlefield itself, even though in many of these examples, photographers could seize the long-desired opportunity to freeze violent death, something that seemed impossible in the course of actual combat. Yet such rituals are among variations of the European gaze on imperial wars. Capital and corporal punishment were some of the usual expressions of visible physical violence in colonial terrains. The intersection between spectacular retribution and its photographic reflections was explored at an early date in the history of the medium. Felice Beato took a picture of hanged ‘mutineers’ during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 in what has now become an iconic shortcut to grasp the violence of the British repression. Years later, William Wallace Hooper’s attempts to use his camera to capture the very moment of impact of bullets into the

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Figure 7.7 Rahmizade Bahaeddin (?), photograph showing the execution of the murderers of the British vice-consul on Crete, 10.7 cm × 14.6 cm, silver print on cardboard from John Archer’s photographic album (1871–1954).

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The execution and its aftermath were photographed from several angles by local studios who appear to have sold single prints to members of the international squadron. A British officer bought this copy to put in his own private album. The fact that the bodies of the so-called bachi-bouzouks were left to rot on the gallows increased the spectacularisation of the scene. French troops, who also took part in the operations, executed suspected rioters by firing squad. A photograph of the proceedings was published by L’Illustration on 17 December 1898, 385. The specific methods of the British and French might have differed; however, the modes of visualisation intersected.

bodies of condemned Burmese rebels sparked a scandal. A relatively large corpus of pictures, with several subgenres, documents a great variety of ways to punish people. To understand its substrate better, one has to delve into how executions and the infliction of physical pain were part of a broader context. From a British or French standpoint, extra-European and colonial spaces, in particular, offered multiple opportunities to record symbolic gestures of chastisement precisely when the visibility of punishment was declining in Europe itself. The morality and legality of pretrial photographs and of photographs of prisoners became a contended issue at the turn of the century.37 The movement toward executions without public viewing is a well-studied process. Three main analyses stand out and should be sketched, even if hastily. For Max Weber, the evolution of modern European states allowed them to reach effective control capacities. The means to enforce social order became so potent in the nineteenth century that the publicity of punishment and the terror it was supposed to instill were no longer necessary tools.38 Norbert Elias considers that rising standards of civility ended up making the spectacle of executions and public punishment unbearable to most people.39 Michel Foucault, finally, insists upon what it means to project power on bodies. The end of the performance of chastisement thus corresponds to a historical moment when the mind, not the body, became the focal element to be corrected in Western societies.40 None of these perspectives, introduced here in too few words, were presented without nuances and counterexamples by their authors. Foucault never lost sight of how the condemned retained a capacity for subversion up to their death, nor did he lose track of the diverse potential perceptions of what visible punishment could mean to individual observers and of the intrinsic fragility of these processes. However, in all three approaches, and in most of those that were developed in their wake, punishment in colonial contexts and in the non-European world is a sideshow at best. They ignore the fact that such punitive practices were not invisible in Europe. Photography, in particular, recorded them and brought them back to France and Great Britain from Africa and Asia for public display. Punishment, as observed in others or as practised in the colonial sphere, was a standard to measure what was ‘advanced’ or not, what was ‘civilised’ or not. Geographical and cultural distance did much to reinforce the idea that harsh and exotic rituals of punishment

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were markers of decay or backwardness. It still does. However, in many cases, the encounter between European and local practices, sometimes fused by photography, created new techniques of applying and spectacularising pain. Rather than being frozen in a past that had become unacceptable to European audiences, punishment was reinvented on the fringes of their empires. Photography, and cinema soon after, played a crucial role in this modernisation. The evolution of French and British views on punishment must therefore be examined on a global scale. As Clare Anderson has shown, the evolution of capital punishment should be observed across the British Empire.41 Public stagings of inflicted pain or death were planned in colonial contexts well after the early twentieth century. While flogging was, for instance, banned in the British Army in the 1870s for white soldiers, it was still applied to African colonial troops until the Second World War. There are multiple factors involved in these imperial specificities; however, a few key points should be underlined. In some areas of the European empires and their zones of influence, the lingering threat of a potential uprising or actual signs of a resilient local resistance justified spectacular practices of punishment in the eyes of the authorities. In Egypt, as explained earlier, it was the fear of an insurrection that partly sealed the fate of the Denshawai villagers. The French in Madagascar also hoped to strike fear into locals by publicly and photographically executing two magnates. On several occasions, cameras played a part in the performance, by both recording and structuring it. Henri Labouret, the head of the Gaoua administrative division (between modern Burkina Faso, the Northern Ivory Coast, and Western Ghana) starting in June 1914, kept pictures of rebel hangings in his private albums.42 These images show summary executions. There was visibly no attempt at refinement in these executions. The British prided themselves in carefully measuring the length of rope to ensure the condemned’s neck would break and thus avoid long agony. Nothing of the kind was reflected in this album. The angle of the camera clearly shows that the photographer was placed as close as possible to the crude gallows. Local inhabitants in the market square were apparently summoned to witness the scene. French authorities were setting an example in an area that consistently resisted the new colonial order. It worked to a certain extent. This gesture of punishment lived on for decades in the memories of the elders in the area.43 The harshest practices in both empires rarely went unremarked on in the imperial metropolises. Photography fed some of this outrage as shown earlier. Despite denunciations, ethnic and cultural differences were often summoned to justify the existence of practices that had become less acceptable in Europe. There was an obvious racial dimension to the punishment of the non-European body, even if simplistic generalisations should be taken with caution in this matter. The combination of several factors, however, gave modernised meanings to corporal punishment in colonial domains.

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The structuring of early humanitarian discourses, the uneven legal codification of punishment along European standards, and the visual economy of inflicted pain all participated in renewing their use and placing them into colonialist narratives of progress. ‘Civilisation’ was bound to supersede the ineffective violence of the past. Under this stratum, nonetheless, the meanings assigned to punished bodies in Asia and Africa – at least as they were understood by European observers – were not completely erased. It was often argued that corporal punishment remained the appropriate response to local circumstances and that it should be conceived with local perceptions of punishment in mind.44 There was a double discourse on these issues on the part of colonial authorities. In 1906, Frederick Lugard resisted the wish of the Colonial Office to curb flogging in Northern Nigeria, which he administered at the time: ‘I suggested the pillory and stocks, but they [the Colonial Office officials in London] want to deal with a primitive people on the lines of 20th century England instead of on the lines of 15th century England [...] Flogging and mutilation are their own traditional punishments. We rightly prohibit the latter, but we cannot yet dispense with the former.’45 Similar reasoning presided over corporal punishment in the prison system of French Algeria. Despite attempts to ‘civilise’ practices and ban the most questionable uses of force, recurring applications of what had become, in France, unacceptable forms of violence against indigenous convicts persisted well into the twentieth century.46 The hybrid judicial systems that were created in many dependencies could seem to maintain elements of the punitive regimes that predated colonisation, many of which had been criticised in Europe. The fact that they survived in part reinforced the feeling that the non-European world – Asia and Africa in particular – remained sites of ‘backwardness’ as far as punitive practices were concerned. Outside formal empires as such, states that were gradually subjected to a form of indirect influence – China, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire  – constituted points of reference and counterexamples from a European perspective. Perceptions of lingchi, a Chinese torture that obsessed George Bataille, have been carefully studied by Jérôme Bourgon in all its photographic expressions.47 They are a great illustration of this process. Modalities of physical chastisement were extremely popular photographic themes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the industrialised world. Within and outside colonial empires, photographers helped establish a vast taxonomy of forms of punishment worldwide. Notably, cinema also contributed to the collection of these specimens early on. In the early twentieth century, the French film-production company Pathé, always more sensationalist than its competitors, released a series titled ‘Capital Executions’, which met with great interest from the public.48 Voyeurism, plain and simple, fostered demand for this violent imagery. Morbid attraction for graphic scenes might also explain why so many snapshots of exotic executions were compiled within the albums of travellers and soldiers involved in

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extra-European conflicts.49 Early expressions of thanatourism developed at sites of executions, particularly in Asia. Some pictures became actual icons to be found in dozens of private collections. One such image is a photograph showing the decapitation of Chinese pirates in Kowloon (Hong Kong) in April 1891. The prisoners had attacked the SS Namoa at sea, near Taiwan, a few months earlier. They had killed Europeans in the process. Photographs of their execution, likely taken by a British customs officer, circulated in the press in the following weeks. Individual prints and postcards with evolving and inventive captions were sold in the main ports of the region over the years.50 The best-selling picture exuded an exotic horror that was much sought after by Europeans. Yet, beyond the stereotypes of Asian torture, the image carried a more complex message. The sentence followed local rules but was carried out in front of Western witnesses, who are seen posing near the bodies in some of the pictures taken that day. The photographers acted within view of the convicts, who could not ignore the cameras.51 Again, punishment was made a hybrid of actual force and its potentially unerasable visualisation. The circulation of the photographs, which were sold in Hong Kong by several studios, therefore conveyed a mixture of messages. Curiosity about non-European cruelties was combined with a desire to assert freedom to trade and travel in a sea free of pirates. In these overlapping discourses, an emerging, British-enforced, rule of law transformed Hong Kong into a nodal point. The ‘Kowloon pirates’ had become an image of practices, both legal and criminal, whose disappearance was ineluctable: the last public execution took place in 1894. Assuming that visions of extreme pain and destruction inflicted upon distant bodies (from a European standpoint) aggregated into an indiscriminate and scabrous assemblage at the time would be a mistake. Photographs of local and hybrid punishments also reflect attempts at establishing gradations between practices from a French or British point of view. This informal glossary stemmed from an inclination to compare practices and to put them at a distance. The coverage of the violence of others, even when they were local auxiliaries, mechanically highlighted the promised progress brought by Western influence. The gruesome fate of Jilali ben Driss Zirhouni al-Youssefi, a rogui (pretender to the throne), executed in 1909 for having attempted to topple the Sultan of Morocco, fascinated French audiences. The punishment was documented by several photographers. The rebel was first shown around Fez in a cage and then cut into pieces in a ceremony that was described as barbaric by the French press, precisely when French influence was extending over the kingdom. Photographs of punishment helped contrast vernacular violence and European uses of violence. Interestingly, views of executions carried out following Western conventions sometimes put European participants into the frame. It is, however, quite exceptional to see them carrying out forms of corporal punishment that were considered backward

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according to Western perceptions. In such instances, they were at best included as spectators of the scene when they appeared within the frame, even when the punishment was a response to harm caused to European individuals. Both in colonised territories and in those subjected to more indirect forms of influence, local auxiliaries applied the pain in front of the lens. For colonial authorities, the strategy was often not ‘to claim the monopoly of legitimate violence for themselves but only to orientate coercion’.52 Delegation was an essential mechanism in many situations. It allowed European agents to outsource the infliction of violent pain, both literally and visually. The presence of European authority could be signalled indirectly via the presence of an officer or in a detail (Figure 7.8). The numerous views of executions that circulated in Indochina at the turn of the century follow the same pattern.53 The spectacular beheading of Ông Ích Đường offers an illustration of this regularity. Ông Ích Đường was a scholar involved in a massive revolt against taxes and forced labour that emerged in March 1908 in the province of Quảng-Nam. He was captured and then beheaded by Annamese executioners in May 1908 at Hoà Khương, south of Huê, under the supervision of Mr Salvant, the French commander of the local indigenous police. All the phases of the execution were carefully documented by European photographers. L’Illustration published five of these views in July 1908. The journalist, well aware of the underlying mechanisms of the scene, wrote: ‘It was done according to the rules, a singular mixture of barbaric practices and European-style staging.’54 These punished bodies in pictures, and the texts that commented on them, were at the heart of a paradox. Photography was documenting ‘barbaric’ practices, violent scenes that were becoming memories in Europe. The future was clashing with the past. New modes of punishment were actually emerging in the experiments that photographers carried out far from Europe. Like William Wallace Hooper before them, these photographers successfully used photographic immediacy to capture death and pain seizing distant bodies.55 The destruction of these bodies was acceptable to Western eyes. The innumerable decapitations that concluded the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), for example, offered endless opportunities to combine technical media modernity and ‘backward’ surges of brutality. In territories where European influence was particularly contested, this confluence between photography and violent organised retribution became recurrent. Photography was often practised as an extension of the establishment of a new order where imperial or colonial authority was heavily challenged. Irregular enemies, in particular, were one of the favoured subjects for the lens. An agent of resistance at war with a new balance of power could be chastised and observed in his decay with more ease than more respectable enemies. Many of the examples mentioned here are, unsurprisingly, showing the bodies of adversaries that did not fit into the norms of

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Figure 7.8 Anon., ‘Under the British Broad arrow in China’, photoengraving, Black and White Budget 4, no. 76, March 1901, 773. This scene unfolded near the Taku forts on the estuary of the Hai He River. This was a landmark: two major battles related to foreign interventions in China occurred at this location in the nineteenth century, the first during the Second Opium War in 1858 and the second in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Chinese-allied soldiers can be seen flogging an individual. Someone has placed a piece of cloth on his back that bears a sign called the British Broad Arrow. This sign indicated what officially belonged to the Crown and was found on some prison uniforms. There is no Royal Marine within the frame; it was not necessary. The message was obvious to most readers of the Black and White Budget, a cheap and pioneering publication that offered hundreds of photographic illustrations. Executions of rebels by French troops, ‘under the Fleur-de-Lys’, were shown on the previous page, as a point of comparison highlighting British restraint.

war and order such as they were perceived in Europe. On the contrary, while some photographs were taken when white Boer soldiers were executed for espionage or war crimes by the British in the early twentieth century, they never circulated in the press.56 Not all the condemned were the same in this respect. In Heraklion, Tianjin, Denshawai, or Tananarive, punishment and its photographic reflections bear witness to the anxieties that pervaded the French and British empires. These photographs are, after all, symptoms of the limits of control exercised

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by colonial structures. Many observers from various parts of Asia and Africa noted that even the most extreme forms of retribution did not have the desired effects in various parts of the colonial areas. The serenity of convicts, in some areas, startled European spectators. They attributed these postures to religious beliefs, particularly in Buddhist Asia. However, some writings point out that they might have been expressions of a worrying disdain for Western power.57 More often than not, witnesses could not make sense of what looked like the complete uselessness of violent modalities of punishment. An isolated sheet from a now lost album, held by the Museum of French Marines in Fréjus, shows handwritten comments on a photograph of the execution of Biram-Kandé.58 Convicted of the murder of a European, Biram-Kandé was guillotined in Saint-Louis (Senegal) on 25 February 1899. The scene was captured by several photographers. Their views of the execution were printed on postcards up until the 1910s. The owner of the album will likely remain anonymous; however, his notes are revealing: ‘The impression left on the indigenous people by the execution of a murderer is not strong enough anymore because in this instance, it happened far too late after the murder of the white man [...] perhaps we were too quick to make Senegal a country where we apply our judicial rules.’ Biram-Kandé was categorised as a criminal, not an enemy; however, the staging of his death obviously aimed at consolidating the colonial order. It materialised the consequences of potential rebellions. Similar scenes were planned in the French Congo in 1898 after the assassination of A. Louettières, a French hunter, in the village of Bongha, the chief of which he had severely beaten. The suspect, Monounabéka, was executed on the orders of Mr Costa, the head of the local police station. An anonymous photographer captured the execution, and the images publicly circulated in France in the following months.59 While photographs were designed as mirrors of re-established balance and clarity in most of these situations, they actually ended up revealing their illegibility. Despite the planned spectacle, order was rarely achieved. Exhibited enemy bodies resisted despite everything. The photographic act, rather than making the sentence complete, recorded instability. The long-term trajectories of some of these images, many of which were reinvented as icons of local nationalism over the years, have now assigned new meanings to these punishments. The other brand of modernity that emerged from the combination of photography and punishment in modern colonial empires is undoubtedly the intimate relationship between inflicted pain and cameras that survived in many parts of the world long after the demise of these empires. Colonial violence? The photographic perspective Examining photographs of enemy bodies raises a fundamental question. Were there expressions of violence that were specific to colonial situations? Baden-Powell’s

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photograph offered a first opportunity to start tackling this question. Can anyone imagine a similar image – shot and then published in a book by a British officer – in a European war in the late nineteenth century? As examined in Chapter 5, distinct regimes of visibility structured the photographic discourses of colonial expansion. What was displayed, and the concrete inflictions of violence on the enemy, went far beyond what would have been the norm in a European conflict between two independent states. Some subgenres of photography only emerged in colonial conflicts. In March 1901, a striking image was published on the front page of L’Illustration.60 It showed a tirailleur presenting to the camera the severed head of Rabah on a pike (Figure 7.9). This picture of the remains of the Sultan of the region of Kanem Bornou (north of present-day Cameroon) was not kept buried in the albums of the French soldiers who defeated this potentate at the turn of the twentieth century. The trophy was openly displayed in France. Rabah, an infamous slave trader, had been defying French troops for years. Starting in 1899, three French columns converged on Kousséri, not far from present-day N’Djamena. They were to fight the final battle against Rabah, an enemy who was also threatened the neighbouring Kingdom of Bagirmi, which had become a French protectorate. François Lamy was in command. Rabah was spectacularly defeated on 22 April 1900. According to consistent testimonies, Rabah, dying from gunshot wounds, was killed as he tried to escape by Abdoulaye Diallo, one of his former fighters who had joined the local troops of French auxiliaries. Diallo decapitated him, and his head was brought to Lamy, himself mortally wounded and in agony, as evidence of his death.61 Rabah’s remains were placed on a spike and were exhibited for several days on the walls of Kousséri so that the local black population, who had suffered from his brutal slave trade, could witness his literal decay. The trophy was photographed as well. None of the versions of the picture bear a signature, and the photographer remains unknown, but several French officers practised photography during the campaign. One was Émile Gentil, who led one of the columns that converged in Kousséri to defeat Rabah. He succeeded Lamy in commanding the operations. The only original print that can be located today was added to a compilation of Émile de Cointet’s letters. He was another member of the expedition (Figure 7.10). Gentil included an engraving based on this photograph in his book on the fall of Rabah’s empire.62 Jules Lavée initially illustrated Gentil’s account of his campaign in Le Tour du Monde.63 Circumstantial evidence that prints of the graphic image circulated within the professional and family networks of the French officers involved in the operations is therefore substantial. Ba Karim – one of Rabah’s former slaves – gave a rare oral testimony to Michael Horowitz in the 1960s. He described and remembered, which is probably even more significant, how the photograph of Rabah’s head was developed immediately after the battle and displayed in Kousséri itself.64 The exposition of Rabah’s head and the

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Figure 7.9 Anon., ‘La tête de Rabah d’après une photographie rapportée par la mission Gentil’ (Rabah’s head from a photograph by a member of the Gentil Mission), L’Illustration, 9 March 1901, 1.

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Figure 7.10 Anon., ‘La tête de Rabah’ (The head of Rabah), silver print from a negative produced in April 1900. Framing and the selection of optics can have radical consequences as far as the spectator’s emotions are concerned when it comes to photographing violence. A close-up of a gruesome subject – Rabah’s decomposed head was displayed on a spike for a prolonged period of time – inevitably adds to the horror. This is a deliberate aesthetic choice by the photographer. The distance between the lens and the horror then becomes political. Such a scene does not have the same impact in a photograph when it leaves the viewer at a more comfortable distance from the atrocity. The proximity between the camera and the human remains was designed to add desecration to defeat.

photograph were initially parts of a performance aimed at a local audience. The spectacular use of Rabah’s skull went on for several weeks. It was put in a wooden case and sent to Paris. Gentil apparently opened the box to prove to local leaders of the Banda population that Rabah was dead. He also assured them that the skull of Muhammad al-Sanusi, Rabah’s nephew, would soon join his collection.65 This event stands out because of how it was actively framed by photography, which documented and shaped this remarkable instance of destruction and desecration. The physicality of photography, its ability to give depth and presence to human bodies, both in their life and death, was fully exploited by the victors.66 The technology could easily substantiate the tactics of shock and awe that characterised several colonial operations. This was not an

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isolated instance. Methods of dread in colonial expeditions were analysed in Europe. Callwell, in his book Small Wars, emphasised the potency of what we would today call psychological warfare. According to him, the ‘lower races’ were ‘impressionable’.67 Rabah’s fate was an acute accentuation of this logic, combining desecration at the local level with the international exposure of the Sultan’s remains. The sacrilegious power of photography was even repeated when Rabah’s skull joined an anthropological collection in Paris and was photographed again to be shown on projection plates in the 1900s.68 Thresholds of tolerance were manifestly high in this case. Only a few journalists voiced outrage against Rabah’s fate. A writer for Le Radical, a radical-socialist newspaper, expressed his indignation: ‘As soon as the fight was over, Rabah’s head was brought back to the French camp [...] This is how civilized armies proceed [...] Since it is not always possible to take photographs of the dead enemies after the battle is over, it is best to behead them [...] Savages have other traditions; some devour their opponents; others scalp them [...] The advanced nations [...] merely sort corpses and select the heads of the warriors of some rank.’69 This was an isolated instance: any outcry remained sporadic. The profanation of Rabah’s body is exceptional for several reasons. Memos and reports written by the victors at the time fed into a narrative that justified the gesture. For Émile Reibell, an officer of the Foureau–Lamy Mission, beheading Rabah was after all ‘the necessary decapitation of a cruel and bloody brute’.70 The Sultan’s death was depicted as a liberation of the populations he had been raiding and deporting into slavery for years. Memoirs and books on the expedition often underscore how local inhabitants hated Rabah for the destructions he inflicted upon them. Charles Guilleux, a corporal, recalled a discussion with a man near Kousséri: ‘Our conversation turned to Rabah [...] Every time this name was uttered, the old nigger wielded his fist in a cursing move [...] Evocations of the tyrant who made head rolls inspired terror [...] My nigger gave me a knife “to cut Rabah’s head off”.’71 On 16 January 1900, Lieutenant Gabriel Britsch, another member of the small army commanded by Lamy, noted: ‘We passed Komadougou and set camp on the right bank at Doutchi, opposite of Begra [...] It was there that Sheikh Kari, who was fleeing from Kukah, was overtaken by Rabah and exterminated with several thousand of his followers [...] It struck horror in all of us and we looked forward to misadventures we are likely to inflict upon Rabah.’72 The tyrant’s downfall was a just cause in the eyes of the French. The transformation of Rabah’s remains into a trophy was also a replication of what the Sultan did to Europeans. Lieutenant Étienne Bretonnet, who had led a first column in support of the Kingdom of Bagirmi threatened by Rabah months earlier, had been killed near Kouno (present-day Chad) in July 1899. His head had then been brought to Rabah.73 The treatment of the enemy leader’s corpse was in many ways a symbolic response to the profanation he had inflicted on French soldiers and explorers. In this

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regard, the violence of the photograph showing Rabah’s head amounted in part to a mirror violence, i.e., a counterviolence that was implicit in local bellicosity.74 The photographic display of the tyrant’s head in L’Illustration also reminded the viewer that the despot found his fate at the hands of a tirailleur. This visual delegation was crucial. The brutality of the event was thus placed in a symbolic space that made it less unbearable to European eyes. The regime change was visually supported and triggered by locals. The surrounding violence was presented as the product of tensions and norms that were essentially African. As illustrated by many of the case studies presented here, photographic records substantiated written discourse that described a colonisable world in perpetual warfare. As a matter of fact, and even if versions differ, Rabah’s corpse apparently suffered a gruesome fate. It was either trampled to a pulp by Baguirmians, the local allies of the French, or thrown into the river in an instance of inter-African expressions of violence that shaped the modalities of colonial wars at the time.75 A counter-reading of the photograph demonstrates how peaks of extreme violence depended on well-known factors. The campaign against Rabah was a logistical feat. The lines of communication were stretched to the extreme. French officers, with limited means, were making momentous decisions without any real communication with a centralised command.76 They often saw sporadic applications of intense brutality as effective warnings. Their goal was to make sure conflicts would not last too long and create insurmountable problems. European troops also fought alongside local militias, Baguirmians in Rabah’s case, who did not always obey orders, were prone to disorderly plunder, and seemed to have increased the risk of friendly fire to a worrying extent. The war against Rabah was also, in many respects, a variation on the conflicts that were internal to the region. It was a colonial war and an African conflagration at the same time. The majority of actors, both local and European, favoured an encounter in warfare, which, in its turn, produced a new focal point at the junction of extreme violence and the macabre staging of victory through the lens. What happened to Rabah’s corpse, the relentless transgression of his figure immortalised by a photograph, could hardly have developed outside of colonial conflictuality. Despite its extremity, this desecration was essentially a political process. As Ricardo Roque points out, such specific incarnations of violence were the consequence of ‘mutual parasitism’ between vernacular codes of violence and imported norms.77 In conflicts where European officers relied on locally recruited auxiliaries, combat itself and violence against civilians, as well as the treatment of dead enemies, were marked by symbiosis, by the interpenetration of codes of violence in war. In colonial contexts, the inscription of victory on the bodies of the defeated was often a message designed to be readable by different audiences with distinct codes of violence. Some officers believed that imitating the forms of mutilation practised by the adversary and letting local allies inflict them upon the enemy were a way to make the act of victory intelligible to the

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indigenous spectators. Such intersections of violence were not unique to the Lake Chad region. Similar bursts of apparently uncontrolled and ‘savage’ brutality occurred on the Ivory Coast, in South Africa, in Annam, and in the German colonies. European conquerors were always careful to grasp how military violence and victory were perceived at a local scale.78 They rarely ignored the fact that local echoes of a resounding feat of arms and spectacular retributions could serve their best interests. Rabah’s fate was therefore not a unique event. His son Fadlallah was killed by the French in August 1901 in British territory in Gujba after a long chase. His head was embalmed in salt and brought back to Dikwa, the former capital of the Sultan, where it was placed on the city walls for all to see. The beheading of the Sultan of Zinder, Amadou Babba dan Tanimoun, who was killed on 15 September 1899, in retaliation for the death of Gabriel Marius Cazemajou in May 1898, provides yet another example of French-sanctioned atrocities.79 The skull of Amara Diali, one of Samory’s counsellors who had instigated the massacre of the Braulot Mission (August 1897), was placed on a spike in Diakolidougou (Guinea) after his execution in October 1898. A postcard of the scene circulated at the time.80 The entrance to the fortress of Kérouané, in Samory, Touré’s native region, was decorated with the skull of Sanaoulé, a sofa (soldier) killed and beheaded in 1892 by Corporal Biré during a battle to take the town.81 The entrance and the skull provided a popular backdrop for colonial portraits in the years that followed.82 In the 1910s, Albert Harlingue’s pioneering photo agency sold a photograph showing four French colonial soldiers smiling and posing around the severed head of a ‘rebel’ put on a spike.83 The negative was made on the Ivory Coast during campaigns against the Baoulé resistance. No editor or publisher bought the print in the early twentieth century; however, its presence in the catalogue is revealing. However extreme Rabah’s fate might seem today, it was not an anomaly; but neither does it epitomise colonial expansion. The trajectory of the photograph and the concurrent written justifications that surrounded it are evidence of the uneasiness it provoked at the time. There were deep disagreements between French colonial officers regarding the use of brute force.84 Hubert Lyautey, in particular, despised the ‘Sudanese school’, an informal network of French officers that developed from the late 1880s during the conquest of West Africa, many of whom were involved in the campaign against Rabah. He had several of these men under his command in Madagascar in 1901, and he harshly criticised their training: ‘They have received their colonial education in Sudan, a good school when it comes to Sudan but a bad one when it comes to Tonkin or Madagascar, where politics are needed much more than war.’85 Gallieni, as we have seen, promoted spectacular displays of power but was above all the champion of strategies of ‘pacification’ where armed violence had as little room as possible. The extreme manipulations of enemy bodies that are sporadically documented by the

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photographic archive were specific to the colonial sphere. However, it was only one of the many modalities of conquest and control. If one turns to Britain, comparable instances of photographic desecration may be observed in various parts of the empire. One example shows similarities with Rabah’s macabre portrait. Abdullah ibn Muhammad, also known as the Khalifa, the successor of the Mahdi who had been on the run since his defeat at Omdurman, was shot dead at the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat in November 1899. Reginald Wingate, who led the operations, likely authored several photographs of corpses of the Mahdi elite (Figure 7.11). These photographic trophies were then published in England in books

Figure 7.11 Reginald Wingate (?), ‘Bodies of the Khalifa Abdallahi and the Amir Ali wad Helu’, 24 November 1899, silver print mounted on card. Who photographed this scene? Some indications point toward Reginald Wingate; however, there is no mention of his authorship in the engraving published by The Graphic. The newspaper names C. Kikides as its source. Little is known about this photographer except that he opened one of the first studios in Omdurman soon after British rule was established. This specific print was mounted in an album compiled by Angus Cameron who was present during the final fight. Wingate also sent prints to Rennell Rodd, a diplomat who worked under Lord Cromer, Consul-General of Egypt.86 The condition of some of the bodies suggests that hollow-point ammunition, likely Mark IV hollowpoint bullets, was widely used during the campaign. These bullets inflicted devastating wounds on impact and were banned in 1899 under the Hague Convention but were still used in several colonial campaigns.

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on Sudan.87 An engraving from photographs, adorned with a few additional crows to add to the atmosphere, was even displayed on a full page by The Graphic, one of Britain’s leading illustrated periodicals.88 Individual prints were exchanged between participants in the expedition and circulated for several years.89 These images were the culminating point in operations that were planned to avenge Charles Gordon’s death. Gordon had been killed in January 1885 while defending Khartoum from the Mahdists. His corpse was beheaded by order of the Mahdi, and his head was displayed on the walls of Khartoum. This turned the British officer into a Victorian hero. The violence, of both the campaign and its photographic coverage, was intimately linked to this context. The aim, yet again, was to provide evidence and spectacle of the fateful end of a rebel figurehead whose death had long been expected. Photography was used to desecrate Abdullah ibn Muhammad’s corpse. It was one of the means to annihilate Mahdism. The remains of Muhammad Ahmad Abd Allah, founder of the Mahdist movement who died in 1885, were buried under a dome in Omdurman. His remains were desecrated after his grave was destroyed by explosive shells and looted. His skull was kept. Kitchener, the commander, apparently originally planned to use it as an inkwell.90 Rumors of atrocities surrounding the victory over the Sudanese at Omdurman reached Britain. George Bernard Shaw denounced the treatment of the Mahdi’s remains in a scathing public letter on 6 October 1898.91 Kitchener then seemed to have planned for the skull to join the collections of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. He confirmed this in a contrived reply to a letter from Queen Victoria herself.92 In January 1899, an article by Ernest Bennett in The Contemporary Review revived the controversy for several weeks. In March, Kitchener wrote to the London Daily News to inform the public that the skull had been buried in Sudan.93 Replaced in this wider context, the photograph displaying the corpses of the Khalifa and his officers takes on complex meanings. It was not just a trophy shot but also a component of a larger staging of victory in which the enemy’s bodies became a focal point, similar to French renderings in their war with Rabah. If such uses of photography were sometimes met with outrage, they seem to have multiplied over a fairly short period from the 1880s to the mid-1900s. At the same time, atrocity photographs emerged to assist in early humanitarian discourses. This chronology needs to be refined. Additional donations as well as the digitisation of more funds will help in the long term in this regard. However, it is paramount to emphasise that these photographic uses have a history. They were not the byproducts of invariable cultural conventions but the expressions of context-specific modes of war and repression that gave rise to new forms and visualisations of violence. The photographs of the remains of Rabah and the Khalifa could be categorised as monstrous and unique examples: shocking but sparse ‘islets of massacre’. Throughout these pages, however, a close relationship has been established between photography

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and the enemy’s destruction, which emerged as a recurring element in the colonial conflicts of the late nineteenth century.94 Moreover, the accumulated photographs compiled in this work leave little doubt as to the visibility of imperial violence in France and Great Britain. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europeans were not as reluctant as one might think to gaze at the corpses left by the colonial wars fought in their names. This might seem troubling given that sensitivities regarding the treatment of dead soldiers on the battlefield were rapidly evolving in Europe. In 1880, the Institute of International Law published a Manual of the Laws of War on Land written by Gustave Moynier, a Swiss jurist. He advocated the adoption of a rule that would make it ‘forbidden to strip and mutilate the dead lying on the battlefield’.95 This idea made its way into accelerating international discussions on the regulation of warfare in the following years. The Hague Conferences in 1899 and 1907 touched on the issue of the dignified management of the dead. The specific problems raised by photographs and films of mass death were not mentioned in the debates, certainly because they were recent phenomena. In addition, most instances of atrocity imagery were produced within the sphere of extra-European and colonial wars and were not the focus of these discussions. Quite rapidly, criticism and public outrage put an end to the most visible uses of photography in the violent contexts of colonial expansion, or at least favoured erasures of this specific type of record. For France and Great Britain, the period when such pictures could circulate openly and could even be desirable was ended by the First World War. The turn of the twentieth century was characterised by an intense circulation of ideas loosely based on social Darwinism. Many variations on the writings of Herbert Spencer and other major thinkers, though reinterpretations that regularly oversimplified the original theories, gave armed conflict a pivotal role in the distinction between strong and weak nations.96 In such a framework, the mass violence of war was not a problem but rather clear evidence of superiority, specifically in colonial contexts. These crudest of exhibitions experienced a brief period of existence but accompanied the peak of French and British imperial expansion and, as such, are to be considered evidence of the actual specificities of colonial violence. The European gaze on bodies battered by colonial conquests was context specific. It differed in many respects from the first photographic representations of mass death in other, more conventional, extra-European conflicts. Whether punished, captured, dying, or dead, the enemy was seized from particular angles. The development of a market for sensational pictures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a necessary explanation but not a sufficient one. In the 1890s and 1900s, several factors contributed to the production of graphic photographs of violence in modern empires. Revealingly, they were often created by the perpetrators, who thought it acceptable to circulate them, sometimes on a large scale. Distinct spaces of violence, made of both

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real and visual components, were therefore expanding in parts of Africa and Asia, following a geography that the previous chapters have begun to delineate. In a major work, Susie Linfield questioned our relationship with the photography of aggression and pain.97 With nuance and depth, she suggested that pictures of violence and suffering are never only voyeuristic but that they also have the capacity to elicit empathy like no other document can. This mechanism, if it actually exists, is unstable: it has its own history. In the late nineteenth century, the spectacle of suffering did not necessarily provoke outrage. Some distressed bodies were looked at without compassion, not only by the European participants in these wars and repressions but also by many of those who had access to these pictures in the imperial metropolises. The rude novelty of these images assuredly accounts for these perceptions. The technical capacity to capture coercion and destruction and to project their reproducible images triggered a profound aesthetic break. Most of the pictures presented here are without precedent. Goya, Delacroix, and others depicted human beings wrecked by war and exactions in paintings and engravings. However, few of the vanquished bodies littering the battlefields of the so-called ‘distant wars’ of the age of high imperialism and disseminated in prints in the industrialised world were equivalent to the suffering bodies represented in European art over the past centuries. The more graphic and often poorly executed photographs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century under study here were nevertheless a form of rhetoric. In their aesthetic poverty, photographs and photoengravings of the pain of others, be they Africans or Asians, developed in a space that was progressively reduced by increasingly vocal anti-imperial denunciations, which, from the late 1900s, effectively started to turn atrocity photographs against European colonisers, as the previous chapter demonstrated. A formalist approach to these photographs would nonetheless come short of fully accounting for the discourses they conveyed. For many of the producers and consumers of these photographs, intense violence was understood to be a necessary phase along the trajectory to a more peaceful state. It was often understood as inevitable counterviolence. In this sense, these seemingly extreme images should not be separated from more pacified views of colonial administration. They were their indispensable counterpoint signalling what the alternative to the new colonial balance could be. Far from borderline cases or senseless documents, they were part of imperial visual economies that had their own genres and subgenres. In this regard, these pictorial fragments are just as revealing as the long, and more reassuring, series of colonial photographs that fill the books and repositories on the period. These photographic pieces constitute an unstable trace that could radically subvert the colonial archive. The photographers we have encountered created a foundational nomenclature of visible violence. This violence was a global topic, stretching over entire continents.

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These photographers were the first to document these topics with a camera. In doing so, European soldiers, doctors, missionaries, and journalists established an initial photographic repertoire that they could shape as they pleased. They therefore preempted the codes of visualisation of organised violence. In this pioneering experimentation with the medium, many images escaped their creators nonetheless. Apparently effective propaganda, reassuring feelings of order, the sentiment of justified revenge could quickly be replaced by indignation and denunciation. The unresolved readings of these extreme images were yet to fully emerge as new discourse crystallised, both in Europe and in the colonised world, slowly changing the meaning of the global influence of France and Britain.

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8 Paper cemeteries One of the most common assertions in studies on war photography is that pictures are never taken of one’s own dead. Doubtless influenced by the recent practices of American and European armies, many commentators assume that photographs of dead comrades are banned and considered to be sacrilege under any circumstances. The story of one image that became something of an icon in Britain challenges this narrative (Figure 8.1). Taken in January 1900 after the Battle of Spion Kop, this photograph of a trench filled with the bodies of dozens of British soldiers can be said to inaugurate the twentieth century – a century of mass slaughter. The photo is the work of a Dutchman named Jan van Hoepen, an entrepreneur who was working as a photographer at the time. Accompanying Boer fighters, he took several portraits of their leaders, including one of Paul Kruger, the president of the South African Republic.1 At the end of January 1900, he happened to be not far from the site of the Battle of Spion Kop near Ladysmith, a city under siege by the Boers that the British command was attempting to relieve. The British soldiers found themselves trapped in shallow trenches, while the Boers occupied higher ground. Caught under Boer artillery and rifle fire, nearly 250 men were killed in a matter of hours. Hundreds more were wounded. After two days, the British retreated, doing what little they could to give the bodies a hasty burial in the trenches where they had fallen. Van Hoepen, like other photographers, including Reginald Sheppard of Pretoria and van Nes of Durban, arrived at the site of the British defeat shortly after the fighting had ended. He took several pictures of the battlefield strewn with dead bodies. His most famous picture is of the first British trench, but he also photographed other dead bodies scattered in a field, half-buried corpses, and a Boer sniper killed during the battle.2 It may well be van Hoepen who is seen looking for the best angle for his photograph in a shot published a few months later by the American journalist Frederic William Unger (Figure 8.2). At any rate, van Hoepen produced the most striking images in the eyes of his contemporaries. Very quickly, rumours began to spread about them. Several British newspapers announced that the pictures would be exhibited in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Boer Republic of the Orange Free State, to reveal the extent of the British defeat. Winston Churchill wrote in the Morning Post, for which he worked as a war correspondent, that the photographs were being sold under the table

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Figure 8.1 Jan van Hoepen, ‘Spions Kop, Natal, January 26th 1900,’ gelatin silver bromide print, 22.4 cm × 16.1 cm, included in an album containing 165 photographs of the Boer War compiled by lieutenant-colonel Frederic Harvey, Royal Army Medical Corps. This picture is similar in aesthetics and subject matter to pictures from earlier conflicts.3 The photographer has positioned himself over a trench. Some rocks just visible in the foreground indicate that he has placed his camera on the edge of this barely adequate ditch, which appears to have been dug in haste by the soldiers themselves. There were two reasons for pictures of this kind enjoying a certain success in the early twentieth century. First, the angle of view prevented faces being identified, thus ensuring that the dead soldiers remained anonymous. This allowed the picture to potentially be used as an allegory of mass death. Second, the lines created by the edges of the trench gave the picture depth of field. There were similar pictures taken in the RussoJapanese War and the Balkan Wars in 1913.4

in Pretoria, something he knew for certain because he had bought some prints himself. In Churchill’s opinion, the photographer had superimposed two negatives to give the impression of an even more horrifying number of corpses and thus to motivate the Boers.5 It was true that van Hoepen’s pictures were initially interpreted as pro-Boer propaganda. A Press Association telegram erroneously pointed out that only the British dead had been photographed, in order to humiliate the empire,6 while Lord Roberts, who commanded the British troops, was reported to have sought to destroy the existing negatives and prints. The presence of this photograph of the trench in

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Figure 8.2 Anon., ‘A modern ghoul’, photoengraving, in Frederic William Unger, With ‘Bobs’ and Krüger, (Philadelphia: H. Coates, 1901), 77. Several photographers took pictures at Spion Kop after the battle. This illustration from a book published by Frederic William Unger – an American war correspondent – shows one of them in a (probably manipulated) mise en abyme. He describes the man as a ‘German photographer’ who was hoping to take ‘a particularly gruesome photograph’. The caption states that a British soldier had shot him in the heart in revenge, a story that was almost certainly invented. The story about the retaliation against the offensive photographer was circulated by the British at the time to provide comfort following the humiliation of the massacre. The background does not seem to correspond to the site of the trench, but the image itself is nevertheless a testament to the exceptional status of van Hoepen’s photograph, which sparked numerous rumours.

several albums belonging to individuals directly linked to Boer soldiers confirms that the image was initially circulated within pro-Boer circles.7 Illustrations based on the photograph were soon published in the press in European countries whose sympathies lay with the Boers. They included Le Monde illustré and Armée et marine in France and Die Woche, the leading German illustrated newspaper.8 Postcards of the scene were also circulated in Germany and Belgium. Closer to Britain, Michael Davitt, one of the great figures of late nineteenth-century Irish

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nationalism, illustrated For Land and People, his pro-Boer account of the war, with an engraving based on van Hoepen’s photograph.9 Davitt had resigned as a member of the British Parliament in 1899 because of the country’s intervention in South Africa. Van Hoepen’s photograph once again was used to fuel anti-British discourse.10 As a result of this photograph, the British authorities were placed in an unprecedented situation. The Boer War was the only colonial war in which photography was mastered by both sides. It was thus one of the few wars in which the empire’s enemies were able to focus their cameras on their opponents and reveal their weaknesses. Until then, the British had had a virtual monopoly on photography as a means of controlling and exaggerating the defeat of their colonial opponents. On this occasion, however, their superiority was challenged. But the story of this image gradually took an unexpected turn. There was a real demand for van Hoepen’s work amongst British soldiers. Prints were sold in South Africa by several studios, as demonstrated by the presence of pictures of the notorious trench in countless albums created by combatants.11 Robert Gell, who had a studio in Newcastle, South Africa, sold individual prints of the trench filled with bodies in a collection entitled ‘Photographs from the Boer side’.12 An application for copyright in Britain was registered by Herbert Edward Fane on 20 April 1900,13 as there were numerous pirate copies circulating in a photographic market that was still poorly protected by the law. The fact remains that in the spring of 1900, the photograph became a kind of memorial to the British. At the time, there had been rumblings over the negligence of the British command. Dispatches from Lord Roberts, commander of the British troops, were published by the London Gazette on 16 April. Highly critical of the officers who had been in command at Spion Kop, the reports sparked a heated debate. Immediately afterwards, the photograph of the trench, now entitled ‘The Price of Empire’, was published by the widely circulated Black and White Budget.14 In July, John Gordon Swift MacNeill, MP for South Donegal, denounced the incompetence of the general staff and suggested that the photograph be shown to the House in the middle of the debate.15 Public opinion and soldiers themselves gradually gave these British deaths a new meaning. They became a symbol of what the command’s negligence could mean for anonymous soldiers. Suddenly, the portraits of generals that had filled the newspapers seemed to give way to the horrifying picture of the unidentified dead. The image gradually became an icon. It was shown in numerous formats. Lecturers in the United Kingdom projected it on magic lantern slides during their lectures.16 In 1901, Dennis Edwards, a former correspondent for The Graphic during the 1879 AngloZulu War, now living in Cape Town, published an album that contained three hundred photogravures of the war. The photograph of the Spion Kop dead, now entitled ‘The Horrors of War’, was an obvious choice to be included.17 A Birmingham-based

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camera manufacturer, William Tylar, even took advantage of the situation to create a small camera called the ‘Spion Kop Camera’.18 Over the years, a number of football stands used by the most ardent supporters were dubbed ‘Kops’. Famously, the terrace at Anfield, home to Liverpool FC, was renamed ‘Spion Kop’ in 1906. Defeat on that ‘acre of massacre’, as John Atkins, correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, called Spion Kop at the time, became a landmark. The photographs of Spion Kop, fated to become icons, demonstrate the fallaciousness of the idea that pictures of the bodies of one’s own countrymen and allies were always off-limits. War dead, wounded, and mutilated victims, all shown as a justification for brutal retaliation, were part of the photographic repertoire of the conflicts of the 1890s and 1900s. As this chapter will illustrate, there were several reasons for showing these bodies, although these tended to vary at different times and in different places. Photographs acted as an outlet for mourning. Soldiers who had fallen far from Europe were rarely repatriated to France or Britain. Buried in situ, they could be commemorated in photographs, which served both as a medium of memory and a source of consolation. Distance made certain rituals impossible, but the image sometimes compensated in some way for the absence of the remains, which, from the First World War onwards, was one of the main factors impeding the mourning of the dead. In the wake of these photographs, an image of the soldier, himself a victim of war and of the indifference of officers and politicians, developed at the turn of the twentieth century. Mutilated bodies were also shown, from a distance and less frequently than heroic deaths, reflecting the ‘savagery’ of wars outside Europe. Images were sometimes used in accounts of the ‘barbaric’ violence of local fighters against Europeans and their allies. This provided a different discourse to that which accompanied the heroic body. The bodies of these victims were used as a justification for the excesses of the repressions and counterinsurgencies that sought to punish the supposed murderers. Suffering and dying in imperial wars Battle was not the primary cause of death for soldiers in the wars outside Europe. In the Madagascar Expedition of 1895, large numbers of deaths were attributed to disease amongst the troops. Two-thirds of British fatalities in the Boer War were due to sickness, with 93 per cent of casualties, both dead and wounded, actually occurring off the battlefield.19 Deaths were mainly caused by fever, not bullets or spears. As Prosper Burot noted in 1897: ‘The colonial soldier, if he is seven times more likely to die in the colonies than in Europe, owes this sad privilege almost entirely to exotic diseases.’20 The terrain on which French and British troops fought for the expansion and maintenance of their empires generally posed enormous logistical difficulties. Whether

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on the northwest frontier of India, in the Sahel, or in the jungle, military expeditions and police operations were carried out under extreme conditions. The many guerrilla operations also involved small units that did not have the same medical capacities as larger groupings of troops. While during the Boxer Rebellion, for example, European soldiers benefitted from abundantly staffed hospitals, this was unthinkable in smallscale campaigns.21 It was therefore more often epidemics  – typhus and measles in particular  – and the lack of food that killed European combatants and their auxiliaries than the intense and rapid violence of battle.22 Photographs were taken of the wounded, the sick, and British and French hospitals, but they all tended to show how well soldiers were cared for on expeditions rather than the disastrous effects of epidemics, although these were relayed in official reports and in the press.23 It is true that there was already a place for the theme of the soldier abandoned to die from his wounds and illnesses. Indeed, this theme was once central to the British narrative of the Crimean War, due to the work of Florence Nightingale, the nurse who became the guardian angel of British soldiers left to die in underequipped hospitals. Roger Fenton, a pioneering artist who had gone to document the Crimean War, produced a highly staged photograph entitled ‘Wounded Zouave and a Vivandière’, which introduced the genre to photography.24 In France, the Société de secours aux blessés militaires, a local branch of the Red Cross, organised fundraising campaigns for those wounded in Morocco. As a rule, however, the public was mainly shown propaganda that played down losses, leaving little room for photographs documenting soldiers’ suffering. The health crises that afflicted many extra-European expeditions seem to be invisible. Even private albums bore little witness to this aspect. Sick soldiers, less heroic than those killed in battle, were rarely shown, except when documenting other nations’ conflicts. Hunger or the effects of cholera, for example, were photographed during the Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan Wars.25 This state of affairs is not particularly surprising, given the difficulty of recruiting colonial troops. In the early 1870s, the Cardwell Reforms of the British Army aimed to reduce the duration of mobilisation in areas outside India and Britain in order to encourage recruitment, as applicants were not exactly lining up to defend the empire. Recruitment problems were just as serious in France. The military authorities were therefore reluctant to reveal the reality of the diseases awaiting European soldiers in Africa and Asia. The heroic figures of Marchand or Kitchener, who were presented as almost superhuman, impervious to any kind of illness, were naturally preferred to the display of soldiers struck by malaria and other parasites picked up during colonial campaigns. The wounded in action were more visible, particularly in Britain, where they were even shown off in official communications. Members of the royal family, who regularly visited military hospitals, often brought press photographers with them, giving unprecedented visibility to the convalescents. Queen Victoria herself asked

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two photographers, Robert Howlett and Joseph Cundall, to take photographs of Crimean War amputees, which she later kept in her personal albums.26 Later, veterans of the Indian frontier expeditions were also immortalised in major newspapers.27 Two amputees from the Tirah Campaign (1897–98), for example, made the front page of The Sketch in April 1898, while a soldier with a broken jaw and another veteran posed for the camera immediately after the Sudan Campaign (Figures 8.3 and 8.4). Neither was it difficult to find photos of heroes who had been wounded during the Boer War. One of the most popular series of stereoscopic pictures of the war, published by Underwood, addresses this theme. It shows a three-dimensional image of a soldier on a stretcher, with the title ‘Rest, Hero, rest! Thy warfare is over’.28 Some of those wounded in the fighting against the Boers were cared for on a hospital train partly funded by Princess Helena of the United Kingdom. An ideal propaganda tool at a time when the treatment of the wounded posed insurmountable problems, it was photographed from all angles for the press.29 The figure of the soldier wounded

Figure 8.3 W. Gregory, ‘What they have suffered for England’, The Sketch, 6 April 1898, 1.

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Figure 8.4 Anon., ‘The wounded from the Sudan,’ Army and Navy Illustrated, 24 December 1898, 340.

in ‘small wars’ was part of the visual messaging used in wars during the reign of Queen Victoria. We are talking here of course about the English soldier – more often Scottish, in fact  – engaged in campaigns outside of Europe. The wounded body of the British soldier was already a stock photographic figure, in the sense that it was a commonplace immediately understood and ultimately expected by viewers. The suffering of soldiers recruited in India or Africa, however, was not so visible, even though they were the backbone of the regiments engaged in these operations.30 Photographic evidence of their heroism was hardly ever shown by the press. In France, those who fell in wars outside Europe were less well recorded. A few striking images did emerge in the mainstream metropolitan press, but these were rare signs of the resistance of an enemy capable of inflicting loss and pain. French soldiers were more often presented on parade than in the confusion after the battle, with its losses and wounded combatants (Figure 8.5). In February 1910, L’Illustration published a portrait of ‘two elderly people from Alsace’ on the front page.31 They were

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Figure 8.5 Anon., ‘Au blockhaus de Mo-Trang: les blessés du combat de Dong-Dang’ (In the blockhouse in Mo-Trang: the wounded from the battle of Dong-Dang), halftone print, L’Illustration, 26 June 1909, 345. The so-called ‘Yen-Thé’ column clashed with Hoàng Hoa Thám’s forces in the forests of northeast Vietnam in March 1909. The operations were covered by several soldier-photographers. This photograph was published in France by L’Illustration. It shows soldiers wounded during the Battle of Dong-Dang. The Dieulefils studio in Hanoi also published a series of postcards on these battles. Some of them showed uncensored pictures of exhausted soldiers, very different from Epinal’s pictures of victorious colonial wars. They include the burial of two soldiers, Casanova and Boubault, ‘killed in the battle of 11 February’, and this picture of Corporal Guibert supported by a comrade.

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pictured grieving their son, Captain Fiegenschuh, who had died in Ouaddaï (Chad) on 4 January 1910 in an attack on his column. He was heralded as an Alsatian hero who had died for a France that could not officially provide financial support to his parents, since they were now German against their will. This heroic figure enabled the newspaper to connect the war in Ouaddaï with the dispute over Alsace-Lorraine, and the story received media attention for several weeks. Le Matin reconstructed the site of the massacre in photographs,32 while La France illustrée published a photograph of the gorge where the fatal ambush had taken place.33 The papers lamented the fact that the family had learned of the death from the newspapers and that Germany was preventing the pension reaching the parents. The scandal even agitated the National Assembly. It is true that there were debates on combatants killed in the colonies for a time, but, on the whole, it appears that the motif of the soldier’s sacrifice was more diffuse and less coherent than in Britain. To find this motif, one must turn to certain specialist publications, such as the Almanach du Marsouin, which kept a tally of and commemorated the dead ‘killed by the enemy’ or as a result of illness. We must also look to the colonial press, both papers published in France on colonial issues and those published in the colonies themselves. The Dépêche coloniale illustrée, one of the papers linked to the ‘colonial party’ at the end of the nineteenth century, occasionally mentioned setbacks and the sacrifice of soldiers.34 And L’Afrique du Nord illustrée, a colonial offshoot of L’Illustration, was not shy about dispatching its special envoys to photograph military operations in Morocco and showing the dead or wounded bodies of French combatants.35 Via other media, but still circulating in mainly colonial networks, postcards of the conflicts in Morocco also served to tell the story of the difficulties of French soldiers.36 These parallel  – and dissonant  – narratives reflected the existence of different audiences, which were more or less receptive to the risks and realities of colonial expansion depending on their geographical position in the empire. After France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, accounts of colonial adventures were sometimes replaced by reports on soldiers’ devotion to duty. In the hierarchy of the exploits of the marine infantry, which formed the backbone of the colonial army, created in 1900, the Battle of Bazeilles (31 August–1 September 1870), near Sedan, was ranked well above battles further afield. As François Robichon has noted, paintings of French feats of arms in Africa and Tonkin did not sell well and only appeared for a short time in the salons.37 The ‘small wars’ were sometimes treated with a kind of disdain, especially as some of the troops who took part in them were not meant to be seen playing too prominent a role in the army. The African battalions, in particular, involved in numerous operations, were extremely tough penal units, and they were largely absent from photographs before 1914. As Jacques Frémeaux has pointed out, the role of

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extra-European wars in France was not the same as in Britain.38 The weight of the defeat by Germany affected the discourse, and there were serious concerns about the possibility of another European war. While military prestige was achieved in India or in Africa on the British side, there was no such clear consensus on the value of the sacrifice of French soldiers on foreign soil. This was reflected in photographs, as those that appeared in France do not have such clearly structured motifs as those found in British albums and publications. There was, of course, one area in which photographs of wounded soldiers offered a new understanding of the body: military medicine. There were a considerable number of doctors who used the medium for personal and professional reasons. The camera became a means of documenting new kinds of injuries and operating procedures. X-rays were also used for the first time in the field in wars outside Europe. The first experiments took place during the Tirah Campaign on the northwest frontier of British India (1897–98), when Scots Guards surgeon Walter Calverley Beevor experimented with an X-ray apparatus to locate bullets. A portable system was also ordered for the Sudan Campaign in 1898. But it was during the Boer War that the technique was tested on a larger scale (Figure 8.6).39 Field hospitals were equipped with radiological equipment, and the large numbers of patients enabled doctors like Lieutenant Bruce Forbes to perfect the technology. It was in Morocco, in 1912, that the French Army began to use radiology. The field equipment built by Gaiffe-Gallot was able to follow the troops, as it weighed no more than 70 kilograms and could be carried on the back of an animal. Rather than in the First World War (too often credited with the innovation), it was in these extra-European wars that photographic visualisation met industrial weaponry for the first time and, in many ways, furnished a new imagery of the soldier’s body. Photographic substitutes Those who died in extra-European conflicts died far away from home. Usually buried close to where they fell, the heroes were sometimes honoured with a small monument, their remains inaccessible to their relatives. A letter sent to the French Red Cross at the end of the nineteenth century by the mother of a ‘Sudanese’ soldier sums up the situation as follows: My son died there, like so many others, alas! He succumbed to fever, dying without the supreme consolations of religion. Oh, to not be able to weep or pray on the land where he sleeps his final sleep! The name of my son is at the end of the list of officers who died in Sudan: twenty-nine of them in this year 1893! There is not one of our colonies that does not

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Figure 8.6 Bruce Forbes, ‘Upper third of the right femur of an officer of the Imperial Light Horse’, in Samuel Monell, A System of Instruction in X-ray Methods (New York: Pelton, 1902), plate 112.

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This X-ray shows the effect of a bullet on the right femur of a British officer wounded at the Battle of Elandslaagte (October 1899). The new medical imaging process allowed the soldier to avoid amputation. This technology was initially used by doctors, who generally used photography on the front to document new types of injuries, but the British press also gave real publicity to these advances.

cause poor mothers to grieve. They are legion, the dear dead lying in the bush, in the rice

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fields, in the sands, mutilated by the enemy or felled by awful fevers.40

Photography, so quickly adopted as a way of recounting the experience of these wars, became a means of making up for these absences. The camera, a guarantee of truth in the hands of a comrade or a journalist, helped to make their parting more real. The hundreds of pictures of graves in the albums of soldiers serving outside Europe have often been ignored by commentators. But it is not uncommon to come across a photograph or two in these private archives that depict the grave of a friend who had died in battle or of fever. Prints were regularly sent to the family back in France or Britain to give a realistic idea of the soldier’s resting place. In the absence of monuments to those who had died in distant wars  – actually quite rare outside the colonies themselves before 1914 – these photographs acted as paper cemeteries that helped survivors and relatives to mourn their dead. This subgenre occupied an essential place in the photographic practices of the period. Sometimes it was simply a matter of showing the place where the soldier had died. Photographs have a powerful forensic dimension and are able to document the fatal moment, which can nonetheless never be fully grasped. In 1885, Xavier Brau de Saint-Pol Lias, an explorer and fervent promoter of colonial expansion in Asia, went with his servants to take photographs of the sites where Henri Rivière had fallen. Rivière was a naval officer and writer who was shot not far from Hanoi in 1883. He was killed by the Black Flag Army, a rebel group that had taken refuge in Tonkin (Figure 8.7). Photography makes it possible to construct a place of memory, to make a heroic act or a tragic episode tangible after the event. This capacity of the camera to create a memorial giving substance to the death of combatants was used in several expeditions, by both the French and the British. During the punitive British campaign against the King of Benin in 1897, for example, Captain Byrne of the Marines was shot by a sniper hidden amongst the trees. The bullet went through his spine, and he died a few days after being repatriated to England.41 In the hours that followed his shooting, one of the soldier-photographers on the expedition took a photograph of the bushes from which the fatal shot had been fired. A print was stuck in the private album that Major N. Burrows compiled shortly after the events.42 Without explanation, this type of photograph would appear to be just another shot of the landscape, albeit a slightly enigmatic one. With a caption, however, the empty place evokes a death in battle that

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Figure 8.7 Xavier Brau de Saint-Pol Lias, ‘Lieux historiques du Tonquin’ (Historic sites in Tonkin), 1885, silver halide print in an album containing 38 pictures, picture no. 36. In a detailed handwritten caption, Xavier Brau de Saint-Pol Lias explains: ‘The non-commissioned officer holding a flag marks the spot where Commander Rivière was killed.’ A ‘native’ is standing amongst the bamboo from which the shot was fired. In the years that followed, the site became an essential place of memory for the French in Tonkin. The album, which the author gave to the Société de géographie during his lifetime, has more than just a private dimension. Its presence in the archive consolidated the author’s status as an explorer and geographer.

can never be fully visible. This is another subgenre of images that regularly appeared in the private albums of soldiers in extra-European wars. One of the prototypes of this kind of photo was taken after the death of Napoléon, Prince Imperial, who was killed in June 1879 during the Anglo-Zulu War. Pictures of graves and cemeteries also acted as memorials. Photographs of soldiers’ final resting places were not unique elements in the imperial or colonial world; they were one of the many types of mementos by means of which Europeans cherished the memory of the deceased, like the death masks popular in the mid-nineteenth century, the locks of hair kept in a piece of jewellery, and, later, the post-mortem photographs that enjoyed a wave of success in the second half of the century. It was not uncommon in Britain to send a photograph of a grave to relatives living far away.43 However, the

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prevalence of this imagery in the photography of colonial expeditions presented its own particularities. While mass graves remained one of the main ways of burying fallen soldiers before 1914, particularly in the French Army, many photographs also showed individual graves, proof that the dead soldier’s remains had been treated with dignity, a last consolation for relatives who could never travel there. It was in wars outside Europe that new funeral practices emerged. Hitherto, these deaths in foreign parts had been poorly recorded and the burial sites badly documented. But there was a growing demand from families who wanted to know where their dead relatives had been buried and whether their remains had been treated with dignity. Shortly after the conquest of Madagascar, in November 1896, Gallieni presided over the creation of a charity called L’Œuvre des tombes pour la Grande Île (Association for Graves in the Grande Île), whose role was to maintain the hundreds of graves of those who had died in the 1895 campaign. These cemeteries, in Mahajanga in particular, were photographed, and the pictures were included in official photographic records.44 This made it possible to contradict critics in France, such as Léon Millot, a columnist close to the radicals, who wrote in La Justice in 1897 that while Lefèvre carts – essential for the logistics of French colonial expansion – had been sent on the expedition, there were ‘no coffins for the bodies of our soldiers’.45 The Boer War was a turning point for the British, and reactions to the photograph of the Spion Kop trench reflected this. The idea of anonymous, indistinct bodies left unburied for days on end was intolerable to a section of public opinion. Even The Navy and Army Illustrated, a glossy magazine that filled its pages with photogravures intended to extol the virtues of military life under the British flag and to attract recruits, left room for the ‘sad side of war’ in photographs of the graves of the fallen.46 In 1902, the magazine regretted that: ‘Our soldiers fall in many distant lands and it is often as impossible to mark the ground which covers their remains.’47 In 1900, Dora Fairbridge and several other women founded the Guild of Loyal Women, whose role was to take care of military graves in South Africa, a further sign of these developments. A South African-based company even offered to build personal graves on the battlefields where soldiers had fallen and, more importantly, to provide photographs of them as a way of helping families living in Britain to grieve.48 The manner in which one’s own dead were buried and the photographic evidence thereof contrasted with the treatment reserved for enemy bodies, which were, at best, thrown into mass graves and, in many cases, simply abandoned. Photographs sometimes bear witness to this, as can be seen in the album of François-Henry Laperrine, creator of the Compagnies méharistes sahariennes (Saharan Méhariste Companies), who took part in the capture of Sikasso (Mali) in May 1898. The officer kept several pictures of the battlefield strewn with enemy bodies. Some of the pictures show bodies

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left to the vultures, while others depict soldiers on ‘corpse burial duty’ (‘corvée des morts’).49 The remains of Babemba Traoré, the king of Kenedugu who committed suicide in defeat, were also photographed and added to the volume.50 Graves and their photographs thus created one more frontier, one further way of distinguishing locals, who were usually anonymous, from Europeans, who were treated as individuals. On this occasion, it separated them even in death. The large number of graves and monuments to the dead at various locations in Africa or Asia, and their photographs, also embodied control of the territories. Like border markers, they drew a line in the sand. Survivors frequently brought back photographs of the graves, either for themselves or for their families. Charles Foulkes, whose path we have already crossed in this volume, kept two photographs of the modest grave of his brother Paul, who died in the Boer War, in his private albums (Figure 8.8). Émile-Louis Abbat, also mentioned in these pages, kept pictures of the Kita cemetery (Mali), where his comrades Major Bardot and Captain Nigotte had been buried.51 Meanwhile, Frank G. Smith, who fought in China during the Boxer Rebellion, kept portraits of his friends who died overseas.52 The mother of one Sergeant Nugier kept a postcard of the monument erected at Ben-Daoud in Morocco on the site of the battle in which her son had been shot in the forehead in February 1908.53 Her words ran: ‘To the memory of the five heroes who died a glorious death [. . .] including my beloved son.’

Figure 8.8 Charles Foulkes, ‘Paul’s grave’, c. 1899–1900, print on baryta paper stuck on card, 9.8 cm × 6.2 cm. Charles Foulkes was one of seven sons of a British chaplain living in India in the late nineteenth century. Five of the sons died outside Britain, in different parts of the empire. The photograph of Paul Foulkes’ grave, included in an album made well after the Boer War, was a means of materialising his death during the conflict.

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The existence of this type of image demonstrates that one should be cautious about overly simplistic claims that the suffering of European bodies was never shown in pictures of extra-European conflicts. While it is clear that pictures of enemy corpses were much more frequent, the violent death of soldiers on one’s own side is by no means absent from the photographic repertoire. Colonial wars did not always offer an image of the soldier compatible with ideals of invincibility; through the use of ellipsis, the price paid by certain families and the physicality of the most painful combat experience can be seen in private collections and, less frequently, in official images. And, sometimes, the tormented bodies of friendly soldiers were presented in the most unambiguous terms. Invisible victims and exposed martyrs There were complex reasons why the death of a European might be shown or suggested in photographs. But the pictures were not taboo. Photographs of this kind were sometimes distributed to show the harshness of conflicts that general staffs and public opinion did not consider to be real wars, on the same level with engagements against a European enemy, for example. J. B. Martial, a lieutenant in the 2nd African Battalion, was part of the Tidikelt column (western Algerian Sahara) from February to May 1900. Nearly 700 combatants penetrated this area under the command of Clément d’Eu. The mission, which was intended to be peaceful, quickly descended into conflict. On 19 March 1900, a battle took place in the oasis of In-Rhar against the forces of the governor of Timmi. Of the hundreds of inhabitants and fighters who took refuge in the kasbah, 162 survived the French attack. The melinite shells fired by the French left a fearsome sight. As one artilleryman admitted: ‘There was nothing but corpses, people without heads, arms, or legs, and some who had been disembowelled.’54 Martial photographed the mass graves after the battle, but, unusually, he also appears to have taken pictures of the battle as it was taking place. One photograph recorded the death of the gunner Gos (Figure 8.9), one of the nine French soldiers killed during the attack. There are further photographs of the French dead taken by Martial that can be found in albums.55 Later, these photographs were published in an illustrated work published by Jean Geiser, who was an early practitioner of photogravure in his studio in Algiers.56 Some spectacular shots of the assault were sold as postcards by the same studio, while others were published in periodicals.57 This series of striking images, which predates the work of the first photojournalists by several years, shone a light on all aspects of the battle, including the deaths of French soldiers. By the turn of the century, the restraint that may have characterised photographic coverage of the deaths of European soldiers and their allies in battle was declining. Martial’s work, as exceptional as it was, did not stand alone. And Spion Kop was not

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Figure 8.9 J. B. Martial, ‘Combat d’In Rhar, 9 h 47 matin. En arrière des pièces, aux coffres à munitions: le canonnier Gos rend le dernier soupir’ (The battle of In Rhar, 9:47 in the morning. Behind the artillery line, by the munitions chests: gunner Gos draws his last breath), 19 March 1900, photogravure, in J. B. Martial, Souvenir d’In-Rhar (Algiers: Geiser, 1901), 32 . The photographer belonged to one of the detachments of the African battalion that fought alongside Algerian tirailleurs and goumiers (indigenous Moroccan soldiers) in this battle. He took dozens of pictures during the fighting. The book he published after the 1900 expedition is illustrated with numerous photographs. The captions indicate the exact time of day as a means of immersing the reader fully in the action. It is a relatively unusual testimony because all the soldiers in the ‘bat’d’Af’’ had spent time in prison.58 They were often kept hidden from public view. Subjected to the worst bullying, and to a kind of colonial violence that was often ignored, the fate of these individuals was nevertheless shown in photographs in the mid-1900s, notably in Le Journal, which published a photograph of one of these ex-cons who had had both legs amputated after being tortured.59 Martial’s work was therefore also an attempt to show the role of these combatants and to give them back their dignity.

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the only place where pictures were taken of the British dead in the Boer War. Black and White, for example, published several photographs of those who died during the siege of Mafeking in March 1900.60 And we have already seen how photographs of the French expeditions to Morocco showed the harshest aspects of the fighting. Paul Azan, for example, who photographed the 1907 campaign, published a photograph of French soldiers who had died on the battlefield and another that showed ‘the final moments of Maréchal des logis Didier’ in a book published by Hachette.61 Some illustrated periodicals were also quick to publish images of French and allied dead.62 The aim of these pictures, which were monitored and approved by the hierarchy, was to provide unprecedented proof of the commitment of French troops and their readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice. General d’Amade’s preface sums up the objective: ‘I felt the eyes of Europe on us [. . .] What had become of France’s soldiers?’63 Such brutal images were mostly used in narratives that sought to emphasise the treachery and barbarity of the adversaries. The mutilation of corpses, relatively common in certain theatres of war outside Europe, was a source of fear and rumour-mongering. From the 1880s onwards, works illustrated with engravings had attempted to expose these practices. In 1888, Georges Hardouin, a draughtsman and journalist, illustrated a book on Tonkin that did not skip over these issues.64 But, unlike photography, engravings were not interpreted as the unfiltered truth, and they did not depict violence with the same immediacy as the new medium. Yet, in the 1890s, the presence of photographers close to the battle fronts made it possible to document the existence of these profanations. And when the images were circulated, they became part of the discourse on ‘savage wars’ that dominated the description of these extra-European conflicts. This was the case with the expeditions to the northwest frontier of British India. Churchill, who began his literary career by reporting on his experiences in the region, described the atrocities committed by the enemy in The Story of the Malakand Field Force: ‘On the frontier, where no quarter is asked or given [...] it is also the strenuous endeavour of every regiment to carry away their dead [...] The vile and horrid mutilations which the tribesmen inflict on all bodies that fall into their hands [...] add [...] another terror to death.’65 The presentation of the suffering of British soldiers, which was far from self-evident in a context where accounts and reports tended to present European armed forces as invincible, was thus not entirely absent from the repertoire. René Bull, who accompanied the Tirah Expedition (1897–98), took photographs of the bodies of soldiers from the 1st Northamptonshire Regiment. A group that had become isolated from the brigade had been massacred by the Afridi (a Pashtun population) during a march in November 1897. Some of the bodies had been horribly mutilated, so much so that a blanket had to be sewn around their remains to keep them together. Bull took several photographs that were later published in the War

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Albums series by the Black and White Company (Figure 8.10). It is worth asking if cameras and other apparatus that recorded events on the front really helped soldiers to overcome the fear or panic they were sometimes gripped by when they imagined their fate in the event of defeat. Whether these fears were legitimate or not, they are essential for explaining the cruel practices committed by European troops.66 There was therefore a limited space for these realistic pictures of European vulnerability, since these images, when circulated, complemented narratives emphasising the savagery of the enemy. Giving visibility to these bodies was a way of providing further justification for the conflict. However, there was considerable resistance to publishing the photographs. Paul Azan, for example, who accompanied the French campaign in Morocco in 1907, took photographs of three horribly mutilated chasseurs d’Afrique (light cavalrymen). He decided not to publish them in the end, instead keeping them ‘for future historians’ as evidence of the atrocities.67 There are a number of well-known martyrs amongst those who died in battle in France and Britain’s extra-European wars. For example, the remains of Ferdinand de Béhagle, the French explorer who had unwisely sought to negotiate with Rabah, and whose grisly fate was described in the previous chapter, were exhumed and photographed. The anonymous photographer, clearly authorised by the French officers, shows the skeleton in leg irons, with standards taken from Rabah’s son in the background. L’Illustration devoted a full page to the exhumation of the remains and the erection of a monument on the site where the explorer had been executed.68 Following the reconquest of Sudan, numerous photographs were also taken of the places associated with the death of Charles Gordon, the imperial martyr par excellence for the British.69 Pictures of civilian victims of rebellion movements, meanwhile, were rarely displayed in public. Engravings sometimes made it possible to visualise such events in

Figure 8.10 René Bull, ‘The Northampton disaster, burying the dead’, halftone engraving, in René Bull, Black and White Albums. The Tirah Campaign (London: Black and White, 1897), 27.

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the press, but realistic images were generally avoided. Portraits, or shots of the places where the events took place, were clearly preferred to shots of dead bodies. This is true, for example, of the photographic coverage of the Fez massacres in 1912. Riots had broken out after the signing of the Treaty of Fez in March that established the French protectorate in Morocco, and a revolt by the Sultan’s soldiers erupted on 17 April 1912. Joined by some civilians, the mutineers first attacked the Europeans and then turned on the city’s Jewish population.70 Several photographers were on the spot to document the insurrection. Some of their pictures, in particular those taken of the numerous executions of insurgents following the recapture of the city, were circulated in the mainstream press. L’Illustration displayed the coffins of the murdered Frenchmen on the same page as the bodies of the mutinous Moroccan soldiers who had been executed.71 Portraits of the dead and pictures of the destruction caused by the riots were also printed.72 The death and mutilation of the European and Jewish victims were not shown directly, however, although photographs existed and were circulated in the foreign press, in Italy for example.73 Picture agencies in France offered the pictures to the press in Paris, but editors, with the exception of Le Journal, preferred not to publish.74 This restraint, which contrasted with the coverage of disasters or conflicts outside the French Empire, sought to avoid undermining the image of French power. While heroic deaths in a foreign war may be acceptable, the massacre of unarmed Europeans was rarely shown. This was partly the result of a degree of self-censorship by those who took the photographs. But control was also exercised by the French administration in Morocco, who had, at least indirectly, the capacity to exert their authority over photographers. The conventions established by the editorial staff of the illustrated newspapers also seemed to prevent the dissemination of this type of image. These factors all contributed to producing a selective display of victims, with decisions being made over the dead bodies that could or could not be shown. Within the colonial and imperial context, there were few exceptions to the rule. One such anomaly however, is a photograph of the open coffin of a French missionary mutilated by the Boxers in 1900 at the beginning of the rebellion, distributed in a stereoscopic view by the Underwood firm and found in the albums of a number of rank-and-file soldiers who had fought in China. It was circulated because it was, in essence, a visual justification of the conflict, an appalling counterpart to the hundreds of images of beheadings of insurgents following the victory of the international troops. A similar rationale was at work in the decision of the Italian authorities to disseminate images of the bersaglieri (light infantry units) massacred by Ottoman forces and their local allies at Shar al-Shatt in October 1911.75 The pictures of the Italian corpses were a response to pictures of civilians who had been killed. The empires’ awareness of the need to control the visual narrative was not new; Britain had been experimenting with this approach since the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

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Various mechanisms, from ‘good taste’ to censorship, generally made it possible to ensure that any kind of physical weakness was rarely visualised. This was not precisely regulated as such by either the British or the French, though. It was not until the First World War that more or less explicit rules were laid down. At the time, there was no equivalent, for example, to the ban on photographs of coffins of American soldiers killed in the Iraq War in the early 2000s. The selective visibilities of violence against the European presence responded to informal but highly effective mechanisms. Some obvious realities were not lost on the various actors involved in creating and disseminating images. On the one hand, too much emphasis on showing the violence perpetrated against Europeans could undermine the official discourse on the global expansion of the empires. The display of victims could work within the limited framework of Britain or France to denounce, for example, certain forms of criminal behaviour, supposed perils, or to cause a scandal. But the same visual strategy raised real difficulties in the colonial context, particularly at the beginning of the twentieth century, when ‘pacification’ and ‘development’ were the watchwords in official reports and administrators’ publications. On the other hand, and even if this aspect deserves to be better documented, one should not imagine that the only people who saw these pictures were in Europe, or only in the European quarters of Asian or African cities. This assumption, all too common even today, obscures the fact that some of the postcards and illustrations showing the Fez riots, for example, were seen by members of the local population. Indeed, certain images were published and sold in studios in the city shortly afterwards. Absent from existing archives, there is almost no way of knowing how these photographs were viewed by locals. These infrapolitical uses of the image will probably never be grasped.76 Who knows which servants might have leafed through a copy of a newspaper left on a table and then talked about it to their relatives? In this context, the display of repression could be a form of control. Photographs of the vanquished were not simply statements of facts; they were also manifestations of power. To show too much of the fragility of Europeans, on the other hand, would be to show one’s own weaknesses. When faced with the dead and wounded bodies of colonial soldiers, photography, once again, was deployed in apparently contradictory ways. From the end of the nineteenth century, the medium, first due to its initial relative technical complexity, then due to the manner in which photographs were circulated, was essentially an institution  – a polymorphous structure that was nevertheless subject to numerous economic and social constraints.77 In this sense, photography did not automatically challenge the status quo, even if it gave the impression of providing access to a radically different way of representing reality. During this early stage, photographs – even the theoretically destabilising ones analysed here – did not rock the foundations of power or upset political, economic, and cultural power relations. As we have seen

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in this chapter, the way in which the death of soldiers and settlers was visualised generally obeyed norms and codes that, although vague, were sufficiently widespread to ensure that the inevitable advance of Western power was not called into question. In a spectacle of suffering that was unavoidably selective, the display of death and injury became normalised. There were deep logics underlying what was shown and what was covered up. Entire dimensions of physical violence escaped the camera, sometimes for technical reasons, but mostly as a result of deliberate choices. Though in some cases quite horrendous, the punishments inflicted on soldiers from colonial armies, for example, generally remained invisible. A few photographs in scattered albums occasionally showed executions of local soldiers, but these were exceptions.78 By contrast, certain deaths, on the battlefield or caused by a ‘savagery’ that had to be extinguished, were made visible, because they fulfilled the public’s expectations. The same could be said for the few pictures of heroes who had died a tragic death. And yet, in a period in which certain uses of photography, though still undefined, were being crystallised, some images also slipped the net. This visual corpus highlights depictions of the suffering of the common soldier that preceded the First World War by more than a decade. The colonial soldier does not appear as a tireless herald of progress. He was sometimes forgotten or neglected, particularly in the French context, and his image could be hazy. Photography played a role in the grieving process and in developing new perceptions of death in combat. In the images of Spion Kop and of the deaths during the conquest of Madagascar, some viewers saw the futility of war and mass slaughter rather than the glory of conquest. The authorities and armies involved in these conflicts naturally did their best to prevent these discourses from taking hold. But they were faced with a paradox. War was now visible, and its effects on the soldiers sent to Africa and Asia and its efficacy against the enemy testified to the reality of conflicts. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photography contributed to making extra-European conflicts tangible. In particular, it showed that colonial and imperial conflicts were real wars, as worthy of the name as the European conflagration that was anticipated and rumoured in a vast number of letters sent by officers and soldiers engaged far from their homeland at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, at the same time, many of the individuals and institutions involved in colonial ventures sought to deny the true nature of the conflicts, presenting operations as rapid preludes to stabilisation, as efficient ‘small wars’ with a separate status, wars that cost little and were always on the point of ending. Rather than a mirror of reality, photographs and their selective circulation reflected these insurmountable paradoxes.

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9 Invisible wars? Reflections of extra-European conflicts in France and Britain L’Excelsior, founded in 1910, was one of the leading publications illustrated with photographs that emerged in the early twentieth century. In the first issue, the owner, Pierre Laffite, explained that the aim of the newspaper was to be the ‘cinematograph of world news’: ‘To read it will be to see everything.’1 The written word was giving way to the image, opinion to ‘information’. Like many of its competitors in France and the industrialised world, L’Excelsior chose to invest in photography as the main medium for its message, and the daily was saturated with halftone images. The pictures were not of the same quality as those printed using different processes in other illustrated publications, such as L’Illustration, which targeted a public willing to pay higher prices. A visual rhetoric replaced the now-dated layouts of the illustrated magazines of the engraving age. While the war was raging in Morocco in May 1913, for example, the newspaper presented nine photographs on just one page, arranged on three levels (Figure 9.1). There is a combination of rectangular and oval frames, along with the briefest of captions, creating a dynamic structure similar to that used in cinematographic narratives, proof of an utterly modern form of news medium barely filtered by the written word. What does the page show? The upper part of the composition, which has been given the most space by the paper’s artistic directors, is devoted to the campaign in Tadla, the region of central Morocco in which the French-led troops were confronting tribes that refused to submit to their authority and that of the Sultan. A rare photograph of the funeral of a tirailleur is shown next to two more theoretically reassuring pictures of the effect of this military campaign: the burning of a rebel village and a portrait of a group of enemy soldiers about to be executed. A brief comment praises the ‘victorious battles’ which promoted ‘respect for our authority’. The photographs are reported as having been taken by ‘a special correspondent’, in reality one of the photographers that the French officers permitted to accompany the troops. This may have been Maillet, who had a studio in Casablanca and sold the same pictures

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Figure 9.1 L’Excelsior, 25 May 1913, 5 © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

as postcards. L’Excelsior had been covering the French operations in Morocco for months and regularly featured comments from Charles Mangin, the commander of the column, and his superior, Hubert Lyautey.2 In this respect, the newspaper served as their mouthpiece. The conflict was thus highly visible in France, though its coverage was filtered through the more or less effective censorship of the army in Morocco. Week after week, with no fewer than four illustrated articles and two front pages in September 1912, the battles in Morocco were presented as a kind of serial. In the middle of the page, the focus moves suddenly to Essigny (in the department of Aisne), where the flight of Louis Duvignon, a deserter from the Belgian Army who had stolen a car in Paris in February and tried to kill its owner, had finally been brought to an end. He was found at his mistress’s house and wounded by a gunshot. In an effect which may be deliberate, the stretcher on which the thief is lying is reminiscent of that bearing the body of the heroic tirailleur buried in Morocco. Further

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down the page, there is a picture of a dog show and one of Mlle Lili Boulanger and other candidates for the Prix de Rome music prize about to start the mise en loge part of the contest. All kinds of subjects are mixed up together on this page: far-off wars, nearby crimes, and minor news items. L’Excelsior, while giving more space, more ‘scalar value’, to the French military operations in Morocco, shows these pictures alongside all kinds of sensationalist, surprising, and entertaining images. The story of the conflict becomes blurred, derealised, and even complies with the norms of a sequential, episodic narrative that brings it closer to fiction in formal terms.3 When images of conflict, violence, and atrocities in distant places reached France or Britain, they were not seen as isolated fragments but took their place amongst hundreds of other images published on the same conflict and thousands of photographs of other events. Images of war or atrocities were governed by the same mechanisms that presided over the publication of any photograph. They were filtered, fabricated, inserted into a text, and used principally to illustrate the viewpoints of those who showed them. This raises two important questions: first, what exposure was given to the different forms of physical violence studied here? Answering this question means assessing the amount of photographic coverage given to conflicts outside Europe. Second, were they really visible within French and British society? The second question relates to the effect of these visual discourses on metropolitan societies, in three specific respects. First, a study of the public uses of photography will help us to understand the extent to which the imperial experiences of Britain and France may have created ‘colonial cultures’ within the metropole. Second, there will be a discussion of reactions to the display of realistic images of organised violence. And last, we will consider contemporary predictions of what a possible future European war might look like. Extra-European wars did take place In 1991, when the Gulf War became one of the first conflicts to be covered by the major 24-hour news channels, Jean Baudrillard made a highly critical analysis of the coverage of the confrontations. He developed his ideas in a series of provocative articles – to which the title of this section refers.4 He argued that in the steady flow of images, the ‘real time’ war of the modern media had become an object of fiction, and that for viewers confronted with a series of images disconnected from reality, the war did not appear to be taking place at all. It is tempting to look at the visual cultures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the same way. The gradual advent of photography can be seen as one of the processes through which the reality of armed conflict began to elude the Western public. If we consider the events discussed here as a kind of backdrop to the First World War, it is not difficult to overestimate the

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way in which this derealisation of the violence of war may have affected Europeans, seemingly ready to engage in mutual destruction. This phenomenon should not be exaggerated, however, either for today or for the Belle Époque. War and its photographic coverage were not understood to be mere fantasies. First of all, it was not only people living in the imperial metropolises who saw images of warfare from outside Europe. In 1900, as today, the images may have been seen by the victims or their relatives in a completely different way to the potential audience in Europe. We know, for example, how some soldier-photographers made prints of the conflict or of punishments while serving abroad. Editorial processes never completely blocked out reality for those who read the press. Photography and media coverage in general sometimes shockingly and realistically captured what a major armed confrontation in the age of modern artillery or a colonial ‘small war’ meant in reality. This is not to deny the existence of constraints, filters, and inhibitions, which all influenced the way that photographs were intended to be interpreted in the European press. On the contrary, it is a central aspect that needs to be looked at closely, particularly in order to understand that readers in the 1890s and 1900s were exposed to images with a highly variable ‘degree’ of photography. Between engravings made from a photograph, retouched photographs, and the different photomechanical printing processes available, viewers were confronted with pictures that were often of a hybrid nature. As Thierry Gervais has shown, for a long time, the photographs in L’Illustration were not crisp and clear. The coated wood technique, which consisted of engraving the photographic print directly with no further artistic intervention, had been typical in the 1880s.5 But it was the adoption of halftone printing from the 1890s onwards that really changed things. This industrial process, which uses dots to produce different tones of grey, first reached maturity with the development of the permanently etched glass screen by the Philadelphia firm Max Levy and Co. The technique did not spread evenly. It was in Britain that the changes initiated by the American press were most quickly taken up. In particular, the daily newspaper market was profoundly altered by the arrival of the Daily Mail, founded by Alfred Harmsworth in 1896. Intended for mass circulation, the paper sold nearly a million copies a day at the beginning of the century. Its success meant that it was able to send its own photographers to provide extensive visual coverage of distant events, particularly the Boer War. Magazines also built their reputations on their ability to cover wars outside Europe. Black and White magazine, for example, published a large number of halftone pictures of the Sudan Campaign in 1898. And, a few years later, Black and White Budget – founded in 1899 – inundated its readers with pictures of the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion for the modest price of tuppence. At this stage, over 80 per cent of its illustrations were photographs, and these included

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the less palatable aspects of war. From 1900 onwards, the number of halftone images printed exceeded that of traditional engravings in The Graphic.6 Intense competition between the various titles in terms of spectacular content and quantity of images led to a profound transformation in the ways in which news was expressed and presented. The Sphere, founded in 1900, was one of the major players in these developments. There ensued a general move in this direction. Specialist magazines, such as The Army and Navy Illustrated, offered outstandingly fine reproductions on glossy paper. The magazine, which benefitted from a vast network of soldier-photographers, regularly carried pictures of Britain’s wars (Figure 9.2). The shift towards images can be confirmed by a statistical analysis of the occurrence of the term ‘war pictures’ in the British press, which clearly shows a steep rise in visualisations of war from the late 1890s onwards (Figure 9.3). In France, it took a little longer for the technique to be consolidated.7 Le Journal, one of the four main dailies in the French press at the beginning of the twentieth century, did not definitively adopt halftone printing until the middle of the 1900s.8 The same was the case for L’Illustration, edited by René Baschet. While cost influenced editorial choices, the unequal spread of these printing technologies can also be put down to various forms of corporate and cultural resistance. The shift towards photography was completed in the early 1910s. Most of the major dailies, such as Le Petit Parisien, now had their own photographic departments. And on the occasion of the Italian intervention in Tripolitania in 1911, Le Temps, another French daily with a large circulation, invested heavily in new printing machines. Although the realism of photography became a major selling point (Figure 9.4), photographs printed in the press did not achieve the same degree of detail as in silver halide photography. A press photograph was a pale shadow of the ultra-realism of the original. But realistic photographs were not always wanted.9 It was often thought necessary to retouch photos in order to correct their limitations.10 There was also a debate over the value of giving free rein to the transparency attributed to mechanical images. For some, ‘the brutal realism of the photographic image is not to be tolerated’.11 George Scott, who covered the Balkan War for L’Illustration, published only engravings of the atrocities he had witnessed.12 He drew on his own photographs but toned them down in his illustrations.13 And Le Petit journal, which made the conservative choice of sticking to art work, published numerous sensationalist engravings, some of which were derived from photographs supplied by the first picture agencies. Different publications treated the work of the artist and the photographer in different ways. Sometimes the name of the illustrator was given, followed by the name of the photographer who had provided the original picture, but at other times no details at all were provided.14

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Figure 9.2 Anon., ‘Our Advanced Posts on the Nile’, halftone prints, Army and Navy Illustrated, 17 December 1898, 291.

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10,000

1,000 Frequency of occurences

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The Hudson & Kearns company, based in Southwark, imported high-quality rotary printing presses in the 1890s. The characteristics of the pictures they produced can be seen in the illustrations on this page. Together with George Newnes, one of the most active publishers of the period, Hudson & Kearns were pioneers in photographic printing. The magazine Army and Navy Illustrated is one of their creations. This page shows a collection of images taken by several different officers, including a shot of the battlefield littered with corpses and a picture of a tent pitched using several items taken from dead Mahdist soldiers, including their spears.

100

10

1 1880

1885

1890

1895

1900

1905

1910

Figure 9.3 Occurrences of the expression ‘war pictures’ in the British press between 1880 and 1914, according to the Britishnewspapers.com database (accessed in May 2019). The term ‘war pictures’ may not only mean photographs, which were known to have a ‘subordinate status’ in the late nineteenth century,15 but the logarithm used here should not obscure the extraordinary effect of the Boer War on the visual representation of conflict in Britain.

Others, however, like the first photojournalists who built their careers covering wars outside Europe, promoted a rhetoric of realism. Photography, even when it appeared aesthetically poor in comparison to engravings, responded to the growing demand for objective journalism, in direct contact with events. Uncertain over how to move forwards, however, editors’ pictorial coverage of events remained hybrid until the 1910s. The historian Neil Harris considers that the United States underwent a ‘halftone effect’ during this time. The public’s understanding of the world was

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Figure 9.4 Advertisement for The King magazine published in the London Daily News, 2 February 1900, 2. ‘Actual war photos. No fancy drawings!’ The King, with its splendid glossy photographs, clearly took part in the visual turn that was occurring at the time of the Boer War. The advertisement places particular emphasis on the veracity of photography. The magazine does not ‘tamper with its war photographs’, which are ‘truthful snapshots’ taken by over ‘twenty correspondents’.

radically altered within a generation by the new image technologies. And France and Britain were far from the only countries where this occurred.16 The dissemination of photographs of the Congo atrocities by the British press provides a demonstration of the phenomenon. It has been shown how Englishspeaking missionaries and their uses of photography played a key role in the ‘revelation’ of the crimes committed in the Belgian Congo. Some of their photographs were also published in periodicals with a large circulation. The Bystander, for example, published several articles illustrated with these photographs in 1907, playing openly on the realistic power of photography. The reader was now provided with ‘photographic proof’ of the crimes committed against local populations (Figure 9.5). It shows the body of a man killed for not providing his quota of rubber in the Congo Free State, where an ultraviolent system of forced labour aimed at overexploiting both local populations and natural resources. This image is clearly staged, with the European missionaries placed at the heart of the composition wearing white clothing

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Figure 9.5 Anon., ‘“Methods of Barbarism”: A Photographic Proof’, retouched halftone print, The Bystander, 27 February 1907, 435.

that has been made even whiter. Not simply an anecdotal example of the transformations that were common at the time, the aim of this photograph was to find a balance: to take advantage of the realism of photography in order to provide proof of a colonial crime, while creating an image that had meaning and was not submerged by the horror of its subject.17 Here, what is actually placed at the centre of the visual discourse is the subject of evangelisation, seen as the dam that would hold back the flood of barbarism. Apart from the sociotechnical factors that reduced the impact of photographs, other phenomena fostered the fictionalisation of conflict. As Dominique Kalifa has pointed out, European military expeditions in Africa and Asia lent themselves particularly well to the treatment of news that was prevalent at the end of the nineteenth

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century.18 In Britain, it was the era of the emergence of ‘new journalism’. Editors such as W. T. Stead promoted sensationalist and dynamic news coverage. This innovative approach was closely linked to ‘new imperialism’ – that period of intense expansion of British colonisation in Africa and Asia.19 When treated as serials and minor news items, the impact of war pictures was much reduced. The heroisation of various figures of colonial expansion also encouraged this shift towards more fictional forms of narrative. The phenomenon was typical at the end of the nineteenth century, with the figures of Kitchener, Gordon, Brazza, and Marchand all emerging as major media constructions. This trend also contributed to the euphemising of the less palatable aspects of their actions in Africa and elsewhere. The coverage of exotic barbarities and colonial repression was also subject to this globalisation of sensationalism. The extremes of violence reflected in the press were treated no differently from other tragic or striking events, such as major catastrophes or accidents. Overall, the frameworks were largely pre-established, both in written narratives and in illustrations.20 Colonial campaigns had the merit of almost always ending in victory. The publishing of the more extreme images usually followed a breach in these expectations, when the unanticipated death of an officer, stronger than expected resistance, or an unforeseen and highly unusual defeat disrupted the supposed natural order of things. Certain images, however, such as those showing torture in Asia or captured soldiers, also became expected signs, not meant to surprise but to repeat in a circular manner the narrative codes on the disorder of the world far from home.21 The spread of photographic documentation throughout the mass media was accentuated by the rise of the picture agencies at the beginning of the twentieth century. With the exponential increase in demand for news photographs by many newspapers in industrialised countries, the production and supply of photographs became a veritable industry. Several picture agencies were founded in the 1890s, such as the Bain News Service. Some specialised in covering events outside Europe. In Britain, Bolak’s Electrotype Agency and The Illustrated Press Bureau, amongst others, supplied pictures from all over the world. And in 1912, Topical (Topical Press Agency, one of the first London-based photo agencies created in 1903) set up a specialist war photography branch, the Topical War Service, one of the first examples of its kind.22 The London News Agency also employed several specialist ‘war photographers’ in the early 1910s. In France, several agencies, of which Rol, Harlingue, and Meurisse were amongst the best known, were also founded at the beginning of the century. Photographs were sometimes circulated amongst these different suppliers. The Sphere, The Graphic, and L’Illustration, for example, all bought photographs of the Russo-Japanese War produced by Viktor Bulla’s agency in Saint Petersburg.23 This type of circulation led to the increasing obsolescence of the national framework in the

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photographic representation of current events. Certain images were presented within a few days or weeks of each other by newspapers in different industrialised nations. The 1909 photographs of the caged ‘usurper’ (rogui) Jilali ben Driss al-Youssefi alZerhouni, first published by L’Illustration on 19 September 1909, were printed three days later by The Sketch, which had purchased them from Scherl, the company that owned Die Woche, one of Germany’s leading illustrated publications.24 The punishment inflicted on this usurper who had rebelled against the authority of the Sultan of Morocco and was butchered in public aroused a mixture of fascination and horror in Europe, much like the Chinese torture of death by a thousand cuts. Another filter specifically limited anomalies in the visualisation of colonial wars. To varying degrees in both France and Britain, links existed between those who provided news and those engaged in colonial expansion. We have seen how officerphotographers often found themselves in a position to take pictures of the campaigns in which they participated. At the turn of the twentieth century, the promoters of colonial policies, both the British ‘constructive imperialists’ and members of the French ‘Colonial Party’, had a good understanding of how to exploit the circulation of information in order to gain public and governmental support for their projects. As Simon Potter in the United Kingdom and Julie d’Andurain in France have both demonstrated, the flow of news from colonial empires was in part managed by these networks.25 In France, Auguste Terrier, secretary of the influential Comité de l’Afrique française, played a pivotal role in this sense. He was at the heart of a professional and personal network that allowed him to support explorations and to ensure they were backed by both the colonial and the generalist press.26 And in fact, the French and British press depended on often limited sources. When it came to covering small-scale operations in distant areas, at a time when the telegraphic transmission of images was still in its infancy, newspapers had no choice but to depend on the participants themselves to glean material for their articles. The visibility of violence in distant conflicts thus passed through several filters. Entangled in narratives that bordered on fiction, transformed into minor news items, and partly controlled by actors who had no interest in too much being said, public accounts may appear to have been sanitised. However, the idea that journalistic coverage of armed conflicts only provided a distorted view of events must be qualified. The interactions that existed between the press and the civilian or military actors directly involved in the development of colonial empires never reached the level of organised and totally effective propaganda.27 There was no all-powerful structure that systematically warped coverage of the wars, rebellions, and repressions that were taking place in the empires. It would be therefore wrong to assume that what was read and seen in newspapers was always severely distorted. At times crudely caricatured in mainland Europe, the

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coverage of the Boxer Rebellion in Britain was quite informative. A newspaper as popular as the Daily Mail, for example, presented it without excessive sensationalism and was not ‘hysterically anti-Chinese’.28 Although the major newspapers resisted revealing the full extent of the concerns caused by the concentration camp system during the Boer War, Emily Hobhouse’s work, which revealed the appalling treatment of Boer civilians from January 1901 onwards, eventually bore fruit and provoked a public debate.29 As we have seen, from the 1890s onwards, photographs published in the mainstream press occasionally sparked tense debates. And in the various editorial lines of the 1910s in France, despite the mechanisms of censorship and in the absence of pictures as gruesome as those found in soldiers’ albums and correspondence, it was not difficult for readers of the press to be aware of the difficulties of the Moroccan Campaign. But some of these nuances can be missed if one focuses too exclusively on periodicals. Although a genuine ‘newspaper civilisation’ was developing at the time, there were many other ways of obtaining information and viewing war photographs, some of which passed through a less rigourous selection process.30 Kodak opened a photographic gallery on the Strand in 1901, which hosted several exhibitions of spectacular war photographs, first on the Boer War, and subsequently on the Italian intervention in Libya in 1911. One visitor noted of the Boer War photographs exhibited there in July 1901: ‘[they] should give a better idea of the incidents of warfare than is to be obtained by reading any number of newspaper reports or letters by special correspondents.’31 The precursors of cinema, such as the magic lantern, also offered new perspectives. The lectures of René Bull, for example, who embarked on a tour of the United Kingdom after the Sudan Campaign in the winter of 1898, and then again in 1900 for a series on the Boer War, were accompanied by projections of his photographs, the plates of which seem to have been lost. Photographs were also projected in the presentations denouncing ‘the Congo atrocities’ that enjoyed considerable success with the public. Furthermore, battles and their surroundings could now be shown in three dimensions. The series of stereoscopic views of the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese War produced by Underwood and Underwood were all sold in Europe (Figure 9.6). The dozens of pictures provided a more documentary view than that which could be found in the press. Some of the photographs by Jimmy Hare and James Ricalton that were not accepted by publishers because they were considered too shocking circulated in this medium. Postcards were also a channel for visual information. Cinema, which had initially depicted war largely through short scripted sketches filmed on cardboard sets, became more realistic and documentary in the 1910s. Pathé, for example, marketed films showing the hanging of fourteen people by the Italians in Libya in 1911, while the 1912 film entitled Turkish Troops and Civilian Refugees,

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Figure 9.6 James Ricalton, ‘After a fierce assault – every man killed’, 1905, stereoscopic picture published by Underwood and Underwood. James Ricalton was one of the first American photojournalists. He established close relations with Japanese officers during the Russo-Japanese War, which enabled him to take shots of the fighting. Here he appears to have held the camera above the trench to take the unframed picture – a technique Robert Capa claimed to have used to take his famous photograph ‘The Falling Soldier’ in 1936. This photograph shows a number of those who had been killed in an attack on positions in Port Arthur in the autumn of 1904. The siege was particularly bloody, killing nearly 20,000 people.

shot during the First Balkan War, showed the collateral damage of the conflict.32 The specialist press, some newspaper supplements, war memoirs, and soldiers’ writings also served to disseminate photographs that were less sanitised than those found in newspapers and magazines. The violence of war was therefore not routinely filtered out. Visual and written news, which could at times be quite divergent, took on a new form at the end of the nineteenth century, becoming a subject of public debate in the first two decades of the twentieth century. When France and Britain were directly involved, tales of heroism and doctored pictures prevailed, but modern warfare and colonial troubles were  not  blocked out altogether. The question now is to establish if anyone was looking. On ‘colonial cultures’ Several historians have suggested that a ‘colonial’ or ‘imperial culture’ existed in France and Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.33 The effect of empire on the metropoles has certainly been the subject of much debate that can only be touched

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upon here. Many believe that French and British identities have been profoundly influenced by their global histories and their status as colonial powers.34 Some go so far as to deny the existence of any substantial link, while further studies seek to understand the variety and nuances of these interactions.35 Before considering this question more closely, it is necessary to take a step back and undertake what is known as a ‘distant reading’ of the periodicals of the time. To tackle the insurmountable number of pages published from the nineteenth century onwards, we now have several tools that allow us to carry out analyses of large data sets. Both major and minor titles have been digitised in France and Britain, making it possible to derive and compare statistics on the number of times certain words and expressions are used.36 Applied to colonial conflicts, for example, it is possible to gauge the importance given to Britain’s so-called ‘small wars’ in the press from the 1880s to 1914 (Figures 9.7 and 9.8). It appears that while not all of Britain’s imperial wars generated the same level of interest as the Boer Wars – with the exception of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 – they were nevertheless well covered. Some, such as the fourth and fifth Anglo-Ashanti Wars (1895–96 and 1900), were mentioned half as many times as such major conflicts as the Russo-Japanese War and the First Balkan War (1912–13). Punitive expeditions and distant wars appear to have become part of the media landscape. The situation seems to have been comparable in France, where the Madagascar Campaign also occupied a significant place in relation to these two major conflicts (Figure 9.9). This is confirmed 45,000 40,000 35,000 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0

18 8 18 0 8 18 1 8 18 2 8 18 3 8 18 4 8 18 5 8 18 6 8 18 7 8 18 8 8 18 9 9 18 0 9 18 1 9 18 2 9 18 3 9 18 4 9 18 5 9 18 6 9 18 7 9 18 8 9 19 9 0 19 0 0 19 1 0 19 2 0 19 3 0 19 4 0 19 5 0 19 6 0 19 7 0 19 8 0 19 9 1 19 0 1 19 1 1 19 2 1 19 3 14

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Boer War / South African War

Russo-Japanese War

Balkan War

All Brish colonial wars

Figure 9.7 Comparison of occurrences of the Russo-Japanese War, the Balkan War, and all occurrences linked to British colonial wars (‘Ashanti war/campaign/expedition’; ‘Sudan war/ campaign/expedition’; ‘Tirah campaign/expedition’; ‘Benin Expedition’; ‘Matabele War’; ‘Afghan War’; ‘Zulu War’; ‘Burmese war’; ‘Battle of Omdurman’; ‘Egyptian campaign’), from data available at Britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk (accessed January 2019).

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254 8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000

2,000 1,000 0

18 8 18 0 81 18 8 18 2 8 18 3 8 18 4 8 18 5 8 18 6 8 18 7 8 18 8 8 18 9 9 18 0 9 18 1 9 18 2 9 18 3 9 18 4 9 18 5 9 18 6 9 18 7 9 18 8 9 19 9 0 19 0 0 19 1 0 19 2 0 19 3 0 19 4 0 19 5 0 19 6 0 19 7 0 19 8 0 19 9 1 19 0 1 19 1 1 19 2 1 19 3 14

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3,000

Ashan

Tirah

Benin

Matabele

Egypan

Figure 9.8 Occurrences of the expressions ‘Ashanti war/campaign/expedition’, ‘Tirah campaign/ war’, ‘Matabele war’, ‘Benin expedition’ and ‘Egyptian campaign’, from data available at Britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk (accessed January 2019).

by a study of the illustrated supplements of Le Petit journal and Le Petit Parisien.37 The issue was even directly addressed at the time. In 1896, a journalist from The Sketch asked Lucien Marc, the editor-in-chief of L’Illustration: ‘Do you find that a colonial war – the Madagascar expedition, for example – makes a great difference to your circulation?’ According to Lucien Marc, the impact was significant, although ‘an important funeral’ such as Victor Hugo’s obsequies sold even better.38 In 1905, the Publishers’ Circular noted that ‘distant wars’ improved sales of books on geography, history, and travel.39 The phenomenon was also noted in the local press in Britain, where major conflicts frequently provided an opportunity to increase the prominence of international news in unusual ways, and even to radically change reading habits by attracting new readers and encouraging more public readings of the latest news.40 In terms of both quality and quantity, press coverage of the conflicts was sufficiently great that to dismiss them as mere media epiphenomena would be nonsensical. The French and British populations knew that their soldiers were engaged in operations outside Europe. Sometimes the conflicts were even at the heart of the news cycles. The spectacle of these events was clearly visible. But the stories were competing with other major media artefacts. In France, debates on the three-year military service law and the all-consuming Dreyfus affair, for example, were much more extensively reported. And in the United Kingdom, amongst numerous other issues, public debates on the suffragette movement and Home Rule were more central than those on the wars. The instabilities of the European empires, however, were not drowned out altogether by these other issues.

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2,000 1,905

1,800

1,600

1,400

1,200 1,041

1,000

800 693

600

396

400

295

294

255

245

235

159

143

90 114

89

233

198

200

79

69 13

43

61

100 45

26

20

12

25

16

2

00 19 01 19 02 19 03 19 04 19 05 19 06 19 07 19 08 19 09 19 10 19 11 19 12 19 13 19 14

99

63

19

98

18

97

18

96

18

95

18

94

18

18

93

0

18

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Expédion de Madagascar (1895 Madagascar Expedion)

Guerre du Transvaal (Second Boer War)

Guerre russo-japonaise (Russo-Japanese War)

Figure 9.9 Occurrences of the terms ‘expédition/campagne/guerre de Madagascar’, ‘guerre russojaponaise’, and ‘guerre du Transvaal/des Boers’ in L’Aurore, Le Cri du peuple, La Croix, Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, L’Humanité, Le Journal, La Justice, Le Matin, Le Petit journal, Le Petit Parisien, and Le Radical, from data at Gallica.fr (accessed January 2019).

Is this to say that the French and British populations, who were exposed to this flow of information from the colonies, overwhelmingly supported the development of a colonial empire, including its most violent consequences? The irruption of photographic evidence of abuses raised public debate on a regular basis. Photographs were only one of the pieces of evidence used from the end of the 1880s. But their journey, from Burma to Bakel, from Denshawai to Morocco, provides proof that there were also dynamics of dissension and indecision. Attitudes towards colonial expansion were not uniform, neither in France nor Britain. Despite the mechanisms that heroicised, nationalised, and sanitised the narratives on colonial troubles, they were received in very different ways by different members of the population. It is

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true that the circulation of certain pictures was a sign of the strength of pro-imperial sentiments; the front page of L’Illustration showing the head of Rabah or the page of the Illustrated London News that showed Bhambatha’s decapitated body were no accident. The number of cogs and actors involved in a picture of this nature being taken, developed, sent from sometimes inaccessible areas, selected by newspaper staff, and finally printed is clear evidence that the image, and the act it represented, was fundamentally acceptable to a substantial part of the society that produced and viewed it. But it is also true that few of the pictures of brutality mentioned in this book failed to provoke a systemic response or a critical reaction. This is why the trajectories of these photographs are so revealing. They were often powerful drivers of debate and so reveal the limitations of an over-rapid summary of the discourses on colonisation at the time. When reading articles that support a certain intervention in the empires, one can see that they were above all the product of information circulation structures, of possible censorship, and of editorial decisions. But not all readers had the same ideology or spoke with the same voice. During the Boer War, there was a considerable distance between the discourse disseminated by the press and the positions of the British public. Some of the coverage of that conflict reveals bursts of jingoism – that imperialistic fervour that seemed to embody ‘popular’ support for the expansion of British influence in the world – but it gives only a limited insight into the diverse reactions of the groups that made up society at the time. A wide range of different positions existed, from apathy to the most fervent support, and even radical opposition. The trajectory of the photograph of Spion Kop provides evidence of this.41 These differences were so great that the Boer War caused a profound change in the way the empire was defined and how its future was seen. In France, regional affiliations could also produce very different attitudes towards colonial expansion. However, a whole dimension of these debates, and more particularly the effect of the photographs of these conflicts, is lost to us altogether. We know, for example, that in Britain there were public readings of newspapers in pubs, followed by active discussions. This was also the case in the many community newspaper reading rooms scattered around the country. These potentially critical discourses and voices, however, are not easy to access today. The examples dealt with in previous chapters show all kinds of differences in the way that pictures were received. A close look reveals profound differences within national cultures and institutions. Parliamentary debates over colonial matters appeared to be more dynamic in Britain. And the Irish question, which offered many opportunities to criticise English power, and the radical tradition initiated by Richard Cobden  – a tireless critic of the abuses of the British Empire  – provided fertile ground for more systematic denunciations of excesses, even if these issues were often instrumentalised for internal political purposes.42 National differences within

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the United Kingdom were also significant. The Scottish experience of empire was not the same as the English experience, for example. This diversity fuelled debate.43 The great ‘split’ in the Liberal Party in the 1880s, which triggered the growth of the Labour movement, also played its part in intensifying the controversies. The development of positivism and pacifism in Britain was accompanied by acerbic criticism of imperial expansion, as can be seen, for example, in the work of the writer Frederic Harrison. The innovative use of photography by the evangelical movement was different on the two sides of the Channel. And more generally, a political culture of debate in images developed earlier in the United States and Britain than in France,44 where the framework for debate was also quite distinct. It was hardly possible to debate colonial issues during the Third Republic ‘other than in a cacophonous, chaotic fashion’.45 Media furores around colonisation did not have the same political effects as in the United Kingdom. The army was closer to the political leadership in Paris than in London. From indigénophiles to the first radical anti-colonialists, the wide variety of criticisms and reformist approaches to the empire in France failed to change the situation in any significant way.46 These differences deserve to be explored further; a connected history of the critiques of imperialism and colonialism before 1914 has yet to be written. And beyond national boundaries, certain images were prompting disgust on a broader scale, at a time when a global media culture was beginning to emerge. Quite apart from colonial issues, the reception of photographs showing open brutality aroused the first debates over the obscenity of such images and whether it was necessary to display the horror in all its detail. An atrocity exhibition? In 1914, a report funded by the Carnegie Endowment was published on the mass violence in the Balkans. Drawn up by pacifists, it was perhaps the first study of this nature and contained several photographs of the atrocities. Before being published, there was much discussion about whether it was really necessary to include such shocking material. Nevertheless, the committee decided to go ahead and publish some of the photographs, ‘avoiding as much as possible, – though it was no easy matter, – a vulgar collection of horrors’. They were included in the report as ‘specimens, often incomplete, of the illustrations published wholesale by the newspapers’.47 This internal debate on the banality of brutality offered by photography echoed debates on the matter between publishers and authors. A year earlier, the Browne and Co. printing company, about to publish a book by Francis McCullagh on the Italian intervention in Libya (1911), was faced with similar concerns.48 Like Gaston Chérau, his counterpart at Le Matin, McCullagh was covering the fighting for the New York World, the Westminster Gazette, and the Daily News (London) when he photographed the massacre at the Mechiya

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oasis in late October. Highly critical of the Italian Army, which had killed thousands of civilians at the oasis, McCullagh was keen to publish his photographs in the book, because, in his words, ‘instead of making protests, I made photographs’.49 Some of the most shocking images were removed from the final version of the book. The publisher warned the reader in a note at the beginning of the book: ‘Some photographs of the Oasis Repression taken by Mr. McCullagh, and submitted to us, have been found unsuitable for publication in a work intended for general circulation, and have not, therefore, been reproduced in the present volume.’50 The irruption of mass violence in the photographic repertoire at the beginning of the twentieth century raised unprecedented challenges. For those who were handling the material, there were now serious questions to answer. What was the purpose of the realistic exhibition of violence? Could it not have harmful consequences on individuals? The steady flow of photographs and news in Britain and in France was visibly changing sensitivity thresholds. To understand this, we must look at other kinds of image that were circulating at the time, not just photographs of extra-European conflicts. On the whole, the trend had been for fewer open displays of death at the end of the nineteenth century. Symbolic of these changes in thresholds, one of the main places to see corpses, the Paris Morgue, which had been open to the curious for identification purposes, was closed to the public in 1907,51 while public executions had been debated and in some cases banned.52 But from the 1900s onwards, the development of the ‘spectacle of information’, to use an expression coined by Thierry Gervais, was accompanied by a more pervasive presence of images of death. In France in particular, this ‘exhibition of misfortune’ gradually began to supplant other kinds of news.53 If one combs through the illustrated press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one notes that those who had died in war or in minor colonial conflicts were shown alongside other types of corpses deemed acceptable to put on view. Deaths from industrial and transport accidents or catastrophes, for example, were all displayed in photographs in the press.54 As a sign of the concerns of the time, L’Illustration ran numerous articles on aeroplane crashes in the early twentieth century and was not coy about showing the fate of overaudacious pioneers. The morbidity of the imagery could be quite extreme. L’Excelsior for example, did not hesitate to publish photographs of the bodies of the dancer Isadora Duncan’s children, who had drowned in the Seine after a car accident in April 1913.55 The Grand-Guignol theatre, the Pathé films that re-enacted executions, and the ‘chamber of horrors’ at Madame Tussauds were all symptoms of this attraction to macabre realism. But the relationship was ambivalent. While photography served as an ersatz for public executions, very soon it also came under the spotlight. On 12 January 1909, the front page of Le Journal displayed a photograph of the severed heads of the members of the Pollet gang that had been taken at the morgue. Thieves turned murderers, the guillotining

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of these four individuals in Béthune had been photographed. To the great displeasure of the authorities, the scene had also been filmed. From then on, photojournalists and filmmakers suspected of wishing to shoot in secret were denied access. They had to go outside the metropole to find their subjects. In this context, one of the first issues to arise was to do with obscenity. Photographs of brutalised, naked bodies immediately aroused concerns about impropriety. And with the growth of sensationalist pictures, a veritable lexical field began to develop around these images of atrocities. ‘The grim photographs of the South African battlefields, those trenches, full of mutilated bodies’, ‘the ghastly photographs of the living skeletons which filled the Cuban towns’ during the war in Cuba, the ‘more horrible photographs of recent doings in China’: the effect of these images on the spectators became a subject in its own right.56 A vocabulary of emotional reactions to photographs of brutality took shape, signalling the rapid growth in displays of such images. In a passage that certainly influenced Norbert Elias, John Atkinson Hobson, a pioneering voice in the British anti-imperialism movement, wrote: For a halfpenny every man, woman, or child can stimulate and feed those lusts of blood and physical cruelty […] which, in their literal modes of realisation, have been assigned by modern specialisation to soldiers, butchers, sportsmen, and a few other trained professions. The business man, the weaver, the clerk […] can no longer satisfy these savage cravings […] but the art of reading print enables them to indulge ad libitum in ghoulish gloating over scenes of human suffering, outrage, and destruction.57

Hobson was not the only one to express this view. In fact, he drew on the analyses of Gustave Le Bon, the author of a work entitled Psychologie des foules (published in English as The Crowd) on the role of images, described in the book not as physical objects but as mental evocations, in the behaviour of crowds.58 The question of the effect of horrific images on the public was not only raised in scholarly writings. As early as 1897, The Spectator, a magazine close to the Conservative Party, warned its readers: ‘Owing to the immense increase of information […] and to the increase of newspaper reading, the English who […] look on all things from a position of real or fancied security, look out on the affairs of the world as if they were dramas, and as the scenes advance, behold them with pleasure or pity or horror, but without realizing that they are actual.’59 This indifference was also referred to frequently by French authors. In 1913, the writer Louis Thomas expressed his concern about the Balkan War: The mentality of the contemporary reader of major newspapers requires, it seems, this daily effort to provide sensational news, whether true or false [...] The next day he has

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forgotten what he had read the day before. What does he care if those rivers of blood never flowed in Çorlu [a city in northwest Turkey], if the story, when he savoured it with his morning café au lait, gave him a little thrill that made him more acutely appreciative of the

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tranquillity of his own existence?60

In the wake of the huge increase of photographs and the spectacle of faraway troubles, several observers at the time identified the first supposed effect of the realism of images, namely that there was not any effect at all, or scarcely any. In fact, the phenomenon of indifference is central to any account of the effect of these images on what was beginning to be known as ‘public opinion’ at the end of the nineteenth century.61 The large number of opposing discourses and visualisations, however powerful they may appear to be in archives, sales figures, and mentions of words, does not give us an insight into the full extent of indifference. In the case of events created or documented by photographs of violent acts and their consequences, the indifference was particularly pronounced because, in many cases, the suffering reflected did not necessarily affect observers, either because it came too low down their list of concerns, or because they immediately blocked it out altogether. Rather than attempting to measure the extent of the phenomenon – an impossible task – what should be noted here is the birth of the commonplace itself. The cliché of indifference to photographs of atrocities was already circulating at the end of the nineteenth century. The idea of a voyeuristic Belle Époque population that was hungry for news and pictures of atrocities and primed for war does not appear to stand up to scrutiny. Some people even regretted the time when people were truly shocked by violent images. On the other hand, some observers feared that people would be contaminated. The press had become a ‘fiction factory, turning out the completed article in quantities so prodigious as to defy all historic parallel […] ably seconded by its auxiliaries in the illustrated papers, which engage the pencil of the artist, the camera of the photographer, the die of the engraver […] to carry the stream of poison through the avenue of the eye’, as Walter Walsh wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century.62 Many articles, especially in the conservative British press of the time, considered that obscenity, especially photographs of obscenity, risked spreading immorality. As early as the 1870s, a journalist in the Kentish Independent wrote: ‘There can be little doubt but that the sensationalism of the present age, whether verbally or pictorially expressed, is producing amongst us a harvest of folly, vice and crime […] The study of mental phenomena leads unerringly to the conclusion that exciting stories, as well as exciting pictures, exercise a marvellous and sometimes mysterious influence over the human mind.’63 Pornographic photographs raised concerns of this nature. And stories of crime and violent images were reputed to spread criminal behaviour.64 For the most pacifist

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of commentators, the display of the violence of war could therefore be counterproductive, as there were concerns that such news may actually arouse a desire for violence. This is what American psychologist William James meant when he said that when it comes to the exhibition of war, ‘the horrors make the fascination’. This partly explains the relative restraint of many movements that may otherwise have been inclined to use images of violence to undermine militarist and colonialist discourses. Worse, with the return of certain individuals, the danger, as Paul Henri Balluet d’Estournelles de Constant noted, would be to see ‘a culture of brutality’ whose ‘traditions and vices would then be brought back to the metropole’.65 The powers attributed to images were not necessarily seen as negative by everyone. One of the concerns of the French and British army staffs was that soldiers were becoming too soft after decades of relative peace in Europe and had been too little exposed to the realities of the battlefield. The brutal realism shown in certain illustrated publications openly supported by the hierarchy was doubtless sometimes a response to the belief that it was necessary to remind those back home in Europe of the violence of war. They considered that it was necessary for maintaining a degree of bellicosity. Depictions of the bloodiest details of armed violence were by no means the reserve of photography. There was no false modesty about what was happening on the fronts of colonial expansion at the time. The novels of Rider Haggard, George Henty, and Louis Noir’s Le Coupeur de têtes series, for example, leave one in little doubt.66 This is undoubtedly one of the factors that explains the more frequent depictions of armed violence on the French side of the Channel from the mid-1900s onwards. The question of revenge against Germany was an essential component of the French iconosphere of war at the turn of the century. Showing off weaponry and the consequences of using it served to signal to a potential European enemy that one was ready to fight. These lessons were not only intended for an audience outside France or Britain. Representations of organised violence against an external enemy were also a way of demonstrating the capacity to exercise repression and control within the imperial metropoles themselves. In the words of Foucault, there was a ‘swarming of disciplinary mechanisms’.67 As early as the Paris Commune, parallels had been drawn between the violence committed by French troops in Algeria and the bloody repression inflicted on inhabitants of the capital,68 and these comparisons were repeated at the end of the nineteenth century.69 The racialisation of social inequalities was audible through the choice of words, from ‘apache’ in France to ‘thugs’ in the United Kingdom, while references to supposed ‘native barbarism’ flourished during the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. More broadly, a whole textual and visual rhetoric linked crime with the conflicts and violence located far from Europe. This relationship was evident in the coverage of the great ‘battles’ against anarchist groups at the beginning of the

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twentieth century, such as the Siege of Sidney Street in January 1911 or the attack on the villa in which the last members of the Bonnot gang took refuge in May 1912 in Bonhoure. Photographs of the morgue and bloody shots of the scene were then offered by agencies and sometimes published on the front pages of newspapers alongside pictures from the Moroccan Campaign, for example, with colonial wars being automatically compared with the maintenance of order in the imperial metropoles.70 In general, these were only semantic shifts – transfers of words and icons that had limited consequences – but it was also the case that some British policemen in the 1900s and 1910s had participated in colonial wars. Far from being a ‘vulgar collection of horrors’, the display of organised violence, and in particular of colonial operations, responded to specific objectives and rationales. In addition to an incipient voyeurism, there was a whole range of motives for the large number of displays of misfortune in the early twentieth century. A glimpse of the Great War W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the first thinkers to establish a causal link between the colonial wars and the Great War, a fact that is often forgotten.71 It is Hannah Arendt, however, whose work serves as the initial reference point for many studies on the connections between the conflicts linked to the expansion of European empires and the gigantic conflagration of 1914–18.72 Numerous historians have sought to understand the extent to which the mass violence of the twentieth century may have been an extension and evolution of colonial violence. The most extreme position is to argue that the colonial conflicts were a veritable template, that they established a paradigm. In France, and especially in Germany, the issue of the origins of the Holocaust has been analysed from this standpoint.73 The mass violence observed in Europe in the twentieth century cannot be disconnected from what was happening in the empires, but to overstate this link would be to forget the African and Asian features of the colonial wars. While one should not go so far as to consider these conflicts as purely African or Asian phenomena, neither should one judge the events of the pre-1914 world only in terms of the First World War, or at least its European battlefields. And, after all, one of the most obvious parallels between colonial violence and the genocides of the twentieth century lies in the capacity of European societies to maintain a complex balance that made any war and any massacre a distant object until destruction could not be ignored anymore because it was at one’s front door. Analyses that automatically link intense colonial violence to national propensities for mass murder pose a further difficulty. They are based on culturalist readings that suggest that one or other colonial power was intrinsically prone to greater armed violence, which in turn was likely to produce new atrocities. Yet it was primarily

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the narratives of the great colonial empires about each other that gave rise to some of the clichés about their respective tendencies for violence. None of the colonising European powers shied away from taking radical advantage of their superior military capabilities. And all used racial distinctions to justify their behaviour. This does not, of course, prevent one from studying the crucial nuances that distinguished them. But with regard to the exercise of force in their imperial spheres, there were more similarities than differences amongst the French, Germans, Belgians, and British. Our point of entry into this debate is modest, since photography played only a peripheral role in the matter. It is a relevant indicator, however, in that it radically changed the way that armed conflicts were visualised at the turn of the twentieth century. Many of the characteristic dimensions of war were made visible by photography: the effects of artillery, the mass deaths, civilian casualties, and trench warfare that was not exactly heroic. The ‘new’ war was already palpable both in the great confrontations of the Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan War and in the coverage of colonial operations. The Balkan Wars (1912–13) were widely reported in the press and exposed by military attachés, without any lasting effect on the public debate.74 Industrial-scale devastation was not completely buried beneath presentations of military glory. And particularly within the armies themselves, photographic documentation was used in discourses that anticipated war in Europe. Shots of war were not mere illustrations; they were a commentary on war itself, on its advantages and its effectiveness. And although photography was only one medium amongst others, it was a legitimate one in the opinion of specialists on combat at the beginning of the twentieth century. The work of the military attaché Corvisart, who deposited albums full of direct photographs of the Russo-Japanese War at the École Militaire in Paris, is an obvious example,75 while British publications aimed at the military, such as the Journal of the Royal United Institution, made increasing use of photographic evidence from the 1900s onwards. Acceptance of this visual and written information, however, was still uneven and uncertain. Many French officers did not consider the ‘small wars’ to be useful references, despite the considerable efforts of their colonial colleagues to convince them. This disdain was less marked in Britain, where colonial wars on the Indian frontier provided a necessary baptism of fire. Debates on the links between small-scale extra-European conflicts and a major European war raged for decades, however; a sign of the importance of the subject for many military observers.76 On the whole, the conclusion was that there was a fundamental difference between the two types of operation. The French learnt few lessons from the interminable Boer War, unlike the British, who took advantage of it to radically reform their army. The physical distance of colonial combat was matched by a rhetoric that emphasised its temporal distance: the wars being waged in Africa and Asia belonged to the past, or rather, they were being fought against what Europeans considered to be the past.

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The discourses and visualisations of war at the beginning of the twentieth century did have some anticipatory effect on the future war, however. European soldiers and civilians were immersed together in imagining future battles. In simplistic terms, a possible European war was envisaged as a movement towards a brutal outburst that could decide everything in a moment.77 And the idea of a conflict resolved by a decisive move following slow logistical development was typical of the narrative of colonial wars. Moreover, in these wars, a tiny number of European soldiers died in combat compared to thousands of African or Asian casualties. In the eyes of the public, this situation may have become a yardstick, a measure of the ‘normal proportion in the wars we waged’.78 Perceptions of the approximate number of potential casualties in forecasts of a great European conflagration were perhaps not entirely unrelated to the narratives of conquest. It is difficult to say to what extent these collective constructions, combined with exoticised and euphemistic treatment of organised violence, may have influenced conceptions of what a ‘real’ war might look like. But the short-sightedness certainly seems to have been real. The pacifist Jean de Bloch tried to use photographs and light projections in his lectures and books to give an idea of the war that was to come.79 However, photographs of the world’s predicament were not enough to enable it to be understood in depth or to curb it. In 1909, Norman Angell published a book entitled Europe’s Optical Illusion in which he set out to demonstrate that a war with Germany was nigh-on impossible due to the costs it would entail. Although the book’s prophecy was flawed, perhaps its title was apt. The aim of this volume has been to review and compare three aspects that are different in theory, but deeply intertwined in practice: the visualisation of war in general, that of colonial conflicts in particular, and the photographic recording of modes of physical punishment applied outside imperial metropoles. Nowhere is this intertwining more visible than in the media constructions of the discourses on these kinds of violence. These three dimensions were entangled in the new forms of information made possible by the growing use of photography. The general depiction of war in the periodicals and publications of the time was not only of a comforting nature. And the horrors of conflict were not suddenly brought to light by the Great War. For the British, the Boer War was a crucial warning of what conflict in the twentieth century could mean. In France, although the most brutal aspects of the campaigns in Morocco were partly papered over, these campaigns also provided an opportunity to glimpse the new face of battle. The Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan War showed trench warfare causing considerable losses. The situation was similar with regard to the use of force in the colonies. It was not as easy as one might think to be completely ignorant of the outrages and difficulties of imperial expansion. The mid-1900s were a key moment in this respect. The convergence of a series of events, some of which were constructed by photography, revealed some

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of the excesses of European colonialism. While the initial scandals of the 1880s and 1890s had not profoundly damaged imperial edifices, their foundations were gradually being undermined. More virulent denunciations of excessive violence, pioneering in their use of photographs as evidence, existed alongside deliberately brutal depictions of French or British military campaigns aimed at both European adversaries and those resisting colonial advances. The invasion of media discourse by photography is one of the factors explaining the emergence of new thresholds of tolerance and new debates. French and British societies were seeking to strike a new balance through censorship, editorial practices, a new vocabulary for describing images, and concerns expressed over pictures of violence. They also took refuge in a culture of indifference and fleeting indignation. Powerful collective mechanisms designed to insulate metropolitan populations often pushed wars and disasters back to the distant places from which they had come. The situation was not stabilised before 1914. Ways of visualising war that had persisted throughout the 1900s and the early 1910s survived the first months of the conflict. But at the end of the immense collective ordeal of the First World War, the societies of the belligerent nations developed new relationships with mass violence and its visualisation that were quite different from those at the beginning of the century.

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Conclusion: ceci n’est pas une illustration It is sometimes quite difficult to see what a photograph actually shows. The picture can be so unusual that one can look at it for a while without understanding it. For many observers, the photograph by Raymonde Bonnetain on the cover of this book is such a picture. One has to take a second look in order to make sense of it. Raymonde Bonnetain was travelling through present-day Mali between 1894 and 1895 with her husband, Paul, who had been sent by the Ministry of Public Education in 1892 to study the indigenous populations. An amateur photographer, she took this bizarre photograph in a garden in Kayes (Figure 10.1).1 It shows her daughter, Renée, one of the first children of European origin to accompany colonisers to the region, sitting in the middle of a bed of skulls. The little girl is even holding a skull on her lap. The image is skilfully composed, and it clearly took some time to arrange the human remains. The child has put on her Sunday best and is wearing a hat for the photo session. A Western woman has taken the picture after giving instructions to her own daughter and surrounding her with skulls. Someone – probably Henry Sarrazin, a Veterinary Officer with an interest in anthropology2 – has collected these remains and given them to the photographer for this display. There is no reason to doubt that these skulls, transformed into decorative specimens, belonged to Samory Touré’s sofas (fighters) who resisted French encroachments. They were killed in the early 1890s in what is today the north of Guinea. Their individual names are lost, but Yves Person’s collection of interviews with surviving African participants in the conflict offers a rich local source on their histories.3 There are probably observers outside the frame. Servants may well be watching, aware of the desecration that is being enacted here on Africans. From these local angles, the image provides a disturbing illustration of the extreme imbalance that inhabits the colonial photographic archive. Initially incomprehensible, this isolated photograph on the cover of a book is interpreted according to the preconceptions of those who see it. For some, the picture may confirm the extreme violence of conquest and the brutality of the Europeans who had come to colonise Africa. It may even be taken as evidence of a specific French inclination toward imperial violence in comparison with a supposedly more benign

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Figure 10.1 Raymonde Bonnetain, ‘Mlle Renée Bonnetain (1894–5) jouant avec les crânes de sofas (soldats professionnels) de Samory, fusillés outre-Niger, après d’inutiles combats, pour la plus grande gloire – gloire & profit – de l’artillerie de marine’ (Mlle Renée Bonnetain [1894–5] playing with the skulls of Samory’s sofas [professional soldiers], shot in the outre-Niger region, after some pointless battles, for the greater glory – glory & profit – of the marine artillery), albumen paper, 16.5 cm × 11.2 cm.

British approach to colonial administration. The photographer and her model seem to display a staggering degree of inhumanity. The bodies of the colonised have been brutalised twice: once in their death and now in this staged scene. Some will even find that the use of this image on the cover of a book reinforces this degradation. Others, overly concerned not to exaggerate the degree of force employed in French imperial expansion, will see a one-off, the temporary delirium of one woman, scarcely representative of the colonial process as a whole. A thousand readings are possible on an initial view of the photograph. Faced with an image taken out of context, our first interpretations of this macabre reflection of a colonial conquest are generally determined by our own initial points of view. Photography of physical violence automatically pushes us to

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interpret the image in such a way as to restore order and reassure us. As we come to the end of this book, however, we must ask readers to suspend their judgement and to see the fundamental opacity of this particular photograph. As with any photograph, to discover what is really going on in this image one must first take the trouble to read the caption, in this case written on the back of the cardboard on which the albumen print is glued. Someone – doubtless Raymonde – has pencilled a long, ironic description. These skulls are those of Samory’s soldiers, who had been killed ‘for the greater glory – glory & profit – of the marine artillery’. They are the remains of enemies, executed at an unknown date and then collected by the French. The photographer is thus expressing a critical view of the military operations in the region of ‘French Sudan’. In her opinion, the war against Samory and the fresh campaigns ordered by Louis Archinard were unnecessarily aggressive. The local commanders pushed for conquest without always informing Paris. She disapproved of this and noted in a travel diary published on her return to France: ‘The honourable artillerymen, for their greater advancement in rank, are not at all anxious to finish things [...] so much the worse for the blood and money of the country!’4 The image and its caption are evidence of an acerbic critique of the strategic choices of those leading the operations. The image then takes on other possible meanings. The dissonance of this portrait is accentuated by the fact that Raymonde Bonnetain is a woman, one of the few female photographers encountered in this study. She was considered an intruder by Archinard, who endeavoured to discourage her from accompanying her husband. And, in fact, her view of the French in Africa contrasts with standard accounts of heroism. A priori a private photograph, the picture was one of a series published as illustrations in her travel diary. Bonnetain kept her camera with her at all times during her stay in Africa, because of her misgivings about the literary descriptions and overly imaginative engravings in magazines such as Le Tour du Monde. She also printed other photographs that toyed with the subversion of roles, one of which depicted her in military uniform amongst colonial officers.5 She was thus not hesitant to take advantage of her position to make fun of the artifice of conquest. The Bonnetains were not, however, pioneers of anti-colonialism. Raymonde freely expressed intense contempt for the local populations. In order to cheer up her daughter, Renée, she bought a ‘black doll, a living doll, a little slave that I will free’, whom she renamed Belvinda. In the face of slavery, she refused to resort to what she considered to be ‘humanitairomanie’ (a pointless mania for humanitarianism).6 The macabre arrangement of skulls for a posed photograph also speaks volumes about the respect she might have had for indigenous people. Raymonde Bonnetain’s photograph is indeed a contradiction. It is evidence of a time when broad support for the colonisation of Africa and a feeling of profound racial distance were mixed with a growing disgust with the violence of conquest, which undermined the moral

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justifications for expansion. Raymonde Bonnetain hated the practices of Archinard, whose downfall she and her husband contributed to hasten, as much as she despised what she perceived to be the backwardness of native cultures.7 Like some other pictures presented in this book, this photograph was not circulated at the time, except for a small circle of relations, including Marguerite Durand, an early French feminist who kept the print in her files. It is this book, amongst others, that gives it a new existence by showing it to the public 130 years later.8 Why choose such an enigmatic image for the cover of the book and return to it in the conclusion? Is it useful? Is it legitimate? These questions are of course rhetorical. This photograph documents the end of the twentieth century in the same way as tens of thousands of views of landscapes or ethnic types from the colonial period. Its power should not be overestimated. Long lost in a Parisian archive, it is anybody’s decision to turn away and make it invisible again, and therefore as powerless and unseen as it has been since the late nineteenth century. This is obviously not what this book advocates. Historians, whom Carlo Ginzburg describes as hunters of dissonant details and unusual prints, must try to interpret it in the same way as any other picture commented on in this book.9 Certainly its strangeness, linked to the violence that inhabits it in many respects, forestalls reflection for a time. But the intention here has been to both embrace and harness emotion to sustain a humanising analysis, in the face of photographs that, both now and in the past, often actually prevent us from really seeing anything because of what they reveal. The portrait of Renée Bonnetain does not speak for itself. It is not an illustration but part of an analysis that must encompass all aspects of the photograph, from the initial moment of its creation to its numerous circulations and reinventions. It is even necessary to go further when faced with a photograph of this nature. In order to overcome the shock of images of violence, we must constantly ‘show that we are showing’, as Georges Didi-Huberman suggests.10 This is why our conclusion begins with this mise en abyme. For there is an inevitable circularity in a book on photography that reproduces photographs. The selection of images, in this case inescapably shocking, inevitably undermines the discourse. The visual takes precedence over the written word. The exhibition of photographs, ‘more imperative than writing’, blinds one to the issues if one does not recognise the initial impact and seek to go beyond it.11 To do this, one must keep in mind that any work on, or with, photographs involves an inevitable montage of images. What if another picture were suddenly to be shown at the end of the series of brutal images in this book, such as this child’s face captured by Henri Gaden (Figure  10.2)? This is the same photographer who documented the ravages of the war against Samory in the early 1890s. He also made rare portraits of children, including this one, which appears almost too modern for one to believe that it dates from the

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Figure 10.2 Henri Gaden, ‘Portrait d’enfant’ (Portrait of a child), between 1900 and 1901, print on baryta paper, Zinder.

turn of the twentieth century. Gaden, an indigénophile, eventually refused to return to France at the end of his career and lived in Senegal with his African family until his death in 1939. The image, reflecting Gaden’s sincere affection for the people he encountered, could provide comfort at the end of this study. The tactic is well known in cinema, such as when a retreating dolly gently distances the viewer from a comforting picture at the end of a Hollywood movie. What I wish to stress here is that one should be aware of the montage involved in any work on photography and of the malleability of the perspective that one wishes to accentuate. At the end of the day, the observer cannot ignore how he or she is eventually the one instilling new meaning and value in these images. This work is radically selective. An archive has been created; a group of photographs condensed into a book. These are fragments. This approach may seem like that of the naturalist who wanders off to collect a few rare stones and insects, an attitude not alien to nineteenth-century culture and to photography in general, which tends to

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transform what it captures into a specimen. Should we be wary of this act of collection, which for Siegfried Kracauer is merely the assembly of ‘fragments around a void’?12 In short, can anything meaningful be said of the selection of images offered here? One could argue that these fragments have a metonymic effect. By showing only one striking photograph, there is a risk of turning it into a kind of summary of the period.13 One isolated image poses a problem because it can lead to one ignoring the entire set. References to these sets are therefore accessible in the notes of this study until such time as databases are able to map all the photographs produced. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these images were enmeshed in a web of circular discourses and archives. This was particularly true of the official writings that formed the basis of the ‘colonial’ library, with the majority of photographs incorporated within self-referential and self-confirming constructions. Archives, specifically archives of photographs, which could be produced in ever-larger series, tend to overwhelm exceptions. It is all too easy to say that anomalous pictures are unrepresentative. Here we have sought to show that it is possible to interrupt this kind of continuum. The fragment, the devastating image, can be seen as a flaw in the discourse, an unexpected object that can say more than hundreds of pages of official reports. François Brunet has highlighted this capacity of photography to pose a threat to established historical narratives.14 Photography has a power to destabilise, provided it is not seen as a simple illustration. It can help to turn the archive upside down. The reason for this lies in the ‘substrate’, the ‘margin of excess’ recorded by the lens, as Christopher Pinney notes.15 However manipulated and selected the photographed image may be, there is an excess that threatens to transform its meaning. It shows more than one would have wished. The images exhibited here are thus more than fragments. Often anomalous visions, they are by definition part of a complex network of texts and reactions that are much larger than themselves. Despite the censorship and filtration mechanisms that extreme photographs had to pass through between the 1890s and 1914, some images slipped through the net. Others, considered acceptable at the time, now reflect practices and perceptions that are no longer tolerable. All of them have the advantage of offering access to ‘recalcitrant events’,16 events that have left no written trace because they caused a kind of trauma that is impossible to put into words. To record the consequences of their acts, and sometimes to distance themselves from what they had done, some perpetrators of mass violence produced pictures that documented certain unspeakable memories. We have examined just some examples of the photographs that have this additional power. The history of photography explored in this work is far from complete; it is full of missed opportunities, discarded negatives, and lost prints. It would be wrong to end it without mentioning the images that are missing. Vast areas in the history of violence, as it is understood in this book and as it was practised and conceived of at

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the time, failed to be caught on camera. Slow violence, ‘ordinary violence’, structural violence, and the effect of famines all escaped the field officers’ lenses, and it is of course impossible to claim that this corpus provides a complete history.17 Although there are a few mentions of sexual violence, it remains largely absent from this book. And women in general may appear to be underrepresented in this selection of documents, even though they have played their part in this story. Whether they were photographers like Raymonde Bonnetain, veritable creators of albums, recipients of negatives to be sold to the press, or centre stage in the photographs – either as victims  or with weapons in their hands, another volume is needed to do justice to their  role.  Here we have primarily analysed images linked to constructions of masculinity. The other distortion that must be kept in mind is the effect of the medium on perceptions of time. Photography makes things look modern. That is why it was such a popular tool in the age of imperialism. Many of the photographers of the time were aware that they were putting down a marker, creating a before and after, potentially changing the perception of time. It would be easy to think, then, that some forms of violence or conflict began with their photographs. Since the colonial era was the first to be photographed, it may seem to represent a fundamental rupture. But while we have highlighted its particular features, we have also drawn attention to the essential continuities of certain types of conflict and violence over time in Africa and Asia. In the encounters that took place – facts of direct violence being an extreme form – the arrival of Western forces did not lead to the destruction of everything that had existed previously. Isabelle Surun underlined the risk of a similar distortion when the colonial mapping of Africa is considered. It was in fact part and parcel of much longer and deeper processes that unfolded well before nineteenth-century imperial expansion on the continent.18 The ability of the indigenous powers to appropriate the medium and use it to defend their own legitimacy illustrates the limits of the rupture caused by the coming of photography. There is a further way in which photographs may affect perceptions of time and confuse the author and the readers of a work like this: there is a risk that photographs appear to represent the present day. More than other kinds of traces of the past, photographs can alter the way one perceives the distance between oneself and the past. We all build up numerous visual references, icons, and motifs gleaned from reading and watching films. Depending on our own personal libraries, many of the images shown here will seem to make sense. One picture may seem to anticipate an image that would become famous much later, and another may even seem to share an aesthetic worthy of the conflicts of the 1960s. These intuitions are not necessarily misguided. It cannot be denied that the chronology of war photography needs to be reviewed, at least in part. Photojournalists

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in the 1930s were building on decades of trial and error. Several of the enduring genres and subgenres of images of organised violence were already consolidated at the beginning of the twentieth century. Capturing the fatal moment, the explosion, the clash of battle, and the extremities of violence had been a horizon of expectation for many late nineteenth-century photographers. Photographers had long awaited the conjunction of factors that would allow them to capture these objects. This was already happening in the 1880s, well before the First World War, which is regularly presented as the Western world’s entry into the ‘modern’ visual era of war. Many of those involved in the photographic and cinematic coverage of the First World War were veterans of the conflicts of the 1900s and 1910s. Marcelin Flandrin, whose work in Morocco we have mentioned, joined the photographic section of the French Army, created in 1915. Francis McCullagh, who had photographed the atrocities committed in Tripolitania in 1911, covered the beginning of the First World War on the Eastern Front. These biographical overlaps inevitably link visualisations of extra-European conflicts to those of the Great War. The pitfall of anachronism is particularly acute for the period under study, as it offers surprising similarities with our own experiences today. Let us briefly summarise the situation between the 1890s and 1914: within the space of a generation, there was an unprecedented growth in amateur and professional photography. This phenomenon was linked to the first internationalisation of the media. The development of photography took place over several years without being overly constrained by legal frameworks and strict practices. Lenses were focused on problematic objects, such as war and colonial conflicts. In amongst the mass, there were some extreme images that were likely to create trouble or even controversy if they emerged. Responses to these scandals included the manipulation of images and countermeasures by the media. Some accused others of spreading false news. Ultimately, the relative accessibility of photography empowered private narratives, a kind of democratisation of the archiving of the self. On reading this summary, one might be tempted to draw parallels with our age of social media and the incessant flow of viral images. This propensity is not illegitimate. Some periods seem more familiar depending on one’s own position in time and space. For a European observer today, the beginning of the twentieth century, with its profound changes in the media landscape and its relationship to war, consisting of numerous small conflicts that had remained at a comfortable distance for decades, may now seem closer and more intelligible than the two world wars. The similarities between different generations of photographers can conceal the depth of the changes, but they are marked nevertheless. In just a few years, photographs perceived as harmless by those who took them became evidence of villainy and prompted controversies on the management of empires and war. It is essential to underline this. The photography of an object as extreme as visible violence underwent

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an epigenetic form of adaptation. If we go back to the motif of the corpse-filled trench, institutionalised during the Boer War, for example, we can see how it was repeated in the decades that followed. There are ultimately only so many angles from which one can photograph people killed in this way. Despite the variety of perspectives and types of camera, all photographers are likely to produce an image reminiscent of the pioneering shot of Spion Kop. An illusion of permanence is then inescapable, as is the urge to tell oneself that at the end of the day wars have always been horrific and thousands of soldiers and anonymous civilians have always been subjected to a similar fate, regardless of the place and the century. Comparably a colonial massacre can seem like a harbinger of even greater mass violence. This proximity is illusory. Similar images, determined by broadly equivalent technical constraints, do not document the same things. Each generation and each era reinvents them in slightly different ways that carry new meanings. By focusing on this kind of image, this account inescapably places violence at the heart of the French and British experiences of empire. Through the examples of abuse, humiliation, and battles mentioned throughout these chapters, one can logically get the impression that a feature of colonial expansion between 1890 and 1914 was continuous and confused warfare. This impression does not arise in a vacuum. Colonial violence is an object in its own right and can elicit a wide range of reactions, from guilt, to denial, to martyrology. None of these positions are very helpful in improving our understanding of the processes at stake. Amongst them is the central fact that violence was intrinsic to the expansion of European power in the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, through the modest prism of photographs at least, it is not possible to conclude that it led in a linear fashion to the great global conflicts of the twentieth century. Too many actors on the ground believed these two experiences to obey radically different norms for us to overvalue the importance of the connections. Nor should one deny the actors of the time the ability to make their own assessment of what they were doing. It may be tempting to say that looking at historic pictures of violence with the humanitarian sentiments of the twenty-first century is anachronistic, since they belong to an earlier moral universe. Yet the circulation of certain pictures shows that while criticisms of war in general and of colonial violence in particular were not formulated in a structured way, shock and controversy still existed. If we underestimate the embryonic criticism of empires and wars, we may forget that the senior officers in the colonies did not act in an environment where everything was permitted. And they were fully aware of this. British censorship in South Africa and Louis Archinard’s discretion are just two examples of this reality. Thresholds of acceptability were redefined at the end of the nineteenth century, and even more so from the mid-1900s onwards, as reflected in ideas and words that in

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some cases we still use. Bearing witness to this is the emergence, via the medium of photography, of an initial visual memory of mass violence and atrocity at the beginning of the twentieth century. Some perpetrators chose to suppress the images at the time. It would be anachronistic to say that they were unaware of what they were doing. The moral environments within which they operated were not as radically different from ours as one may think. The circulation of particularly brutal photographs in mass publications testifies to the centrality of mass violence in conceptions of power relations between imperial powers and colonised populations at the beginning of the twentieth century. The concentrated and radical use of force, as well as its spectacular staging, was an essential initial phase at several points in the colonial expansion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, upon which other, less bloody, strategies were subsequently based. The ‘pacifications’ and other forms of colonial development that followed the phases of conquest were frequently based on the more or less distant rumours of brilliant victories by colonial armies and memorable repressions. And this is by no means an anachronistic analysis of the period. It was clearly theorised at the time.19 Photographic documentation bears only indirect witness to indigenous perceptions of these extremes of violence, however. Albeit scattered, there are traces of resistance, indifference, and reappropriation that force us to abandon the binary schemas that separate Western centres from the colonised ‘peripheries’. It is a common mistake to look at African and Asian worlds exclusively in terms of what was happening in the industrialised world. If this work demonstrates one thing, it is that photography enabled a multitude of modernities to be invented in which the West was not always placed at the centre. Rulers rethought their ceremonies, executioners transformed their practices, populations deployed new ways of recording and perceiving organised violence. And more often than not, the coming of photography did not fundamentally disturb some of the balances that long preceded colonisation. For it is not a picture of blind and generalised victimisation that emerges from these photographs. Even in the case of Bhambatha kaMancinza, who was killed in 1906, this went as far as denying the ‘evidence’ and refusing to accept his death despite the photograph. At every step, local regimes of memory defied and distorted colonial knowledge and records, rendering them inoperative. By comparing British and French photographic productions, this book has sought to gauge similarities and differences between the two empires, as well as tracing the circulation of various elements between them. On both sides of the Channel, there was a large body of literature at the time that aimed to highlight major distinctions between the two imperial approaches to the use of violence. Through case studies, we have seen how photography sheds light on differences between the France of the Third Republic and the parliamentary monarchy of the United Kingdom. The frameworks

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of debate, the words used, and the experiences of war from the 1870s onwards differ considerably. The role of the army, and in particular its imperial and colonial personnel, was not the same. Operations in ‘distant’ lands launched the careers of many British officers, but for the French staff they were generally considered secondary campaigns, sometimes almost detrimental to preparation for a ‘real’ conflict. This influenced the way in which information was constructed in the imperial metropoles, where it was also received in rather different political landscapes. There were also differences in the way the information was circulated in the media. The British press adopted photography more rapidly and had a denser network of correspondents than the French periodicals. On the whole, many of the new forms of war reporting developed in the British world first. And yet, the most striking feature to emerge from this connected history is how much the realities of colonial violence resembled each other across the two empires. Both French and British authorities were regularly confronted with scandals and revelations of excesses, atrocities, and shameful brutality. Almost all colonial military expeditions were photographed from the 1890s onwards, and the images were circulated in the illustrated press. As many of the case studies here have shown, these were not necessarily pictures of exotic and peaceful scenes. The display of martyrised or wounded bodies often triggered outrage, a sign of photography’s ability to shape a nascent visual public debate. Indignation was expressed more actively and in a more organised fashion than one might expect: some of the words and tools of today’s anti-colonialism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the criticisms, when not exploited by one current of colonial reform against another, nonetheless seemed to be drowned out by ignorance or indifference. By virtue of their status as colonial powers, Britain and France’s histories of violence against colonised peoples shared more similarities than differences. This remains true today, when public narratives in both countries – now former world powers involved in a constellation of conflicts – favour sanitised perspectives on these contested pasts. On both sides, many have seen, but few have looked closely. At a time when the limited visibility of ‘distant’ wars recently waged by the two states is deliberately controlled, this observation may be of some value.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). 2 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 3 Hubert Lyautey, Du Rôle colonial de l’armée (Paris: Armand Colin, 1900), 4. 4 On the concept of ‘visual economies’, see the introduction to Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 5 Richard Drayton, among others, has emphasised how crucial it is to consider violence as one of the key points of entry into imperial and colonial history, ‘Where Does the World Historian Write from? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism’, Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 3 (2011), 671–85. 6 The phrase was coined by Romain Bertrand, ‘Norbert Elias et la question des violences impériales’, Vingtieme siecle. Revue d’histoire 106, no. 2 (7 April 2010), 127–40. 7 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2008). 8 Benedetta Guerzoni, Cancellare un popolo: Immagini e documenti del genocidio Armeno (Milano: Mimesis, 2013). 9 Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums. The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 13. 10 On this notion, see Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 11 See, for instance, Martin Thomas and Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882–1956, first edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 12 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997), 735–62. 13 For an example of a largely illustrative use of problematic colonial photographs, see Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boetsch, Christelle Taraud, and Dominic Richard David, eds, Sexe, Race & Colonies (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2018).

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14 See the January 1936 special issue of the French satirical magazine Crapouillot for instance. 15 Allan Sekula, ‘Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capitalism’, in Patricia Holland, Jo Spence, and Simon Watney, eds, Photography/Politics–Two, (London: Comedia, 1986), 154.

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1 Repulsion, erasure, and loss of contrast 1 See ‘Photos-chocs’, in Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 105–07. 2 Jane Kilby, ‘The Visual Fix: The Seductive Beauty of Images of Violence’, European Journal of Social Theory 16, no. 3 (2013), 326–41. 3 Georges Didi-Huberman, Images In Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Gérard Wajcman, ‘De la croyance photographique’, Les Temps modernes 56, no. 613 (2001), 46–83. 4 Paul Bijl, Emerging Memory: Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). 5 Roland Barthes speaks of ‘traumatic photography’ in Roland Barthes, ‘Le Message photographique’, Communications 1 (1961), 127–38; Susie Linfield talks of ‘photographs of violence and suffering’, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), preface; John Taylor uses the phrase ‘body horror’, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War, The Critical Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 6 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). 7 See, in particular, Mark Reinhardt, ‘Painful Photographs: from the Ethics of Spectatorship to Visual Politics’, in Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjørn Grønstad, eds, Ethics and Images of Pain (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 33–55 and Geoffrey Batchen and Jay Prosser, eds, Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Books, 2012). 8 Jane Lydon, ‘“Behold the Tears”: Photography as Colonial Witness’, History of Photography 34, no. 3 (July 2010), 234–50. As much as possible, potential descendants have been traced and contacted in good faith in the making of this book. The French edition of the book was also a stepping stone to engage in further conversations. 9 Clare Harris, The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 131–33. 10 For an illustration of the violent power of words, see Wolfgang Sofsky, Violence: Terrorism, Genocide, War (London: Granta, 2003). 11 Jacqueline Denise Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 12 Ernst Friedrich, Krieg Dem Kriege (Berlin: Freie Jugend, 1924); Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, chapter 1.

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13 On how emotions and rationality are not epistemologically incompatible, see Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics Civil Disobedience on Violence Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 161. 14 On these erasures, see Nancy Rushohora and Eliane Kurmann, ‘Look at Majimaji! A Plea for Historical Photographs in Tanzania’, African Studies 77, no. 1 (2018), 87–104. 15 On this idea, see Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago, IL: University of

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Chicago Press, 2011). 16 Kylie Thomas, ‘Wounding Apertures: Violence, Affect and Photography during and after Apartheid’, Kronos, no. 38 (2012), 204–18. 17 Percy Coriat, Sudan, 1928–1931 (Pitts River Museum, 2007.34.2). The document was analysed in ‘The Colonial Album’ exhibition organised in 2012 in Oxford. 18 Petra Bopp and Sandra Starke, eds, Fremde im Visier: Fotoalben aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2009), ill. 164. 19 See Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993). 20 Hubert Lyautey’s albums are kept in the French National Archives, La Courneuve (475AP/315-320). 21 British Library, Curzon Collection (India Office Records and Private Papers), photo 430. 22 Joanna Sassoon, ‘Photographic Meaning in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, LASIE: Library Automated Systems Information Exchange, December 1998, 5–15. 23 This is the case, for example, of the Service Historique de la Défense in Vincennes (France). 24 Annette Becker and Octave Debary, eds, Montrer les violences extrêmes: Théoriser, créer, historiciser, muséographier (Paris: Creaphis Éditions, 2012), 9. 25 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 26 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 17–18: ‘[…] colonial archives […] are cultural artifacts, built on institutional structures that erased certain kinds of knowledge, secreted some, and valorised others and one cannot simply do colonial history.’ 27 Mandy Banton, ‘Destroy? ‘Migrate’? Conceal? British Strategies for the Disposal of Sensitive Records of Colonial Administrations at Independence’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 2 (2012): 321–35; David M. Anderson, ‘Guilty Secrets: Deceit, Denial, and the Discovery of Kenya’s ‘Migrated Archive’, History Workshop Journal 80, no. 1 (October 2015), 142–60. 28 An example is to be found at the Museum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris. It keeps a report by Victor Augagneur on the 1904–05 revolt in Madagascar (Ms 3035 and Ms

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3036, archives of the General Government, Madagascar, Révolte du Sud-Est, 1904–1905, TIII, p. 16). The papers were concealed by Raymond Decary, a French administrator who made sure some of the most sensitive archives of the French would not be seized by British troops when they landed in Madagascar in September 1942. He writes: ‘it is not necessary for the British to see [these archives] […] extracts from some pages could easily be interpreted against us and used as negative propaganda.’ Augagneur, who published a scathing

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criticism of Gallieni’s rule, compiled testimonies on the rapes and summary executions committed by French soldiers. He later published a book entitled Erreurs et brutalités coloniales (Paris: Montaigne, 1927) based on this information. 29 Alexis Adandé, ‘Histoire du Dahomey/Bénin à travers les archives,’ accessed June 2018, www.dan.ilemi.net/IMG/pdf/histoire_du_dahomey_a_travers_les_archives.pdf. 30 Elizabeth Edwards and Matt Mead, ‘Absent Histories and Absent Images: Photographs, Museums and the Colonial Past’, Museum and Society 11, no. 1 (2013), 19–38. 31 On photographs of violence during the First World War, see Joëlle Beurier, Photographier la Grande guerre: France-Allemagne, l’héroïsme et la violence dans les magazines (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016). 32 Daily Telegraph & Courier, 4 March 1898, 4. 33 Edward M. Spiers, The Scottish Soldier and Empire, 1854–1902 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 140–41. 34 Frank Tennyson Neely, Fighting in the Philippines: Authentic Original Photographs (Chicago, IL: Tennyson Neely Company, 1899), 43, 83. 35 Frederick Cooper, ‘What Is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian’s Perspective’, African Affairs 100, no. 399 (2001), 189–213. 36 J. Carter Wood, ‘A Useful Savagery: The Invention of Violence in Nineteenth-Century England’, Journal of Victorian Culture 9, no. 1 (2004), 22–42. 37 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York, NY: Viking, 2011). 38 Sigmund Freud, Totem Und Tabu (Vienna: Heller, 1913). 39 Paul Louis, Le Colonialisme (Paris: Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, 1905), 35–40. 40 This minimalist definition is inspired by Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York, NY: Random House, 1978), 176. 41 Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1990), 49. 42 For an approach to conflict photography as expression of an institutional and cultural context, see Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1997). 43 Rumpf Papers, Victor Forbin photographic archives, Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes (henceforth SHD), SHD/GR, 2 K 247.

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44 On the development of these conventions and on regularities in the visualisations of violence, see the introduction to Jürgen Martschukat and Silvan Niedermeier, eds, Violence and Visibility in Modern History, first edition (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 45 The Graphic, 9 February 1895, 26. 46 Émile Reibell, Le Commandant Lamy, d’après sa correspondance et ses souvenirs de cam-

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pagne (1858–1900) (Paris: Hachette, 1903), 570. 47 For a lengthier discussion on the words colonialism and imperialism, see Andrew S. Thompson, ‘The Language of Imperialism and the Meanings of Empire: Imperial Discourse in British Politics, 1895-1914’, Journal of British Studies 36, no. 2 (1997), 147–77; Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘Empire and International Relations in Victorian Political Thought,’ The Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (2006), 281–98. On the necessarily unsatisfactory nature of purely ‘colonial’ approach to warfare in particular, see Thoralf Klein and Frank Schumacher, eds, Kolonialkriege: Militärische Gewalt Im Zeichen Des Imperialismus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006). 48 The phrase enjoyed a great popularity from the 1880s. 49 Simon James Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 2003), chapter 5. 50 Continuities between military action and police structures are observed throughout the French empire, see for instance Jean-Pierre Bat, ed., Maintenir l’ordre colonial: Afrique et Madagascar (XIXe– XXe siècles) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012). However, armed conflict was only one of many modalities of colonial expansion, see Isabelle Surun, ‘Appropriations coloniales et résistances autochtones. Entre guerre de conquête, alliance et négociation’, in Pierre Singaravélou, ed., Les Empires coloniaux (XIXe–XXe siècle) (Paris: Points, 2013), 37–75. 51 See, for instance, the handwritten notebook of an anonymous soldier who fought in Tonkin in 1908–09 entitled ‘Petite guerre coloniale’ (small colonial war) held by Centre d’Histoire et d’Etudes des Troupes d’Outre-Mer [Centre for the History and Study of Overseas Troops] (CHETOM), Fréjus, France, ref. 18 H 191. 52 Charles Edward Callwell, Petites guerres, leurs principes et leur exécution, trans. Albert Septans (Paris: Charles-Lavauzelle, 1899). 53 SHD, GR 7 N 1220, memo no. 154, 24 November 1902. 54 Trutz von Trotha, ‘“The Fellows Can Just Starve”: On Wars of “Pacification” in the African Colonies of Imperial Germany and the Concept of “Total War”’, in Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster, eds, Anticipating Total War, first edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 415–36; Kim A Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal 85 (2018), 217–37.

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55 Joseph Gallieni’s library was bequeathed to the Société de Géographie. The inventory, now held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (n°SG MS 5502) shows his taste for works in English on the British Empire. 56 This was underlined in Frederick Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History’, The American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994), 1516–45. 57 James P. Daughton, ‘Quotidian Violence in the French Empire, 1890–1940’, in Louise

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Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, eds, The Cambridge World History of Violence, first edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 468–89. 58 Frantz Fanon, among others, has played a key role in the definition of the concept, see Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: Maspéro, 1961). However, European publications clearly identified the category at the turn of the twentieth century. For a recent synthesis, see Dierk Walter and Peter Lewis, Colonial Violence: European Empires and the Use of Force (Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017). 59 Aristide Delannoy, ‘Le Général d’Amade’, Les Hommes du jour 12 (1908), 1. 60 Anon., ‘The German elections’, The Scotsman, 24 January 1907: ‘The Belgians had been repressed, but only in the case the humbler employees, not with the higher officials. However, colonial abuses had occurred in the services of all countries, not excepting Great Britain.’ See also Christina Twomey, ‘Atrocity Narratives and Inter-Imperial Rivalry: Britain, Germany and the Treatment of “Native Races”, 1904–1939’, in Tom Crook, Rebecca Gill, and Bertrand Taithe, eds, Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, c.  1830–2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011), 201–25. 61 The same applies to exploration as shown by Isabelle Surun, ‘L’exploration de l’Afrique au xixe siècle: une histoire pré coloniale au regard des postcolonial studies’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, no. 32 (2006), 11–17.

2 Photography as power: force and counterforce 1 Karen Strassler, Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 20. 2 Thousands of prints from this collection are held by the Archives de la France d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France (ANOM 44PA, online at http://anom.archivesnationales.cul ture.gouv.fr/ulysse/). 3 Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October 39 (1986), 16. 4 John W. Kaye and Meadows Taylor, eds, The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress, of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan, 8 vols (London: India Museum, 1868). 5 Eleanor M. Hight, ed., Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)Ing Race and Place (London: Routledge, 2002), introduction.

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6 Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London: British Library, 2008), 41–49. The project was also emulated by the Dutch Empire, see Fenneke Sysling, Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016). 7 Joseph Ralph Boyle offered the whole series to Roland Bonaparte in 1883 (Société de géographie, Paris, SGE 4-SG BON-1949 (1-8)).

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8 Jean-Louis Lanessan (de), Principes de colonisation (Paris: Alcan, 1897). 9 Joseph Chailley-Bert, La Colonisation de l’Indo-Chine: L’expérience Anglaise (Paris: Armand Colin, 1892). 10 The People of India won a prize at the International Congress of Geographical Sciences held in Paris in August 1875 (Compte rendu des séances, vol. 2, 1880), 331. 11 Emmanuelle Sibeud, ‘A Useless Colonial Science?: Practicing Anthropology in the French Colonial Empire, circa 1880–1960’, Current Anthropology 53, no. S5 (2012), 83–94. 12 Andrew Zimmerman, ‘“What Do You Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?” Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 2 (2006), 419–61. 13 See, for instance, the following scene described in Herbert Risley, The People of India (Thacker: Calcutta, 1908), plate 19, ‘Jiang Girls’: ‘Peppe had immense difficulty in including these wild timid creatures to pose before him, and it was not without many a tear that they resigned themselves to the ordeal. It is right to mention that they were brought in from the forest, where they had been searching for their daily bread which chiefly consists of forest produce, and their leaves were not as neatly arranged as they would have been if the girls had had time to make a fresh toilette.’ 14 Imperial College London Archives, Thomas H. Huxley papers, ‘Natives from India, China, Ceylon, and the Malayan Peninsula’, A.10.2. 15 His collection of plates and prints are now held by the Société de Géographie (Paris) and the Archives Nationales de l’Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence) (FR ANOM 8Fi104/1-2, 35Fi48, 35Fi47, 4Fi753). 16 The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) holds one of Bertillon’s crime scene albums. Its webpage on the document offers an introduction to his photography (www.metmu seum.org/art/collection/search/284718). 17 Edward Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints (London: Routledge, 1900). 18 The Marchand mission became one of the great epics of French colonial history. Setting out from the Congo in 1896, Jean-Baptiste Marchand and his expedition reached Fashoda in the Sudan in 1898 after having travelled 5,500 kilometres across Africa. Their confrontation there with the British Army provoked a major diplomatic crisis. 19 Félix Roquain, ‘La Mission Marchand’, Questions Diplomatiques et Coloniales: Revue de Politique Extérieure 7 (1899), 80. 20 Paul Virilio, Guerre et cinéma, vol. 1, 2 vols (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1984).

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21 Samuel Bourne, ‘Photography in the East’, British Journal of Photography 10, no. 193 (1863), 268–70. 22 Edouard Hocquard, Une Campagne au Tonkin (Paris: Hachette, 1892), 469. 23 Henry Savage Landor, In the Forbidden Land (London: Harper, 1899), 134–36. 24 Ferdinand-Joseph Harfeld, Opinions Chinoises sur les barbares d’Occident (Brussels: Dewit, 1909), 63.

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25 On this image, see Simeon Koole, ‘Photography as Event: Power, the Kodak Camera, and Territoriality in Early Twentieth-Century Tibet’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 2 (2017), 310–45. 26 Zoe Strother, ‘A Photograph Steals the Soul: The History of an Idea’, in John Peffer and Elisabeth L. Cameron, eds, Portraiture and Photography in Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 177–212. The words used to refer to photography in local languages may have led to imaginative interpretations. In the Pende language, spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, photography can be called kivule, which also means shadow and ghost. 27 Anon., ‘The One-eyed Black Box’, Photographic Times 34, 1902, 186. 28 Allan Sekula, ‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning’, in Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan Education UK, 1982), 84–109. 29 Edmond Doutté, En Tribu: Missions au Maroc (Paris: Geuthner, 1914), 55. 30 Henry Yule, A Narrative of the Mission Sent by the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava in 1855 (London: Smith, 1858), 89. 31 Yule, A Narrative of the Mission. 32 Paul Stuart Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin, eds, Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 12. 33 Benjamin Simpson took photographs of the region in the early 1860s, but whole areas remained without direct contact with the British until the late nineteenth century, see Michael Aram Tarr and Stuart H. Blackburn, Through the Eye of Time: Photographs of Arunachal Pradesh, 1859–2006: Tribal Cultures in the Eastern Himalayas, Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library, v. 16/1 (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 34 Elara Bertho, ‘Photographies de Samori Touré: de la carte postale coloniale aux pochettes de vinyles: Le devenir d’une icône,’ Cahiers d’études africaines, no. 230 (2018), 301–22. 35 Alexandre L. d’Albéca, La France au Dahomey (Paris: Hachette, 1895), 194. 36 François Michel and Jacques Serre, La Campagne du Dahomey, 1893–1894: La réddition de Béhanzin: correspondance d’un commissaire des colonies (Paris: Harmattan, 2001), 112. 37 André Salles, Martinique. Béhanzin au fort Tartenson (décembre 1894), glass plate negative, Société de géographie (BNF, France, SG XGC-123). A digitised version is available online at gallica.bnf.fr.

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38 Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes, eds, Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 245–46. The book mentions the possibility that the evolution of the bas-reliefs in the royal palaces towards more naturalism was the consequence of the adoption of European pictorial codes, at least in part. King Ghézo displayed a portrait of Napoleon III in his residence as well as engravings depicting the Crimean War.

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39 Anon., ‘Au Dahomey’, Le Matin, 24 August 1894, 1: ‘Les douaniers surveillaient les croisements de routes et les bords des lagunes pour empêcher l’étranger […] de se servir d’instruments de précision tels que sextant, boussole ou appareils photographiques.’ 40 On this concept, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and also Fabio Viti, ‘Sur quelques images de chefs baoulé. La photographie en guerre (Côte d’Ivoire, 1893-1910)’, Cahiers d’études africaines, no. 230 (2018), 349–71. 41 Margery Perham, Ten Africans (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 22. 42 Heike Behrend, ‘Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa’, Journal of Religion in Africa 33, no. 2 (2003), 129–45. 43 Letter from Coillard to Boegner, 19 April 1886, Archives du Service protestant de mission (Paris). 44 Gwyn Prins, ‘The Battle for Control of the Camera in Late Nineteenth Century Western Zambia’, African Affairs 89, no. 354 (1990), 96–105. 45 For a fuller account on colonial portraiture, see Simon Dell, The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary: Photography between France and Africa, 1900–1939 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020). 46 Erika Nimis, Photographes d’Afrique de l’Ouest: L’expérience Yoruba (Paris: Ibadan: Karthala; IFRA–Ibadan, 2005). 47 Olubukola A. Gbadegesin, ‘“Photographer Unknown”: Neils Walwin Holm and the (Ir) Retrievable Lives of African Photographers’, History of Photography 38, no. 1 (2014), 21–39. 48 For instance, Toffa attached his photographic portrait to an invitation sent in 1893 to Lieutenant Jeannot (Hausa riflemen), see CHETOM 18 H 100, Fonds Petit, Souvenirs du Dahomey (1893–1895), vol.1. 49 Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 246. 50 Hocquard, Une Campagne au Tonkin, 522. 51 Calixte Savaron, Mes Souvenirs: À Madagascar avant et après la Conquête (1885–1898) (Paris: Pitot, 1932), 78–79. 52 Sandria B. Freitag, ‘The Visual Turn: Approaching South Asia across the Disciplines’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 37, no. 3 (2014), 398–409. 53 India was a site of experimentation as far as controlling the press and information in general were concerned. The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 was a pioneering piece of legislation

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which aimed at censoring vernacular publications, drawing on earlier experiences in Ireland where the Catholic and nationalist press were also put under surveillance. This legislation was reinforced over the years by the Newspaper (Incitement) Act of 1908, and then by the Press Bill of 1910, following the nationalist events of 1908. 54 Christopher Pinney, ‘The Prosthetic Eye: Photography as Cure and Poison’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14, no. s1 (2008), 33–46.

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55 Wu Hung, Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (London: Reaktion Books, 2016). 56 Jérôme Bourgon, ‘Le dernier lingchi: faits, représentations, événement’, Études chinoises 25, no. 1 (2006), 113–71. 57 Robert Caix, ‘L’affaire de Nan-Tchang’, Bulletin du comité de l’Asie Française 64 (July 1906), 2–3. 58 Jinghua Ribao, 29 March 1906. 59 This episode echoes Lu Xun’s experience. A writer and essayist, Lu Xun studied medicine in Japan during the Russo-Japanese War where he was regularly shown glass plates of the conflict. One of them displayed the execution of a Chinese man by the Japanese. Lu Xun noticed the indifference of his Chinese comrades to the image. He described years later how this moment triggered his desire to write with a view to change perspectives, see Dewei Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in TwentiethCentury China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 10. 60 Matthew Brower, ‘Trophy Shots: Early North American Photographs of Nonhuman Animals and the Display of Masculine Prowess’, Society & Animals 13, no. 1 (2005), 13–32. 61 Marc Michel, ‘Deux Lettres de Marchand à Liotard’, Outre-Mers. Revue d’histoire, no. 186 (1965), 41–91. 62 Frank Crozier, Five Years Hard (London: J. Cape, 1932), 167. The book, written long after the fact, drew heavy criticism from Crozier’s former colleagues, including Frederick Lugard and Charles Foulkes. According to them, the atrocities mentioned by Crozier were exaggerated or isolated events (Ken Gillings, ‘The Death of Bambatha Zondi: A Recent Discovery,’ Military History Journal 12, no. 4 (2002), 133–37). However, Crozier published some of the photographs as evidence, including one showing a battlefield with an officer visibly killing wounded enemies (Crozier, ibid., 156). Some of these photographs were compiled in an album now held in the Colonial Office photographic collection (National Archives, Kew, CO 1069/58). 63 The photograph was reproduced in the Transvaal Leader Weekly (30 June 1906). Walter Bosman, aide-de-camp to Colonel McKenzie who commanded the Zululand Field Force, provided the following justifications: ‘It was not possible to convey the body to the camp owing to decomposition and to the almost inaccessible place in which it lay. Accordingly, the head was severed from the trunk and conveyed to the camp, where it was recognised as Bambata’s by all those who had been acquainted with him and who were available. The exhibition of the head (to be seen by official permit only) undoubtedly had the effect of

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dispelling a superstition, deep rooted in the mind of the natives, that Bambata was invulnerable,’ in The Natal Rebellion of 1906 (London: Longmans, 1907), 107. 64 Hansard, Commons, 16 July 1906, vol. 160, c1360. 65 The photograph was printed in a local newspaper, the Nongqai, in 1925, see Gillings, ‘The Death of Bambatha Zondi’. 66 C. T. Binns, Dinuzulu: The Death of the House of Shaka (London: Longmans, 1968), 279.

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67 Ellen Takata, ‘Icons in Disguise: Vietnamese Resistance Figures Hoàng Hoa Thám and Ba Biểu in French Colonial Images and Related Texts, 1909–2007’, Trans Asia Photography Review 3, no. 1 (2012). 68 It was published in the South West Africa Annual by Sidney Bristow, a soldier involved in the campaign against Mandume in 1968, when the South West Africa People’s Organisation had been fighting against the occupation of Namibia by South African troops for two years. Its publication at the time was intended to show the majority of the Ovambos in this movement as unrepentant rebels. 69 Margot Timm, ‘Transpositions: The Reinterpretation of Colonial Photographs of the Kwanyama King Madume YaNdemufayo in the Art of John Ndevasia Muafangejo’, in Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester, and Patricia Hayes, eds, The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town, South Africa: Athens: University of Cape Town Press; Ohio University Press, 1999). 70 Jane Lydon, ed., Calling the Shots: Aboriginal Photographies (Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2014), 2. 71 Album of photographs of the 14th Brigade (Lincoln Regiment), Wellcome Library, London, RAMC/1612, 13 (available in digital form: https://urlz.fr/bZQQ).

3 Depth of field: darkrooms and conflicts prior to the 1890s 1 Mimi Sheller, ‘Hidden Textures of Race and Historical Memory: The Rediscovery of Photographs Relating to Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865’, The Princeton University Library Chronicle 72, no. 2 (2011), 533–67. 2 Coll., History of the 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles, vol. 1 (Aldershot: Gale & Polden, 1930), 81. 3 A working hypothesis could be that the photographer is a man called W. L. Canney who took several other photographs of the expedition now in a private collection. 4 It was an RML 7 Pounder Mk IV ‘Steel Gun’ with a muzzle velocity of approximately 300 metres/second, see Coll., Historical Record of N° 4 (Hazara) Mountain Battery Punjab Frontier Force (Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1888), 46–47. 5 A digitised reproduction of the photograph is available at http://arks.princeton.edu/ ark:/88435/736664580. 6 John Harris, ‘Topography and Memory: Felice Beato’s Photographs of India, 1858–1859’, in Vidya Dehejia, ed., India Through the Lens: Photography 1840–1911 (Washington, WS:

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Smithsonian Institution, 2002). Digitised reproductions of Beato’s photographs are available at https://library.brown.edu/collections/askb/beato.php. 7 Anon., ‘Amputation, Cerro Gordo’, 1847, daguerreotype kept at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City. See also Olivier Debroise, Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico, first edition (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 166.

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8 A. M. Lang diaries, 21 June 1858 (British Library, India Office Archives, Add. MS 43825, f. 36): ‘Beato commenced a photograph of [the hanging men] the minute they were dead, running up to the Gallows & steadying them by holding their feet!’ 9 David Harris and Felice Beato, Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato’s Photographs of China (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1999), 23. 10 See for instance Jorge Lewinski, The Camera at War: A History of War Photography from 1848 to the Present Day (London: W. H. Allen, 1978). 11 Ernest Lacan, Esquisses photographiques (Paris: Grassart, 1856), 160. 12 Walter Benjamin, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 527. 13 James Robertson, ‘Sevastopol before the Last Bombardment’, 1855, salt print, Royal Collection (RCIN 2500687). Online version at www.rct.uk. 14 James Robertson, ‘Breach in the Redan’, 1855, salt print, 20.5 cm × 29.1 cm, Royal Collection Trust. 15 Anon., ‘Photography in the Camp’, The Photographic News, 20 May 1858. 16 Oliver Wendel Holmes mentions the stereoview in this famous article, ‘Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture: With a Stereoscopic Trip Across the Atlantic’, The Atlantic Monthly 8, no. 45 (1861), 27. 17 Henry Dunant, Un Souvenir, Solférino (Genève: Fick, 1861). On his ‘photographic’ depictions of the horrors of war, see Sonya de Laat, ‘The Camera and the Red Cross: “Lamentable Pictures” and Conflict Photography Bring into Focus an International Movement, 1855–1865,’ International Review of the Red Cross 102, no. 913 (2020), 417–43. 18 Anon., ‘Photography and War’, The Photographic News, 2 June 1859. 19 For more on the photographic coverage of this conflict, see Anthony Petiteau, ‘1859: La Guerre d’Italie Photographiée’, in Napoléon III et l’Italie. Naissance d’une Nation, 1848–1870, ed. Sylvie Le Ray-Burimi (Paris: Chaudun, 2012), 139. 20 The Photographic News, 10 September 1858, 5. 21 Ray McKenzie, ‘“The Laboratory of Mankind”: John McCosh and the Beginnings of Photography in British India’, History of Photography 11, no. 2 (1987), 109–18. 22 Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Consider the Best Mode of Reorganizing the System for Training Officers and for the Scientific Corps, House of Commons Sessional Papers (London, 1857): 267. See also ‘Photography: instruction in, given to military cadets’, 1857, British Library, India Office Records (IOR/Z/E/4/29/P336).

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23 David F. Rennie, The British Arms in North China and Japan (London: Murray, 1864), 112. 24 Robert Swinhoe, Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860 (London: Smith, Elder, 1861). 25 John Falconer, ‘John Ashton Papillon: An Amateur Photographer in China 1858–1860’, The Photographic Collector 3, no. 3 (1982), 346–362. His album is now held by the Royal Engineers Museum in Gillingham (Photographs taken in China during the years 1858,

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59 & 60 by Lieut. J.A. Papillon, R.E., 6/1). 26 Beato played a significant individual role in this process. He covered the Korean Campaign of 1871 and then went to Suakin (Sudan) where he attempted to bring back photographs of the 1884–85 British Expedition. He had a close relationship with Garnet Joseph Wolseley as well as with many other prominent figures of the British military in the late nineteenth century. 27 Part of his work is held by the National Army Museum (NAM 1966-11-30). Some of his photographs are available online at https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1966-11-30-7. See Ray Desmond, Victorian India in Focus: A Selection of Early Photographs from the Collection in the India Office Library and Records (London: HMSO, 1982), 65. The photographic expertise of officers of the India Army has to be underlined. The curriculum at Thomason College in Roorkee included training in photography as early as the 1860s. Publications linked to amateur societies, such as the Journal of the Bengal Photographic Society, also served to structure the field and share experiences. 28 George Augustus Sala, My Diary in America in the Midst of War (Tinsley: London, 1865), 330. 29 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 2 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1870), 280. 30 La Lumière, 30 June 1864, 48. 31 Javier López, Montón de cadáveres paraguayos la Guerra contra el Paraguay, 1866, published by Bate studio, a digitised version is available online at bibliotecadigital.bibna.gub. uy:8080/jspui/. 32 A. P. Bates, ‘William J. Harding: Pioneer Photographer of Wanganui’, New Zealand Camera 18, no. 2 (n.d.), 39–41. See also William James Harding (studio), Maori Prisoners from Weraroa Pa at Rutland Stockade, Queen’s Park, Whanganui, 1865, National Library of New Zealand, 1/1-000045-G. There is a similar view in the Pitts River Museum collection (Oxford). A digitised version is available online at www.prm.ox.ac.uk/photograph-collections. 33 See, for instance, anon., ‘Maori Prisoners, Members of the Hauhau Church Captured at Wereroa Pa, Waitotara, South Taranaki District, 1866’, National Library of New Zealand, 1/1-017875-G. 34 Anon., ‘Captain Thomas Porter with Pro-Government Maori Troops Outside a Stockade, 1870’, Hocken Library, University of Otago, Box-248-001b/S12-108b. 35 Bertrand Taithe, ‘La Famine de 1866–1868: Anatomie d’une Catastrophe et Construction Médiatique d’un Événement,’ Revue d’histoire Du XIXe Siècle, no. 41 (2010), 113–27.

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36 Auguste Raffet’s work is an obvious precedent, see his engravings on siege of Antwerp (1832) and on the conquest of Algeria. 37 Anon., ‘Photograph in War’, The Illustrated Photographer, 10 September 1869, 429. 38 The albums of the Count of Paris include Crimean views by Robertson and Beato (Bibliothèque nationale de France, RESERVE VH- 315 (1-4) FOL). 39 Louis-Cyrus Macaire, ‘Note relative à la création d’une section de photographie au ministère

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d’État’, 4 February 1855 (French National Archives, F21 562). 40 James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire Photography and the Visualisation of the British Empire (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1997), 77–78; John Falconer, ‘Photography and the Royal Engineers’, Photographic Collector 23, no. 3 (1981), 48–49; see also Henry Schaw, ‘Notes on Photography’, Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers, New Series 9 (1860), 108–28 and William de Wiveleslie Abney, Instructions in Photography (Chatham: S.M.E., 1871) who taught photography at the Royal School of Military Engineering (Chatham) in the 1870s. 41 Francis B. Head, The Royal Engineer (London: Murray, 1869), 220 sq. 42 R. E. Donnelly, ‘Photography and Its Application to Military Purposes’, Journal of the RUSI 5, no. 16 (1861), 1–18; Ferdinand de Lacombe, ‘De l’usage de la photographie dans l’armée’, Le Spectateur militaire 35 (1861), 116–21 and Lieutenant-colonel Berthault, Notes sur l’importance militaire des principales découvertes modernes, June 1861 (SHD, 38 SHAT, 1M 1984). 43 Le Figaro, 7 April 1861, 3. 44 André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri, L’Art de La photographie (Paris: self-published 1862), 454. 45 Ministère de la Guerre, Annuaire militaire de l’empire français pour l’année 1863 (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1863); Jean-Marie Linsolas, ‘La photographie et la guerre: un miroir du vrai?,’ in Christophe Prochasson, ed., L’Espace de l’histoire (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), chapter 4. 46 Mathilde Meyer-Pajou, ‘La pratique photographique au ministère de la Guerre 1850–1900’, in Martin Galinier and Michel Cadé, eds, Images de guerre, guerre des images, paix en images (Presses universitaires de Perpignan, 2012), 189–214. 47 Anon., ‘Echoes of the Month’, The Photographic News, vol. 10, 1866, 363. 48 Anon., ‘Photography Applied to Military Purposes’, The Photographic News 24, 1859, 184. 49 M. A. Jouart, Application de la photographie aux levés militaires (Paris: Dumaine, 1869). 50 The Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem systematically mapped the holy city from 1864 to 1865. James McDonald took dozens of photographs of the city during the operations, see Joan M. Schwartz, James R. Ryan, and Katherine S. Howe, eds, ‘Mapping a Sacred Geography: Photographic Surveys by the Royal Engineers in the Holy Land’, in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London; New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 226–42. 51 Ryan, Picturing Empire Photography.

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52 Henry Baden Pritchard, ‘Photography in Connection with the Abyssinian Expedition’, British Journal of Photography 15 (1868), 601–03. Pritchard was a key figure in the development of photography in Britain. He was Honorary Secretary of the Photographic Society of Great Britain for a few years. 53 These views can be found in many albums held in regimental museums in Britain; see, for instance, Lieutenant Colonel E. Bray’s album held by the King’s Own Royal Regiment

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Museum, Lancaster. 54 Roger Acton, The Abyssinian Expedition and the Life and Reign of King Theodore (London: Office of The Illustrated London News, 1868). 55 Alfred Hannot, La Photographie dans les armées (Bruxelles: Muquardt, 1876), 70–71. Hannot was the head of the Photographic Department of the Belgian War Office in the 1870s. 56 Louis Armand d'Heudecourt’s letter to Niel, 8 June 1868, see Berhanou Abebe, ‘L’expédition anglaise d’Abyssinie (1868) d’après les documents inédits de Louis Armand d’Heudecourt’, Annales d’Ethiopie 18, no. 1 (2002), 73–142. 57 Georg Eckert, Das Zerstörte Strassburg. Studien Nach Der Natur in Photographieen, Bassermann (Heidelberg: 1871, n.d.). 58 Anon., ‘Vues du théâtre de la guerre 1870–1871 d’après nature’, published by Friedrich Bruckmann in Berlin and Munich (Musée de l’armée, Paris, Inv. 2015.23.1). See also the photographs taken by Charles Winter for General Werder, who commanded the German troops, now held in the Musée historique de Strasbourg (n.20574, 20575, 20567 and 20572). Lord Wharncliffe compiled an album of views of the main battlefields. It is now held at the Harry Ransom Center (Austin, Texas, PH-00529). 59 Gustave Doré, ‘L’Enigme’, 1871, oil on canvas, 130 cm × 195.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. On the photographic coverage of the Paris Commune, see Bertrand Tillier, La Commune de Paris, révolution sans images? Politique et représentations dans la France républicaine (1871–1914) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004). 60 A digitised version of this iconic photograph is available online (https://cutt.ly/0triAc7). 61 An exceptional series of postcards supposedly documenting the Battle of Sedan (September 1870) circulated well after the war. They show a Prussian advance against French positions in La Moncelle (see the postcard entitled ‘Bataille de Sedan – Un épisode du combat de La Moncelle lors de la bataille de Sedan le 1er septembre 1870’, no.4, and the one entitled ‘Bataille de Sedan – Combat de la briqueterie où le Maréchal Mac-Mahon fut blessé, 1er septembre 1870’). These postcards were published by L. Dufour in Reims. The rumour was that that a Zouave veteran (light infantry regiments) with a passion for photography took them under fire (L’Illustration, no. 4557 (1930), 21). Military painter Alphonse de Neuville might have been in possession of the original prints. They are probably staged. As the author of the L’Illustration article notes, the shadows indicate roughly that the photographs were taken early in the afternoon. The battle was then over. The Prussian command probably thought it useful to produce these images as potential propaganda.

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62 Floridor Dumas, De la Photographie et de ses applications aux besoins de l’armée (Paris: Réunion des Officiers, 1872). 63 See the engraving entitled ‘Evacuation by the natives of the burnt-out Kabyle village of TiziOuzu, from a photograph by M. Portier’, L’Illustration (5 August 1871), 81. Claudius Portier apparently worked for L’Illustration on a regular basis. The newspaper also published his views of the damage caused by the 1867 earthquake in Blida (19 January 1867), 40.

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64 Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, De La Colonisation chez les peuples modernes (Paris: Guillaumin, 1874). 65 André Gunthert, ‘Photographie et temporalité. histoire culturelle du temps de pose’, Images Re-Vues, no. Hors-série 1 (1 June 2008). 66 A set of ten photographs made for and by the War Office Photographic Department contains is related to the Second Ashanti War (National Army Museum, London, NAM 198702-25). See also Paul Jenkins, ‘A Provisional Survey of Nineteenth Century Photography on the Gold Coast and in Ashanti: Focused on the Basel Mission Collection, and with Special Reference to the Images Linked to the War of 1874’, Journal des Africanistes, no. 75–2 (2005), 103. 67 Wellcome Library, ‘Album of Photographs of the Peshawar Valley Field Force in the Afghan War, 1878–1879’, RAMC/540. 68 James Rattray, Scenery, Inhabitants and Costumes of Afghanistan (London: Hering & Remington, 1847). 69 See the so-called ‘Green Album’, Royal Engineers Museum, Library and Archive (No. J1 6/256); E. T. Thackeray, ‘Memorandum on Operations of the Bengal Sappers and Miners at Gandamak & Jagdalak, Afghanistan, in November and December 1879’, Royal Engineers Institute Occasional Papers 6 (1881), paper 8; Views of Kabul and Environs, from Photographs Taken by the Photograph School of the Corps of Bengal Sappers & Miners (London: Royal Engineer Institute 1881). 70 Elisée Reclus, Nouvelle géographie universelle: la terre et les hommes, vol. 9 (Paris: Hachette, 1884), 45, 57, 79. 71 James Lloyd, ‘The Reading of an Ultimatum to Zulu Chiefs on Natal Side of Drift, Lower Tugela, 11 December 1878’, print from a glass plate negative, 1878, National Army Museum, NAM 1964-09-103-1. 72 George Ferneyhough, ‘The Burning of Ulundi, 4 July 1879’, print from a glass negative, National Army Museum, NAM. 1954-06-5-2-20. 73 National Army Museum, London (NAM 1954-06-5-2). 74 Sophie Saint-Amans, ‘Stratigraphie d’un fonds: histoire des archives Poinssot. I,’ in Monique Dondin-Payre Houcine Jaïdi, Sophie Saint-Amans and Meriem Sebaï, eds, Autour du fonds Poinssot (Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2017). 75 See L’Illustration, 8 September 1881, 4. 76 ‘La photographie militaire en Angleterre’, L’Amateur photographe, n°5 (1 January 1889), 195.

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77 David Bruce, view n°14 from his album entitled ‘Ubombo, Zululand, 1894–1896’, Wellcome Library, London, RAMC 595. 78 William Lockhart, The Gilgit Mission, 1885–1886 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889), 362: ‘Surgeon Giles, as well as having medical charge of the party, was to be naturalist and  photographer. Most of his negatives were lost on the return journey: […] but a large proportion of the plates were either broken or destroyed by water on their way to

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India.’ 79 O. E. Wheeler, ‘Notes on Military Photography’, Journal of the RUSI of India, no. 188 (n.d.), 323–28. 80 Hocquard, Une Campagne au Tonkin, 88. 81 Édouard Hocquard, ‘Kỳ Lừa, vue prise du fort des Rochers’, woodburytype, 16.2 cm × 21.6 cm, ANOM 56Fi/B48. 82 Édouard Hocquard, ‘Route de Lạng Sơn. Champ de bataille du 12 février 1885’, February 1885, woodburytype, 16.1 cm × 21.6 cm (ANOM 56Fi/B52). 83 Gilbert Gimon, ‘Édouard Hocquard reporter Au Tonkin,’ Prestige de La Photographie 7 (1979), 81. 84 L’Univers illustré, 24 March 1884, 196. Engraving no. 2 is from Hocquard’s photograph entitled ‘Porte Sud de la citadelle de Sontay’, circa 16 December 1883 (ANOM 49Fi3/45). 85 Théophile Pennequin (1849–1916) was a general. He was one of the architects of the ‘pacification’ of Tonkin. He regularly appointed photographers to take pictures of his expeditions on a semi-official basis. 86 It was studied in depth by Zahid R. Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), chapter 1. 87 It is possible that Hooper was able to meet Felice Beato in Mandalay where the photographer ended his career and died in 1908. Bristol Archives holds a series of photographs taken by Beato in February 1891 during a campaign against one of the last bastions of resistance to British rule. It shows a staged assault and prisoners (BECM, 2003/001). One of the officers commanding the troops was none other than Garnet Joseph Wolseley (1833–1913) who knew Beato from his youth. Wolseley fought in the Crimean War and in many subsequent campaigns. An accurate description of these networks can only be suggested here. 88 Anon., ‘Burmah’, The Times, 21 January 1886. 89 Hansard, vol. 302, 22 January 1886, cc182–4. 90 Terence R. Blackburn, Executions by the Half-Dozen: The Pacification of Burma (New Delhi: A.P.H. Pub. Corp, 2008), 33. 91 Willoughby Wallace Hooper, Transcript of Court of Inquiry Proceedings, British Library, India Office Records, IOR/L/MIL/3/960. See also, Anon., ‘The charges against colonel Hooper’, The Times, 8 September 1886, 3. One of the issues raised during the trial was the jurisdictional standing of Burma.

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92 Geary Grattan, Burma: After the Conquest (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1886), 243. 93 William W. Hooper, Lantern Readings Illustrative of the Burmah Expeditionary Force and Manners & Customs of the Burmese (London: Lugard, 1887). 94 William W. Hooper, Mindlah After its Capture, 1885, British Library, India Office Records, a digitised version is available online at https://cutt.ly/ztrcWY6.

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95 Chailley-Bert, La Colonisation de l’Indo-Chine, 191. 96 National Gallery of Australia, Burma Album, NGA 2006.955.1. 97 See anon., ‘Corporal Punishment Being Administered to Captured Dacoits in the Provost Marshal’s headquarters at the South Gate of Mandalay, 1886’, Imperial War Museum, HU 65530. The photograph might well have been taken by Hooper himself.

4 Conflicts in the lens: from the 1890s to the First World War 1 François Robichon, La Peinture militaire française de 1871 à 1914 (Boulogne-Billancourt: Giovanangeli, 1998), no. 64, 93. 2 Setting off in a column towards Chad in 1898, Voulet and his acolyte Julien Chanoine massacred and starved thousands of civilians on their way, killed the colonel who had come to relieve them of their duties, and were eventually shot by their own mutinous riflemen. 3 Abbat Papers (private collection), Rapport d’une reconnaissance dans le Boussangsé, 10 July 1897. 4 Abbat Papers (private collection), letter to his family sent from Segu, 10 June 1894. 5 Abbat Papers (private collection), letter to his family sent from Segu, 31 October 1894. 6 The Abbat Papers were digitised and made available by Catherine Abbat (https://cutt. ly/ ftrnXR6). 7 For similar examples of photographic recording of British punitive expeditions, see Donald MacAlister’s snapshots. He took part in a column against the Aro Confederacy (eastern Nigeria) in 1901 (British Museum, Af, B58.29 and Af, B58.6). See also Charles Edwin Collard’s photographs of the campaigns waged against the Kavirondo (present-day Uganda) group between 1898 and 1900, (Royal Commonwealth Society, Y3045A-B). A digitised version is available online (https://cutt.ly/ntrn1Jx). 8 Marcel Monnier, ‘La mission du Capitaine Binger’, Le Monde illustré, 26 November 1892, 319. 9 Photo-Revue, 1908, xxv. 10 J. L. Bunel, Notes pratiques sur la photographie dans les pays chauds (Paris: Mendel, 1906); Edgard Imbert and Maurice Poincet, La Photographie en France et dans les pays chauds (Toulon: Liautaud, 1902); Alexandre Le Mée, La Photographie dans la navigation et aux colonies (Paris: Charles Mendel, 1902).

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11 La Vie coloniale, 1 September 1912, 1. 12 Some officers of the Grenadier Guards, who took part in the 1882 intervention in Egypt, the 1898 campaign against the Mahdists in Sudan, and the Boer War, seem to have developed a specific photographic culture, see for instance F. J. Davies, ‘The Employment of Photography in Reconnaissance’, Royal United Services Institution. Journal 36, no. 170 (1892), 447–61.

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13 Elliott S. Parker, ‘John Thomson, 1837–1921 RGS Instructor in Photography’, The Geographical Journal 144, no. 3 (1978), 463. 14 Some of the ledgers of the expeditions supported by the Geographical Society are available in the Auguste Terrier collection (Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris). They generally mention specific lines for photography (see for example ‘Devis des dépenses de la mission Maistre’, Ms 5892, document 54 ter). 15 SHD/GR, 7 Ye 1368. 16 Bulletin de la société photographique du nord de la France, February 1891, 31. 17 Charles Foulkes, ‘Photography in Military Reconnaissance’, The Windsor Magazine 25, no. 147 (n.d.), 513–16. 18 The Photographic Times, vol. 20, 1890, 198 19 See A. M. Mantell’s article on military photography in The Photographic News, 19 April 1889. It was reviewed by E. Egasse in L'Amateur photographe (1 January 1889), 194–200: a sign of the shared interest on both sides in the reciprocal uses of photography in the army. 20 H. C. Shelley, ‘War and the Camera with a Telephoto Lens’, Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin 31 (1900), 323–25. It seems that Dallmeyer, which was producing high quality optics at the time, supplied telephoto lenses to H. C. Shelley and Reinhold Thiele for testing under real conditions. Other officers were supplied with lenses by the same firm. This unprecedented sponsorship is significant for the consolidation of the field of professional war photography. 21 Thierry Gervais, ‘Un basculement du regard. Les débuts de la photographie aérienne 1855–1914’, Études photographiques, no. 9 (2001), 88–108; Coll., La Chine à terre et en ballon (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1902). 22 Roger Aubry, ‘La Photographie militaire en campagne’, Armée et marine, 4 August 1901, 541–43; Lt. Flament, ‘En Campagne avec les Boërs: les fortifications passagères’, Armée et marine, 23 December 1900, 1098–1101. 23 See some of the reports held by the Service historique de la Défense (e.g., 9M23 or 1K7261) that are illustrated with snapshots. 24 See, for example, the photograph of the Italian military attaché in Omdurman (www.iwm. org.uk/collections/item/object/205024115). 25 As shown by the combat photographs of the Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898) attached to Lieutenant de Vial’s report on Cuba (June 1896, SHD, GR 7N 1213).

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26 Photographs taken by Albert d’Amade as military attaché to the United Kingdom (ECPAD, D137-13-156). Military attachés played an essential role in the circulation of knowledge and practices. 27 Collective, Sud-Oranais. Album de la 1re Colonne du Haut-Guir, Mars–avril–mai 1908 (Algiers: Geiser, 1908). 28 Frederic Villiers, Villiers: His Five Decades of Adventure (London: Harper & Brothers,

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1920), 134. 29 It was reproduced in France by Le Monde illustré (8 February 1895), 88. It might be the work of Kamei Koreaki, one of the great figures in late nineteenth-century Japanese photography, who was covering the war as a quasi-photojournalist. 30 Olivier Cosson, Préparer La Grande Guerre: L’armée Française et La Guerre RussoJaponaise, 1899–1914 (Paris: Indes savantes, 2013), 336. 31 L’Illustration, 27 June 1908, 439. 32 Jean du Taillis, Le Nouveau Maroc (Paris: Société d’éditions géographiques, maritimes et coloniales, 1923). 33 Robert de La Sizeranne, ‘L’esthétique des batailles’, Revue des deux mondes, no. 130 (1895), 597–627. 34 This is a pun on one of the best-known verses from Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, written during the Crimean War: ‘Cannon to right of them, / Cannon to left of them.’ 35 Anon., ‘Notes’, The Photographic News, 12 December 1890, 966. 36 Edward M. Spiers, ed., Sudan: The Reconquest Reappraised (London; Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998), 104. Francis Gregson’s correspondence is held at the Sudan Archive at Durham University. He mentions photography in several letters and how he gave albums compiling his work in the Sudan to several indidivuals (SAD.226/3/18-30, SAD 226/4/42). 37 Stephen Bottomore, ‘Frederic Villiers: War Correspondent’, in Wheeler W. Dixon, ed., Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900–1992: Essays and Interviews (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994). 38 The Photographic News, 5 August 1898, 510. 39 Tim R. Moreman, The Army in India and the Development of Frontier Warfare, 1849–1947 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1998), 80–81. 40 Black and White, 7 May 1898, 2. 41 Anon., ‘The Everlasting Now’, The Photographic News 33, 4 January 1889, 1. 42 James L. Hevia, ‘The Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer-Era China (1900–1901), Making Civilization’, in Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds, Empires of Vision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 283–314. 43 Frederick Lugard, The Rise of Our East African Empire, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1893), 683.

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44 Pamela Welch, ‘Church and Settler in Colonial Zimbabwe: A Study in the History of the Anglican Diocese of Mashonaland/Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1925’, Studies of Religion in Africa, 34 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 9 sq. 45 Henry Francis Hoste, ‘Forty Years Ago: Rhodesia in 1890’, circa 1930, unpublished ms (National Archives of Zimbabwe, HO/14/1/1): ‘Fry, who was our official photographer, got his camera going, to the great alarm of the natives, who watched him in fear and

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trembling, expecting an explosion every moment.’ 46 An album of 150 photographs by Ellerton Fry is held by the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas (PH-00879). 47 The Graphic, 15 November 1890, 4. 48 ANOM 60 APC 3, Private Archives, General Louis Archinard. See also Archinard’s albums held by the Musée des Troupes de Marine in Fréjus (France). 49 His negatives and photographic prints are held in the Archives du Quai-Branly, (PV0003866). 50 Louis-Gustave Binger, Du Niger jusqu’au Golfe de Guinée (Paris: Hachette, 1892). 51 Alexandre L. d’Albéca, ‘Au Dahomey’, Le Tour du monde, 25 August 1894, 126. 52 Henri Gaden, a ‘Soudanais’ – the name given to French colonial soldiers involved in the conquest of West Africa in the late nineteenth century  – also sent his photographs to L'Illustration on the occasion of Samory’s defeat in 1898 (ANOM, APC I Dossier XVI, letter from Gaden to his father, 21 October 1898). 53 An engraving by Abel Tinayre depicting the same scene was published by Le Monde illustré on 12 November 1892, 8. 54 Lamy to Poizat, Paris, 22 November 1894, in Emile Rebeill, ed., Le Commandant Lamy d’après sa correspondance et ses souvenirs de campagne (1858–1900) (Paris: Hachette, 1903), 263. 55 Le Monde illustré, 1 June 1895 and 10 August 1895. 56 Hocquard’s book on Madagascar – Edouard Hocquard, L’Expédition de Madagascar, journal de campagne (Paris: Hachette, 1897) – is illustrated with more than 150 photographs, some of which were also reproduced on of projection plates now held in the ANOM without the correct attribution (see FR ANOM 137Fi). 57 Part of these series are kept in the Archives de la France d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence (ANOM 44PA) and are accessible online (https://urlz.fr/c1aS). A complete series is also held kept in the Foiben-Taosarintanin’i Madagasikara in Antananarivo (Madagascar). 58 Joseph Gallieni, La Pacification de Madagascar (Paris: Chapelot, 1900); Joseph Gallieni, Neuf ans à Madagascar (Paris: Hachette, 1908). 59 Gallieni to Jules Charles Roux, 15 March 1903, in Joseph Gallieni, Lettres de Madagascar, 1896–1905 (Paris: Société d’éditions géographiques, maritimes et coloniales, 1928), 89. 60 Bennet Burleigh, The Khartoum Campaign (London: Chapman & Hall, 1899), 107. 61 E. D. Loch’s diary, National Army Museum (NAM 9412-247-53), 2 September 1898.

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62 Paul Fox, ‘An Unprecedented Wartime Practice: Kodaking the Egyptian Sudan’, Media, War & Conflict 11, no. 3 (2018), 309–35. 63 George Warrington Steevens in the Saturday Review, 7 September 1898, 383. For a similar event in its articulation between a decisive battle and its photographic coverage, see Marie Emmeran de Traversay’s album on the bombardment of the Figuig oasis (Algerian– Moroccan border) in June 1903 (BNF, OZ-481-8).

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64 WSC to Colonel Ian Hamilton (Ian Hamilton Papers), 16 September 1898, cited in Randolph S. Churchill and Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill (Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press, 2006), 403: ‘I pulled into a trot and rode up to individuals firing my pistols in their faces and killing several – 3 for certain – 2 doubtful – one very doubtful.’ 65 Anon., ‘The Camera in the Battlefield’, British Journal of Photography, 31 March 1899, 203. 66 Anon., ‘The Camera in the Battlefield’: ‘It is not improbable that combats in the near future will be depicted with the cinematograph in conjunction with the phonograph or some similar instrument, thus enabling all the sights and sounds of war to be witnessed and heard at entertainments at home.’ 67 French Diplomatic Archives, La Courneuve, France, 27 F 14 (15). 68 See, in particular, Berny Sèbe, Heroic Imperialists in Africa the Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 69 See, for instance, James Ricalton, China through the Stereoscope (New York, NY: Underwood and Underwood, 1901) and Arthur Smith, China in Convulsion, 2 volumes (New York, NY: Fleming H. Revell, 1901). 70 The war was also filmed; see, for instance, Battle of Spion Kop: Ambulance Corps Crossing the Tugela River (www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1943). 71 Ernest W. Smith, special correspondent for the Morning Leader, always carried a portable Kodak camera with him (see Smith Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TXRC94-A22). 72 ‘Report on press censorship rendered to the field marshal commanding-in-chief by the press censor army headquarters Pretoria, July 1900’, National Archives of the UK (Kew), WO 108/262. 73 Stephen Badsey, ‘War Correspondents in the Boer War’, in John Gooch, ed., The Boer War: Direction, Experience, and Image (London: Cass, 2000), 187–202. Alfred Milner papers (Bodleian Library, MS. Milner dep.228) contains several documents which demonstrate the concern of this high-ranking administrator for these issues. See also Papers Relating to the Administration of Martial Law in South Africa (London: Harrison, 1902), 59: ‘Any unauthorized person who makes a sketch, photograph or model of […] any battery, filed-work or fortification […] will be arrested and severely dealt with.’ 74 John Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England: 1894–1901. 1: 1894–1896, Revised and enlarged edition (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), 87. 75 Anon., ‘The man who had gone to the front, an interview with Reinhold Thiele, immediately before his sailing as graphic war photographer’, Lincolnshire Chronicle, 1 December

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1899: 3. The phrase ‘war photography’ became more and more commonplace during the second Boer War (see, for instance, anon., ‘The perils of war photography’, Northern Whig County, 26 February 1900, 1; anon., ‘The furies of war photography’, Northern Whig County, 28 February 1900, 1; and Charles Urban, ‘Adventures of “living picture” seekers’, The Tatler, 18 July 1906). 76 Peter Harrington, ‘Pictorial Journalism in the Boer War’, in John Gooch, ed., The Boer

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War: Direction, Experience, and Image (London: Cass, 2000), 235. 77 Black and White Budget, 29 September 1900, 831. 78 Albert de La Pradelle, ‘Le Correspondant de guerre’, La Revue Politique et Littéraire, 2 December 1905, 728–29. 79 An anonymous album containing the complete set of views taken by J. E. M. during the Battle of Pieters is held by the University of KwZulu-Natal (call number: d02). The photograph can be found in other albums, for instance in the papers of George Lytton Crossman (1877–1947), Liddell Hart Military Archives (London, Crossman 1/Album 1). 80 See, for instance, Emanoel Lee, To the Bitter End: A Photographic History of the Boer War, 1899–1902 (New York, NY: Viking, 1985). 81 On the widespread uses of the camera in early twentieth-century Britain, see, in particular, Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918, Objects/Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 82 On Coutts, see Karel Schoeman, Witnesses to War: Personal Documents of the Anglo-Boer War from the Collections of the South African Library (Human & Rousseau: Cape Town, 1998), 45. 83 Lisle March Phillipps, With Rimington in the Boer War (London: Arnold, 1901), 202. 84 See, for instance, the anonymous photograph taken within two hundred metres of a Boer position and published by the Black and White Budget, 21 April 1900, 73. 85 On French military attachés and their views of the Boer war, see Roger Duval, Au Transvaal et dans le Sud-Africain avec les attachés militaires (Paris: Delagrave, 1902). 86 Thierry Gervais, ‘“Le plus grand des photographes de guerre.” Jimmy Hare, photoreporter au tournant du XIXe et du XXe siècle’, Études photographiques, no. 26 (2010), 10–49. 87 John W. Steinberg, ‘Was the Russo-Japanese War World War Zero?’, The Russian Review 67, no. 1 (2008), 1–7; Philip Towle, ‘British War Correspondents And The War’, in Rotem Kowner, ed., Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5: Volume 1: Centennial Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 319–31; Frederic A. Scharf, Anne Nishimura Morse, and Sebastian Dobson, eds, A Much Recorded War: The Russo-Japanese War in History and Imagery, 1st edition (Boston, MA: MFA Publications, 2005). 88 Ogawa Kazumasa, The Russo-Japanese War: Taken by the Photographic Department of the Imperial Headquarters (Tokyo: K. Ogawa, 1904).

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89 Marco Gerbig-Fabel, ‘Photographic Artefacts of War 1904–1905: The Russo-Japanese War as Transnational Media Event’, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire 15, no. 6 (2008), 629–42. 90 Ludovic Naudeau, ‘La Chute de Moukden’, Le Journal, 4 August 1905; Jean Rodes, ‘Après La Bataille’, Le Matin, 27 April 1905. 91 Anon., ‘The Horrors of War: Russian Victims of a Skirmish with General Kuroki’, The

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Graphic, 3 September 1904, 4. 92 James H. Hare, A Photographic Record of the Russo-Japanese War (New York, NY: Collier, 1905). Available online at https://digital.wolfsonian.org/WOLF033808/00001/1j. 93 Collier’s Weekly, 25 February 1905, 18. 94 Massimo Zaccaria, ‘The Other Shots. Photography and the Turco-Italian War, 1911–1912’, in Modern and Contemporary Libya: Sources and Historiographies, ed. Anna Baldinetti (Rome: Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2003), 63–89. 95 Anon., ‘Public Hanging of 14 Men During Italian-Turkish War, 1911’, black and white footage, British Pathé and Reuters Collection, 2468.12. 96 Giorgio Bertellini, ‘Dramatizing the Italian-Turkish War (1911–12): Reports of Atrocities, Newsreels, and Epic Films in Italy and the USA’, Early Popular Visual Culture 14, no. 2 (2016), 131–54. 97 Georges Rémond, Avec les Vaincus (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1913), 62. 98 Herbert Baldwin, A War Photographer in Thrace (London: Urwin, 1913). 99 See the French Navy official reports on the massacres (SHD, SS ED 100). 100 L’Illustration, 15 May 1909, 337. 101 Nadine Akhund-Lange, ‘Une enquête internationale dans les Balkans. La Commission Carnegie, de l’expédition au rapport de 1913–1914’, in Catherine Horel, ed., Les Guerres Balkaniques (1912–1913) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014). 102 Coll., Rapport de la commission Carnegie, dotation pour la paix internationale. Enquête dans les Balkans, rapport présenté aux directeurs de la dotation par les membres de la commission d’enquête (Paris: Crès, 1914); George Lorand, Les Deux guerres et les atrocités Balkanique d’après le rapport de La commission Carnegie (Brussels: Rossel, 1914). 103 Anon., Les Cruautés Bulgares en Macédoine Orientale et en Thrace, 1912–1913: Faits, rapports, documents, témoignages officiels (Athens: Sakellarios, 1914). Atrocities were also committed by the Greeks against the Bulgarians, but they received more limited coverage; see Lubiomir Miletich, Atrocités Grecques en Macédoine pendant la guerre Gréco-Bulgare (Sofia: Imprimerie de l’état, 1911). 104 The Bystander, 6 November 1912, 293; Illustrated London News, 9 August 1913, 12. 105 Anon., ‘Answers to Correspondants’, The Photographic News, 30 November 1893, 768; Anon., ‘Photography on the Warpath’, The Photographic News, 25 August 1893, 593–94. 106 Francis Trevelyan Miller, ed., The Photographic History of the Civil War, vol. 1 (New York, NY: The Review of Reviews, 1911), 24.

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107 On this clash of historicities and temporalities in the nineteenth century, see Christophe Charle, La Discordance des temps: une brève histoire de la modernité, le temps des idées (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011).

5 The public and the private: regimes of visibility

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1 Timothy Parsons, Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), 51. 2 Mary Clarke, The Plumtree Papers: A History of Bulalima-Mangwe and Life in Rhodesia up to 1922 (Bulawayo, Zimbabwe: Plumtree Foundation, 1983), 11–12. 3 Frank Sykes, With Plumer in Matabeleland (London: Constable, 1897), 79. 4 Anon., ‘A Summons to Surrender’, The African Review, 15 August 1896, 384. 5 Anon., ‘Camera Record from South Africa’, Black and White, 5 September 1896, 300. 6 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Collection ‘Critique’ (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986). 7 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Foucault – Les formations historiques’, La Voix de Gilles Deleuze en ligne (blog), accessed 4 January 2021, www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_article=415 part 3 of 4; Martschukat and Niedermeier, Violence and Visibility in Modern History, introduction. 8 Kenton Scott Storey, ‘“What Will They Say in England?”: Violence, Anxiety, and the Press in Nineteenth Century New Zealand and Vancouver Island’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 20, no. 2 (2010), 28–59. 9 Many thanks to Tendai Mukunyadze and Pathisa Nyathi (Amagugu International Heritage Centre, Npuma, Zimbabwe) for their invaluable help in identifying Langabi. 10 William Rausch, The Defence of the Prison, silver print, 1896. The photograph is part of a set sold by Dominic Winter Auctions in Cirencester, England, in 2017. The collection was owned by descendants of British settlers established in Rhodesia. 11 William Harvey, On the South African Frontier (New York, NY: Scribner, 1899), 248–49. 12 Anon. ‘The Hanging of Spies  – Few or Many  – Is a Necessary Act of War’, St James’s Gazette, 26 July 1897. 13 Paul Walters and Jeremy Fogg, ‘The Short Sorry Tale of Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland and Its Frontispiece’, English Studies in Africa 53, no. 2 (2010), 86–101. 14 Kirkintilloch Herald County, 29 July 1896, 8. 15 Robert H. MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester; New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1994), 141, n. 33. 16 Olive Schreiner corresponded with William T. Stead, who authored several anti-lynching reports in the 1880s. She also entertained links with the Anti-Lynching Committee, which was set up in Britain in 1894. 17 Anon., ‘Hanging of Spies at Suluvaito [Sic]’, Hartlepool Northern Daily, 19 March 1897.

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18 Labouchère addressed the issue in June 1896 (House of Commons, Debates, 18 June 1896, vol. 41, cc1326–7 1326). Several articles published at the time quoted an anonymous letter from a soldier who witnessed the hangings and denounced them. See Anon., ‘South African Horrors’, Northern Echo, 18 June 1896. 19 Sykes, With Plumer in Matabeleland, 27–28. 20 Susie Protschky, ‘Tea Cups, Cameras and Family Life: Picturing Domesticity in Elite

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European and Javanese Family Photographs from the Netherlands Indies, c. 1900–42’, History of Photography 36, no. 1 (2012), 44–65. 21 Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds, Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, Material Cultures (London: Routledge, 2004), introduction. 22 More than twenty of his albums are held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (no. OZ 463-8 to OZ 484-8). 23 Charles Mangin’s albums have been digitised and are available at www.gallica.fr. 24 Lyautey Papers, Archives Nationales (Pierrefitte, France), extract from a diary entitled ‘Voyage dans le Sud de Madagascar juin–juillet–août 1901’ (no. 475 AP/41), 202. 25 Anon. (Goi?), ‘Souvenirs de Chine, 1902’, photographic album, Musée de l’Armée (Paris, France), Inv. 2017.7.1. 26 Frank G. Smith papers, National Maritime Museum (London), SMH-1 to 4. 27 The gruesome image, entitled ‘Death by the Thousand Cuts’, is reproduced in Henry Norman, The Peoples and Politics of the Far East (London: Unwin, 1895), 225. 28 This view of the execution of the so-called ‘Namoa pirates’ is analysed in Chapter 7. 29 Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 15. 30 James Ricalton, China through the Stereoscope (New York, NY: Underwood and Underwood, 1901). 31 L’Illustration, 2 September 1900, 188. 32 Bulletin de la société de topographie, January 1903, 3. 33 Imbert was a member Hubert Lyautey’s staff when he was in the south of Madagascar in the early twentieth century. Imbert kept a dedicated copy of Lyautey’s Dans le Sud de Madagascar. Pénétration militaire, situation politique et économique, 1900–1902 (Paris: H. Charles-Lavauzelle, 1903). Lyautey’s Madagascar album (‘Madagascar. Commandement supérieur du Sud, 1900–1902’, Archives nationales, 475AP/317) includes several prints from Imbert’s negatives, in particular female nudes. 34 Protschky, ‘Tea Cups, Cameras and Family Life’, 65. 35 Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India, 30. 36 Aline Muller, ‘La Part d’ombre d’un Fonds Photographique: La Production Du Lieutenant Edgard Imbert Conservée à l’ECPAD’, Les Cahiers de l’École Du Louvre, no. 10 (14 April 2017). 37 Lyautey, Dans le Sud de Madagascar.

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38 Calixte Savaron, Mes Souvenirs: À Madagascar avant et après la conquête (1885–1898) (Paris: Pitot, 1932), 300. 39 See also the album compiled by one of the officers of the Tidikelt military expedition (February–May 1900) held at the Archives Nationales d’outre-mer (FR ANOM 8Fi403). Several prints show the mass graves dug to bury some of the 600 locals killed by the French during the In-Rhar oasis battle (March 1900). Alongside more benign pictures, the album

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also includes a close-up shot of two decapitated heads. 40 This anonymous picture of Luka Jantjie’s corpse is part of James Joseph Cooke’s album. Cooke took part in the last phase of the Langeberg/Bechuanaland expedition (1896–1897). The album is privately held. 41 Kim A. Wagner, The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 209. 42 Mark Coghlan, ‘The Record of a Racist Killer? William Harte, Natal Carbineers, 1906’, Natalia 35 (2005), 29–56. 43 Paul Bonnetain, ‘Au Tonkin’, Le Figaro, 16 May 1884, 1. 44 See, for instance, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers album held at the King’s Own Scottish Borderers Regimental Museum, KOSB V1/1-3. 45 Walter Ford to his sister Jane Ford, 23 November 1900, National Army Museum, 88007196, cited by Gilles Teulié, Les Afrikaners et la guerre anglo-boer (1899–1902) (Montpellier: Cerpanac/Presses de l’université Paul-Valéry-Montpellier III, 2000), 244. 46 Royal Commonwealth Society, Y3058H. 47 Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 5. 48 John Archer’s album is held at the Liddell Hart Military Archives, King’s College (London), see ‘Service in South Africa, Along The Nile And POW Life: Archer, J,’ accessed 5 January 2022, https://kingscollections.org/servingsoldier/collection/servicein-south-africa-along-the-nile-and-pow-life/. 49 For similar photographic uses among US soldiers during the Philippine–American War, see Silvan Niedermeier, ‘Imperial Narratives: Reading US Soldiers’ Photo Albums of the Philippine–American War’, Rethinking History 18, no. 1 (2014), 28–49. 50 André Maux to Mme Maux, 9 March 1913, SHD, Vincennes, GR 1 KT 836 1. 51 André Maux to Mme Maux, 24 September 1913 à Mme Maux, ibid. 52 André Maux to Mme Maux, 9 March 1913, ibid. 53 Harris, The Museum on the Roof of the World, 105. 54 Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 55 Patricia Goldsworthy, ‘Images, Ideologies, and Commodities: The French Colonial Postcard Industry in Morocco’, Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 2 (2010), 147–67. 56 Paul Azan, Souvenirs de Casablanca (Paris: Hachette, 1911).

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57 Anon., ‘La guerre au Maroc’, L’Illustration, 7 March 1908, 2. 58 See, in particular, the series entitled Campagne du Maroc (1907–1911). 59 See the postcards of the Moroccan campaigns in the Gandini collection, Ministère des Affaires étrangers (Nantes). 60 Undated postcard, Michat Papers, SHD, Vincennes. 61 Frank Schumacher, ‘Straffeldzug im Namen der Zivilisatio: der Boxerkrieg in China

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(1900–1901)’, in Thoralf Klein and Frank Schumacher, eds, Kolonialkriege: militärische Gewalt im Zeichen des Imperialismus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 145–80. 62 Practising photography away from the main urban centres of Morocco could prove difficult, despite Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz’s personal interest in the medium, see Paul Lemoine, ‘Mission Segonzac dans le Bled es-Simoun’, Bulletin du comité de l’afrique française 16, no. 3 (March 1906), 86. 63 Sergeant Bousquet Papers, 1909–1919, private collection. 64 Michat Papers, postcard no. 50, SHD, Vincennes, 2K148/30. 65 Campagne du Maroc. Journal de Marche 14 BCA, 1913, SHD, Vincennes, GR 1 KT 438 1. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Some damning testimonies reached the metropolitan press, see anon., ‘Au Maroc, la colonne de Tadla, lettres d’un sous-officier’, Armée et démocratie, 14 July 1910, 45. 70 Felix Aster, ‘“… Will try to send you the best views from here”: Postcards from the Colonial War in Namibia (1904–1908),’ in Volker Langbehn, ed., German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory (London: Routledge, 2010), 55–70. 71 Harry Ewin Papers, Imperial War Museum, 2001-09-09. 72 See Didier Guignard, L’Abus de pouvoir dans l’Algérie coloniale, 1880–1914: Visibilité et singularité (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2010) for a case study on censorship and information in Algeria. 73 Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection’, 1527. 74 Daniel J. Rycroft, Representing Rebellion: Visual Aspects of Counter-Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 75 Christopher Pinney, ‘Iatrogenic Religion and Politics’, in Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella, eds, Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 30–31. 76 Graphic views of the violence exerted on aboriginal populations in nineteenth-century Australia are extremely rare as noted by Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), chapter 4. 77 George Goldie, Memorandum to Council, October 4, 1897: 114, Bodleian Library, Oxford (Lugard Papers Correspondence, memoranda and papers relating to West Africa, 1894–1905).

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78 Lyautey to Max Lerclec, 30 November 1901, Archives nationales, Lyautey Papers, 475AP/291. 79 Vincent Hiribarren, ‘Hiding the European Colonial Past: A Comparison of Archival Policies’, in James Lowry, ed., Displaced Archives (London: Routledge, 2017), 74–85. 80 Hansard, HC Debates, March 1887, vol. 311, c888: ‘Their heads were cut off and carried to Bassein.’

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81 Docteur Bérillon, ‘La Névropathie coloniale’, Le Journal, 25 September 1913, 5. 82 Herbert Ward, A Voice from the Congo (New York, NY: Scribner, 1910), 248. 83 Bernard Taithe, ‘Losing their Mind and their Nation? Mimicry, Scandal, and Colonial Violence in the Voulet-Chanoine Affair’, in Martin Thomas, ed., The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters and Colonialism, vol. 2 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2011), 26–51. 84 Archives of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (Paris), Ms 2768/IV, documents related to the controversy that surrounded the publication of Paul Vigné d’Octon’s La Gloire du sabre (Paris: Flammarion, 1900). 85 Albert Martin to Paul Vigné d’Octon, 31 August 1900, Archives of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (Paris), Charles Le Myre de Vilers Papers, Ms 2768/IV. 86 Ibid. 87 De Lamothe to the Ministère des Colonies, 15 June 1898, cited by Marcel Blanchard, ‘Administrateurs d’Afrique Noire’, Revue d’histoire des colonies 40, no. 140–141 (1953), 404. 88 Merlaud-Ponty, ‘Notebooks on the Sudan (1890–1891)’, 5 January 1891 entry, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France (Paris), Auguste Terrier Papers, MS 5937. 89 Roy Dilley, Henri Gaden à travers l’Afrique de l’Ouest (1894–1939) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015), 61–62. 90 Alphonse-Armant Bigeon, La Photographie et le droit (Paris: Mendel, 1894), see the chapter entitled ‘L’espionnage et la photographie’ and V. Riston, ‘La photographie et l’espionnage devant la loi’, Photo-Journal, 1891, 169. 91 The War Office published Revised Rules for Newspapers Correspondents at the Seat of War for the 1882 Egyptian campagn (National Archives, Kew, WO 32/7138). 92 Papers Relating the Administration of Martial Law in South Africa (London: Stationer’s Office, 1902), 33: ‘Defence works: A. any unauthorized person who mahes a sketch, photograph or modal of […] any battery, filed-work or fortification […] will be arrested and severly dealt with.’ Very few individuals were actually prosecuted (see CO 879/69, 58–59). Some of J. Comerford’s negatives, a correspondent for the Freeman’s Journal, were confiscated by the Chief Military Press Censor in 1900 (Hansard, HC Debates, débats, 16 August 1900, col. 141). 93 'Control of the Press in Time of War’, National Archives, CAB 17/91. See also Philip Towle, ‘The Debate on Wartime Censorship in Britain, 1902–1914’, in Brian Bond and Ian Roy, eds, War and Society (London: Coom Helm, 1975), 103–16.

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94 Official Secrets Act, 1911, s.12: ‘The expression “sketch” includes any photograph or other mode of representing any place or thing.’ 95 See Corvisart’s memorandum sent from Tokyo, 4 January 1906, SHD, GR 7 1220. 96 See Fournier’s report on ‘operational secrecy’, document no. 17 attached to memorandum no. 76, 30 August 1913, SHD, 7N 1568. 97 In Madagascar, a decree enacted on 16 February 1901 by the colonial government made the

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publication of newspapers in the Malagasy language subject to authorisation.

6 Subversion, denunciation, and manipulation 1 Clemenceau criticised the French conquest of Africa. The year 1894 was a turning point because the Ministry of the Colonies, created that year, accompanied an unprecedented colonial expansion. This context explains why he reused these photographs at the time. There are no indications in the Clemenceau papers (held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France) to elucidate when or how he came into possession of these prints, but there is no doubt he owned a full set since he mentions five images when L'Illustration only published three engravings from photographs. 2 Joannès Barbier’s biography is known through a series of articles he authored in the magazine Lyon-Exposition, nos 75–78, 25 August, 2, 9, and 16 September 1894. 3 The ANOM hold an extensive file on the topic (ANOM 1602 COL 2). 4 Louis Archinard, ‘Rapport sur la campagne 1890–1891’, Journal officiel, October 1891, p. 4902 sq. 5 Bulletins de la société d’anthropologie de Paris, t. II (1891), 364. 6 ANOM, fonds De Lamothe, 4PA/1, April 16, 1891 letter. 7 Handwritten caption on the back of a print of the photograph held by the musée de l’Armée (no. 21800.59). 8 De Lamothe to Étienne, message n°401, April 1891, ANOM, 1602 COL 2. 9 See BNF, SG WE-164, BNF, SG WE-99 and BNF, SG W-100. 10 A cercle was the smallest administrative unit in French colonial Africa. 11 Roux to Lamothe, 14 April 1891, ANOM, 1602 COL 2. 12 In a telegram sent on 14 April 1891, de Lamothe wrote to Émile Roux that he wanted to make sure outsiders would ‘understand the specificity of your position in Sudan, where you are forced to command obedience and discourage revolt in an immense territory with a small number of people’ (ANOM, 1602 COL 2). 13 Anon., ‘L’œuvre de la civilisation en Afrique’, L’Illustration, 11 April 1891. 14 De Lamothe to Étienne, 16 April 1891, ANOM, 1602 COL 2. 15 De Lamothe to Roux, 12 April 1891, ANOM, 1602 COL 2. 16 De Lamothe to Roux, 14 April 1891, ANOM, 1602 COL 2. 17 Ibid.

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18 Roux to Lamothe, 13 April 1891, ANOM, 1602 COL 2. 19 Archinard to Étienne, 17 April 1891, Auguste Terrier papers, Bibliothèque de l’Institut, ms 5938, 80–81. 20 Journal des débats politiques et littéraires (12 April 1891), 2; Le Temps (13 April 1891). 21 L’Illustration, 20 April 1891, 342. 22 Joannès Barbier, ‘Au Sénégal’, Lyon-Exposition, 2 September 1895.

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23 Le Paris, 16 April 1891, 2. See Jean Grave, Patriotisme, colonisation (Paris: Temps nouveaux, 1903), 174: ‘On nous a mis cette semaine sous les yeux des photographies qui représentent l’œuvre de civilisation: ce sont des noirs massacrés […] une des photographies représente un adolescent qui, pour complaire à la civilisation, vous a coupé à lui tout seul ses cinq têtes. C’étaient les têtes de ses frères. Ce Caïn promet.’ 24 Augustin Hamon, La France politique et sociale (année 1891) (Paris: Savine, 1893), 218–19. 25 Le Matin, 29 April 1891, 1. 26 Barbier to Coussy, 29 May 1891: ‘There is a powerful lobby in the colony whose interest is that as few Europeans as possible move into the hinterland […] the shot went off from there’ (Il existe à la Colonie un parti très puissant qui a tout intérêt à ce que l’Européen ne pénètre que le moins possible dans le haut pays […] le coup est parti de là). 27 François Manchuelle, ‘Métis et colons: la famille Devès et l’émergence politique des Africains au Sénégal, 1881–1897’, Cahiers d’études africaines 24, no. 96 (1984), 477–504. 28 Kimberly Luke, ‘Order or Justice: The Denshawai Incident and British Imperialism,’ History Compass 5, no. 2 (2007), 278–87. 29 Anon., ‘The Punishment of Egyptians at Denshawi’, The Sphere, 14 July 1906. 30 The Sphere, 7 July 1906, 9. 31 A copy of this pamphlet was sold by Christie’s (London) in April 2017. 32 Mr Swift MacNeill, House of Commons debates, 19 August 1907, vol. 181, Hansard, col. 295. 33 Anon., ‘Were the Egyptian Penalties Too Severe? The Camera’s Testimony’, The Illustrated London News, 14 July 1906. 34 Swift MacNeill, ibid.: ‘These were authorised photographs, the object being to educate the public mind.’ 35 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Atrocities of Justice under British Rule (London: T. F. Unwin, 1907), 69. 36 Mansur Mustafa Rifat, Damaging Evidence against English Hypocrisy. Two Dates, 1882–1914. Egypt and Belgium (Berlin: n.i., 1915). 37 On Britain, see Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014); Nicholas Owen, The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford; New York, NY: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1993); on France, Claude Liauzu,

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Histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France: Du XVIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 2007). 38 Anon., ‘Notre civilisation Au Maroc’, L’Humanité, 21 June 1913. 39 ‘Comment nous pacifions Le Maroc’, L’Humanité, October 1913. 40 See the postcard published by Boumendil et fils, ‘Mérada. Marocains morts au combat de la nuit du 16 au 17 mai 1912’, Gandini collection, French Diplomatic Archives, N055389.

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41 Arthur Asseraf, ‘La Société Coloniale Face à l’actualité Internationale: Diffusion, Contrôle, Usages (1881–1899),’ Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (1954–) 63, no. 2 (2016), 110–32. 42 The Tatler, 16 September 1903, 3; and La Vie illustrée, 27 February 1903, 1. 43 L’Illustration, 18 and 25 September 1909. 44 Yves Person, Samori. Une révolution Dyula, 3 vols, Mémoire de l’IFAN 80 (Dakar: IFAN, 1968). 45 Louis Sonolet, “Les progrès de l’Afrique occidentale française”, Le Tour du Monde, 1 January 1911, 15. 46 Anon., ‘Un village de la zône forestière dévasté par Samory en 1898’, postcard, Colonies françaises series, Haute-Côte d’Ivoire occidentale. This postcard was printed by the Société française d’électrographie in Neuilly-sur-Seine. It was also sold in a colourised version. A stereoscopic glass plate showing the exact same scene is to be found in the French Diplomatic Archives (Henri Gaden, Village détruit par Samory, September 1898, MAE, 145/1347). 47 Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 18–25. In the British press, see for instance ‘Kano – Village destroyed by slave raider’, The Graphic, 10 October 1903. 48 Jean-Marie Seillan, ‘Le Gore colonial. Aspects du corps supplicié dans la littérature d’aventures africaines à la fin du XIXe siècle’, in Frédéric Chauvaud, ed., Corps saccagés (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 263–75. 49 Francis McCullagh, Italy’s War for a Desert: Being Some Experiences of a War-Correspondent with the Italians in Tripoli (London: Herbert and Daniel, 1912), editor’s foreword: ‘Some photographs of the Oasis Repression taken by Mr. McCullagh, and submitted to us, have been found unsuitable for publication in a work intended for general circulation, and have not, therefore, been reproduced in the present volume.’ 50 Kevin Grant, ‘Christian Critics of Empire: Missionaries, Lantern Lectures, and the Congo Reform Campaign in Britain’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29, no. 2 (2001), 27–58. 51 Lanessan (de), Principes de colonisation, 82. 52 Roger Casement, Correspondance and Report from Her Majesty’s Consul at Boma (London: Stationery Office, 1904). See also Robert M. Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities: Eyewitness Accounts of Colonialism in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo (New York, NY:

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Routledge, 2011) and Christina Twomey, ‘The Incorruptible Kodak: Photography, Human rights and the Congo Campaign’, in Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick, eds, The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 9–33. 53 Alice Seeley Harris and John Harris, The Camera and Congo Crime (London: Congo Reform Association, 1906). See also Christina Twomey, ‘Framing Atrocity: Photography and Humanitarianism’, History of Photography 36, no. 3 (2012), 255–64; John Peffer, ‘Snap

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of the Whip/Crossroads of Shame: Flogging, Photography, and the Representation of Atrocity in the Congo Reform Campaign,’ Visual Anthropology Review 24, no. 1 (2008), 55–77. 54 Frederick Starr, in The Truth about the Congo (Chicago: Forbes, 1907) offers a more lenifying vision of the Congo Free State in photographs. In 1907, the Belgian Fédération pour la défense des intérêts belges published a pamphlet titled La Vérité sur le Congo, which denounced the alleged photographic disinformation produced by the Congo Reform Association. 55 Edmund Morel, King’s Leopold Rule in Africa (London: Heinemann, 1904). For an example of a pro-Leopold article criticising the campaign, see Anon., ‘Vingt-deux ans d’administration au Congo’, Revue de droit international, 2nd series, t. VI (1906), 607. See also La Belgique maritime et coloniale, 1905, 437. 56 F. J. Duquesne, ‘A Congo Traveler on the Value of Atrocity Photographs’, New York Times, 11 January 1908. 57 This is the case, for example, of Brazza’s report on the French Congo, quickly buried by the government. See Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch’s preface to Le Rapport Brazza mission d’enquête du Congo: rapport et documents (1905–1907) (Neuville-en-Champagne: Le Passager clandestin, 2014). These denunciations aimed at reforming imperial governance rather than criticising the very foundations of colonialism. 58 Martin Thomas and Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882–1956 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 10. 59 Gilles Teulié, Les Afrikaners et la guerre Anglo-Boer, 1899-1902 (Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry, 2000), chapter 1. 60 See Chapter 7. 61 Anon., ‘The French in Central Africa’, The Sphere, 30 March 1901. 62 See F. Lugard’s report, Various. West Africa, vol. 1, 1901, 140–142, FO 2/524/144. 63 Anon., ‘The Charges against the Sirdar’, London Daily News, 23 March 1899, 5. See also Cromer to Salisbury, 17 February 1899, National Archives (Kew), PRO 30/57/14/11. On French critical views on the profanation, see La Lanterne, 4 November 1898, 1; Anon., ‘La violation du tombeau du Mahdi’, Autour du monde, 1899, 190, and Alexandre Mérignhac, ‘Les pratiques des Anglais’, Revue générale de droit international public VII (1901), 118. 64 Le Temps, 8 July 1906, 1; Anon., ‘L’affaire de Denshawi’, Bulletin du comité de l’afrique française, January 1906, 209.

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65 Emmanuelle Sibeud, ‘Une libre pensée impériale?: Le Comité de protection et de défense des indigènes (c. 1892–1914),’ Mil neuf cent 27, no. 1 (2009), 57. 66 Roger Casement, Correspondence Respecting the Treatment of British Colonial Subjects and Native Indians Employed in the Collection of Rubber in the Putumayo District (London: Stationery Office, 1912). 67 On the influence of Evangelicalism on these trends, see Heather D. Curtis, ‘Picturing Pain’,

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in Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, eds, Humanitarian Photography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 22–46. 68 Anatole France, Jules Renard, and Louis Tinayre, Aux Victimes de la guerre Russo-Japonaise (Paris: Pelletan, n.d.). 69 André Gunthert, ‘Sans retouche’, Études photographiques 22 (2008), 56–77. 70 Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 71 Jeff Guy, Remembering the Rebellion: The Zulu Uprising of 1906 (Scottsvile, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006), 124. 72 George Monca, Rigadin aux Balkans, film, Pathé Frères, 1912. 73 Richard Brown, ‘War on the Home Front: The Anglo-Boer War and the Growth of Rental in Britain. An Economic Perspective’, Film History 16, no. 1 (2004), 28–36. 74 The Photographic Dealer, vol. 8 (1901), 35. 75 For an early example of fake news debunking, see anon., ‘How Photographs of RussoJapanese War Scenes are Faked’, The Bystander, 24 May 1904, 747. 76 Joseph Gallieni, Rapport d’ensemble sur la pacification, l’organisation et la colonisation de Madagascar (Octobre 1896 à Mars 1899) (Paris: Lavauzelle, 1899), 77. Victor Duruy (?), L’Angavokely. Attaque des grottes, 1897, baryta paper, ANOM, Gallieni papers, FR ANOM 44PA121/45/. Available online at: http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv. fr/ulysse/. 77 Victor Duruy, Le 1er régiment de tirailleurs Algériens, histoire et campagnes (Paris: Hachette, 1899), 293. 78 ILN, 11 May 1907, 720.

7 The enemy’s body 1 Robert Baden-Powell, The Matabele Campaign, 1896 (London: Methuen, 1897), 121. 2 Ibid., 60. 3 James A. Mangan and Callum McKenzie, ‘Martial Conditioning, Military Exemplars and Moral Certainties: Imperial Hunting as Preparation for War’, International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 9 (2008), 1132–67. 4 See Robert Baden-Powell, Sport in War (New York, NY: Stokes, 1900). 5 Achille Mbembe, ‘Nécropolitique’, Raisons politiques 21, no. 1 (2006), 29–60.

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6 Jacques Sémelin, Purifier et détruire. Usages politiques des massacres et genocides (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005), 356. 7 Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2012); Nerissa S. Balce, Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016).

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8 Fabio Viti, ‘Sur quelques images de chefs baoulé’, Cahiers d’études africaines 230 (2018), 349–71. 9 Erin Haney, Photography and Africa (London: Reaktion Books, 2010). 10 Hlonipha Mokoena, ‘“How I Photographed Cetshwayo”: photography and the spectacle of exile in colonial South Africa,’ 15 April 2013 (https://ssrn.com/abstract=2251364). 11 See Richard William Murray, Cetywayo, from the Battle of Ulundi to the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town: Murray & St. Leger, 1879): ‘He appeared to be very nervous, and requested that it might be done at once in order to have it over. He seemed to dread the camera and did not like the look of the lens.’ 12 Crewes and Van Laun, ‘Cetywayo Photographed’, Cape Argus, 16 September 1879, n.p. 13 Thomas Ross, ‘How I Photographed Cetewayo’, Cape Times Weekly Edition, 20 July 1910, 12: ‘I was informed that Cetewayo was very indignant at the very shabby way he had been treated by the man who took his photo on board the steamer.’ 14 Sheffield Independent, 15 August 1882, 2. A digital version of the portrait is available online (https://cutt.ly/htjVckM). 15 Jonathan A. Green, ‘King of Benin’, albumen print (20 cm × 14 cm), from an album (British Museum, Af A47.70). 16 Martha G. Anderson and Lisa L. Aronson, ‘Jonathan A. Green: An African Photographer Hiding in Plain Sight’, African Arts 44, no. 3 (2011), 38–49. 17 A digital version of the portrait is available online (https://cutt.ly/PtjVRrj). Views of the campaign are held at the Royal Engineers Museum (Gillingham, Angleterre). These are photographs taken by Captain G. E. Phillips R. E. in 1895. 18 The portrait is found in the album of Charles Edwin Collard (Royal Marine Light Infantry) held by the Royal Commonwealth Society (cote Y3045A-B). A digital version is available online (https://cutt.ly/ytjVPOo). Other versions are in circulation, see The  Geographical Journal 21, no. 1 (1903), 108. 19 Daniel Rycroft, ‘Capturing Birsa Munda: The Virtuality of a Colonial-era Photograph’, Indian Folklore Research Journal 1, no. 4 (2004), 53–68. 20 ‘Photographs of Rhodesia’, Bodleian Library, MSS Afr. T. 65. 21 The Imperial War Museum has put a digital reproduction online (https://cutt.ly/JtjV19j). 22 Bennet Burleigh, Sirdar and Khalifa (London: Chapman & Hall, 1898). 23 See Lt. Delpy’s album, CHETOM, Fréjus, France (18 H 88). 24 FR ANOM 44 PA 167-35 (available in the Ulysse database).

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25 Joseph Gallieni, La Pacification de Madagascar (Paris: Chapelot, 1900), 139. 26 Archinard kept a picture in his personal albums, which are held at CHETOM. Jean-Marie Collomb’s negatives are held at the Musée du Quai Branly (https://art.rmngp.fr/fr/library/ artworks/jean-marie-collomb_aguibou-a-kita-palabre). 27 The Sphere, 23 March 1901. 28 Frederick D. Lugard, ‘Northern Nigeria’, The Geographical Journal 23, no. 1 (1904), 1–27.

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The same view is reproduced in The King, supplement, 27 June 1903. 29 J. H. Paterson, album of the Kano-Sokoto expedition, 1903, Bodleian Library, GB 0162 MSS.Afr.r.194. Some photographs are reproduced in The Sphere, 27 June 1903, 286. 30 Stephen Ellis, ‘The Political Elite of Imerina and the Revolt of the Menalamba. The Creation of a Colonial Myth in Madagascar, 1895–1898’, Journal of African History 21, no. 2 (1980), 219–34. 31 Photographs of the Mission and Diakonia Archives, VID Specialized University, Stavanger, Norway, circa 1870–1950. 32 FR ANOM 44 PA 121/162. 33 A full series is held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, EN 1126, boîte Fol B. 34 William P. Drury, In Many Parts. Memoirs of a Marine (London: Unwin, 1926), 180–81. 35 Penny Illustrated Paper, 28 October 1898, 1. 36 Ernest Francis Watts, ‘How We Hanged the Sierra Leone Rebels,’ The Sketch, 25 January 1899, 17. 37 Alexandre Lacassagne, Peine de mort et criminalité (Paris: Maloine, 1908), 182. 38 Max Weber, Le Savant et le politique, trans. from German by Catherine Colliot-Thélène (Paris: La Découverte, 2003). 39 Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation: soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen (Basel: Haus zum Falken, 1939). 40 Michel Foucault, Naissance de la prison, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 41 Clare Anderson, ‘Execution and its Aftermath in the 19th-century British Empire’, in Richard Ward, ed., A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse (London: Palgrave, 2014), 170–98. 42 Jeanne-Marie Kambou-Ferrand, ‘Guerre et résistance sous la période coloniale en pays lobi/birifor (Burkina Faso) au travers de photos d’époque’, in Michèle Fiéloux, Jacques Lombard, and Jeanne-Marie Kambou-Ferrand (eds), Images d’Afrique et sciences sociales: les pays lobi, birifor et dagara (Paris: Karthala, 1993), 74–99. 43 Ibid., 83. 44 David Killingray, ‘The “Rod of Empire”: The Debate over Corporal Punishment in the British African Colonial Forces, 1888–1946’, Journal of African History 35, no. 2 (1994), 201–16; Steven Pierce, ‘Punishment and the Political Body, Flogging and Colonialism in Northern Nigeria,’ International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3, no.  2 (2001), 206–21.

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45 Margery Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, 1898–1945, t. II (London: Collins, 1960), 199. 46 Sylvie Thénault, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale. Camps, internement, assignations à résidence, (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012), 42. 47 Bourgon, ‘Le dernier lingchi. Faits, représentations, événements’. 48 See films n°956 et seq (released in 1903), Pathé Foundation (Paris).

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49 The album of Louis Dumoulin held at Université Nice-Sophia-Antipolis offers an example of this, among hunders of others (photothèque ASEMI, (CC-BY) PH44-13 et 14). It contains a view before and after an execution in Tonkin, dated 1902 (on Dumoulin, see Julien Béal, ‘La collection photographique Chine de Louis-Jules Dumoulin (1860–1924)’, 汉学研 究, 中华书局 [Sinology Research], 2016, 212–19). 50 Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 20 August 1891, 4. 51 A digital version is available online (https://cutt.ly/itj1kMr). 52 Emmanuel Blanchard and Joël Glasman, ‘Le maintien de l’ordre dans l’empire français: une historiographie émergente’, in Jean-Pierre Bat and Nicolas Courtin (eds), Maintenir l’ordre colonial, Afrique et Madagascar, xixe–xxe siècles (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 13. 53 Michael Vann, ‘Fear and Loathing in French Hanoi: Colonial White Images and Imaginings of “Native” Violence’, in Martin Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism (London: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 52–76. 54 L’Illustration, 4 July 1908, 452. See also the postcard published and sold by Morin frères in Indochina (no. 134). 55 A similar case sparked a scandal in 1906. A French military doctor was said to have ‘made snapshots’ of each phase of the beheading of the assassin of Mr Guyot-Jeannin, the administrator of the Faranah circle in today Guinea) who was killed in August 1905 (Le Journal, 13 April 1906, 1). 56 See for instance Alexander Turnbull, ‘Execution of Boer Prisoner’, 21 January 1902, National Library of New Zealand, 1/4-60136-F. 57 James Gregory, Victorians against the Gallows (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), chapter 2. 58 CHETOM, Ico 69/04-02. 59 Charles Castellani, Vers le nil français, avec la mission Marchand (Paris: Flammarion, 1898), 333; L’Illustration, 19 March 1898, 221. 60 L’Illustration, no. 3028, 9 March 1901, 1. 61 See the report by Gentil (FR ANOM 50COL41), Émile Gentil, La Chute de l’empire de Rabah (Paris: Hachette, 1902), 220–21 (cf. note 5). Christian Roche, L’Afrique noire et la France au xixe siècle. Conquêtes et résistances (Paris: Karthala, 2011), 88. 62 Gentil, La Chute de l’empire de Rabah. 63 Le Tour du Monde, 5 January 1901, 607.

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64 Michael Horowitz, ‘Ba Karim: An Account of Rabies Wars’, African Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (1970), 398. 65 Émile Julien, ‘Mohamed es-Senoussi et ses tats’, Bulletin de la Société des Recherches Congolaises, no. 8, (1927), 113; Georges Bruel, ‘Mohamed-es-Senoussi et ses États (lettre de rectification)’, Bulletin de la Société des recherches congolaises 10 (1929), 99. 66 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Combattre. Une anthropologie historique de la guerre moderne

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(xixe–xxie siècle) (Paris: Le Seuil, 2008), 273–74. 67 Charles Edward Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (London: HMSO, 1896), 74. 68 Musée du quai Branly, Paris, access: PV0060108. Rabah’s skull is now in the Musée de l’Homme collections. 69 Anon., ‘Coupeurs de têtes,’ Le Radical, 5 September 1900, 1. 70 Emile Reibell, L’Épopée saharienne: carnet de route de la mission saharienne Foureau-Lamy (1898–1900) (Paris: Plon, 1931), 334. 71 Charles Guilleux, Journal de route d’un caporal de tirailleurs de la mission saharienne (mission Foureau-Lamy), 1898–1900 (Belfort: Schmitt, 1904), 288. 72 Jacques Britsch, Français au Tchad: Carnet de route du lieutenant Gabriel Britsch (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), 152. 73 Bulletin de la société des recherches congolaises, vol. 8 (1927), 55. 74 María Victoria Uribe, Anthropologie de l’inhumanité. Essai sur la terreur en Colombie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2004), 19. 75 Guilleux, Journal de route, 330. 76 Vincent Joly, Guerres d’Afrique. Cent trente ans de guerres coloniales: l’expérience française (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009). 77 Ricardo Roque, Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 78 Fabio Viti, ‘À la Guerre comme à la guerre. De la cruauté dans l’art du combat (Baoulé, Côte d’Ivoire, 1891–1911)’, in Dominique Casajus and Fabio Viti (eds), La Terre et le pouvoir. À la mémoire de Michel Izard (Paris: CNRS, 2012), 249–70. 79 Reibell, L’Épopée saharienne, 205. 80 Anon., ‘Tête de Diallo Amara’, carte postale, série ‘Colonies françaises, Haute Guinée,’ c. 1900, collection privée. 81 Édouard Dupouy, Les Chasses au Soudan (Paris: Challamel, 1894), 281. 82 See the picture taken in 1904 by Émile Coquibus (ECPAD, D180-2-39), who in his diaries attributes the decapitation to a tirailleur, or the picture Georges Dauvillier took at the same site in 1909, almost fifteen years after the fact (FR ANOM 41Fi316). 83 Collection Roger-Viollet, ‘Tête d’un indigène coupée et exposée comme exemple de répression’, 3164-16.

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84 Jacques Frémeaux, L’Afrique à l’ombre des épées (1830–1930), vol. 1 (Vincennes: Service historique de l’armée de terre, 1995), 60. 85 Hubert Lyautey, Lettres du Sud, 20 July 1901, 17, Archives nationales, fonds Lyautey, 475 AP 281. 86 Rennell Rodd, Social and Diplomatic Memories (second series), 1894–1901: Egypt and Abyssinia, vol. 2 (London: Arnold, 1923), 256.

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87 John Ward, Our Sudan: Its Pyramids and Progress (London: Murray, 1905), 179. 88 Anon., ‘Some Emirs Taken Prisoner’, The Graphic, 6 January 1900, 6. 89 Christopher Sykes, Orde Wingate (London: Collins, 1959), 68. 90 Wagner, The Skull of Alum Bheg, 52–53. 91 Morning Leader, 6 October 1898, 1. 92 Queen Victoria to Kitchener, 24 March 1899, National Archives (Kew, UK), PRO 30/57/16/3A. 93 Anon., ‘The Charges against the Sirdar’, London Daily News, 23 March 1899, p. 5; Cromer to Salisbury, 17 February 1899, National Archives (Kew, UK), PRO 30/57/14/11. 94 Alain Corbin, ‘Le corps massacré’, in Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and Georges Vigarello (eds), Histoire du corps. De la Révolution à la Grande Guerre, t. II (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005), 215–27. 95 Institut de droit international, Manuel des lois de la guerre sur terre (Bruxelles: Muquardt, 1880), art. 19. 96 See Edward Caudill, Darwinian Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a Theory (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), pp. 93ff. 97 Linfield, The Cruel Radiance.

8 Paper cemeteries 1 A. T. B. Boekhandel, ‘Souvenirs de la guerre du Transvaal, 1899–1901’, photographic album, Getty Collection (Los Angeles), 84.XA.1125. 2 A complete set of these views is held at the Harry Ransom Centre (University of Texas at Austin), no. 964: 1017:0001-0041. 3 See Chapter 1. 4 See L’Illustration, 5 November 1904, 312 for a similar composition by James H. Hare and another by Jean Leune in L’Illustration, 26 July 1913, 79. 5 Winston Churchill, ‘Cronje’s Treatment’, Morning Post, 14 March 1900. 6 Anon., ‘Burghers Grossly Deceived’, South Wales Daily News, 19 March 1900. 7 See L. Degeorge de Valmalète’s album held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, QE-857-PET FOL or the anonymous one held at the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), RP-FF01113-C. Both are available online.

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8 Henry Dochy, ‘La Guerre au Transvaal. Champ de Bataille de Spionkop. Une tranchée de cadavres Anglais’, Le Monde illustré, 31 March 1900; Anon., ‘La Guerre au Transvaal’, Armée et Marine, 12 January 1902. 9 The piece was first published by the Dublin Evening Telegraph, 10 August 1901, 6. 10 Several illustrations of Michael Davitt’s The Boer Fight for Freedom (London: Funk et Wagnalls, 1902) are based on van Hoepen’s photographs. See 351–52.

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11 See C. Chamberlain’s album, Royal Army Medical Corps Archives, Wellcome Library, RAMC/700; T.B.A. Tuckey’s album, RAMC/229 and S. Cooper’s album, King’s Own Museum, Lancaster, KO0373/05. 12 Robert Gell, ‘11 photographs relating to the battle of Spion Kop’, National Army Museum, NAM 1989-04-102. 13 Herbert Fane’s copyright record is to be found at the National Archives (Kew), COPY 1/445/542. 14 Black and White Budget, 12 May 1900, 172–73. 15 Hansard, HC Debates, 22 July 1901, vol. 97, c1114. 16 Warder and Dublin Weekly Mail, 24 November 1900, 8. 17 Anon., The Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1900 (Cape Town: Edwards, 1901). 18 The Photographic Dealer, 10 May 1900, 110. 19 D. Low-beer, ‘Disease and Death in the South African War: Changing Disease Patterns from Soldiers to Refugees’, Social History of Medicine 17, no. 2 (2004), 223–45. 20 Prosper Burot, Les Troupes coloniales (Paris: Baillière, 1897). 21 Georges Bouras, Rapport médical sur le corps expéditionnaire de Chine (1900–1901) (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902). 22 Philip D. Curtin, Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 23 See the photograph entitled ‘Convoi de soldats malades’, ANOM, Gallieni Papers, 44PA185/101 or the engraving from a photograph by Louis Tinayre in Le Monde illustré, 5 October 1895: 220. 24 Roger Fenton, ‘Zouave and a Vivandière’, 5 May 1855, Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 2500401 and Cundall and Howlett, ‘Amputees at Chatham Military Hospital’, 1883 print from an 1856 negative, RCIN 2500189. 25 L’Illustration, 30 November 1912, 427. 26 Philip Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 220. 27 Anon., ‘The Queen at Netley Hospital: Her Majesty inspecting the wounded soldiers from the Indian Frontier,’ Illustrated London News, 5 February 1898. 28 Underwood and Underwood, ‘South African War through the Stereoscope’, part 2, vol. 1, 1900, NAM 1998-01-135-16.

Notes

317

29 Anon., ‘A Field Hospital Train at the Front with General Buller’, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 3 February 1900. 30 The visibility of their sacrifices was not, however, stable over time. The efforts of some colonial officers to promote the Senegalese auxiliaries, as illustrated by Charles Mangin in La Force noire (Paris: Hachette, 1910), favoured a greater exposure of the efforts of these troops in the press (see, for example, Figure 9.1).

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31 L’Illustration, 26 February 1910, 1. 32 Anon., ‘Comment s’est produit le guet-apens du tchad,’ Le Matin, 17 February 1910, 1. 33 La France illustrée, 5 March 1910, 163. 34 Anon., ‘Les Blessés de La Colonne Grosdemange’, La Dépêche coloniale illustrée, 15 August 1910, 193. 35 L’Afrique du Nord illustrée, 28 December 1907, 8; 18 January 1913. This magazine published several articles on the fate of colonial soldiers with pacifist undertones; see, for instance, Gabrielle Quilléry, ‘Les Bateaux blancs’, L’Afrique Du Nord illustrée, 1 August 1908. 36 Anon., ‘La Première promenade du spahi Calineau, gravement blessé à Aïn-Sefra le 15 décembre (hôpital de Marnia)’, c. 1911, postcard, musée du Quai-Branly (Paris), PP0139256. 37 Francois Robichon, L’Armee francaise vue par les peintres 1870-1914 (Paris: Herscher: Ministere de la Defense, 2000), 54–55. 38 Jacques Frémeaux, De Quoi fut fait l’empire: les guerres coloniales au xixe siècle (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2010), 392–93. 39 L. J. Ramsey, ‘Bullet Wounds and X-Rays in Britain’s Little Wars’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 60, no. 242 (1982), 91–102. 40 Anon., ‘L’aumônerie militaire coloniale,’ Semaine Religieuse Du Diocèse de Lyon, 27 May 1904. 41 James Grant, British Battles on Land and Sea, 1874–1897 (London: Cassell, 1899), 680. 42 Album of 174 photographs compiled by Major N. Burrows, Royal North Lancashire Regiment, 1893–(c)1897, NAM 1966-12-43. 43 Patricia Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 295. 44 Anon., Majunga. Un coin du cimetière militaire, 1903, ANOM, Gallieni Papers, FR ANOM 44PA134/26. 45 Léon Millot, ‘Des Femmes aux colonies’, La Justice, 21 January 1897, 1. 46 Anon., ‘Punitive Expedition’, Navy and Army Illustrated, 17 May 1902, 208; Anon., ‘The Sad Side of War’, Navy and Army Illustrated, 2 August 1902, 486. 47 Anon., ‘Soldiers’ Tombs’, Navy and Army Illustrated, 24 May 1902, 224. 48 Advertising published in The Army and Navy Gazette, 12 October 1901, 22. 49 François Henri Laperrine, ‘Après le combat, les morts’ and ‘La corvée des morts,’ photographs from an album on the conquest of the Sahara, FR ANOM 8Fi122/143. 50 François Henri Laperrine, ‘Cadavre de Bemba’, ibid.

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51 Émile-Louis Abbat, ‘La tombe du commandant Bardot (cimetière de Kita)’, c. 1894, aristotype from a glass plate negative, private collection. 52 Frank G. Smith, ‘H. Mills A.B. H.M.S. Orlanda killed at Tientsin, July 18th 1900’, National Maritime Museum, MSS/84/081/2. 53 Anon., ‘Ber-Rechid. Monument élevé dans la plaine de Ben-Daoud à la mémoire des cinq héros qui ont trouvé une mort glorieuse le 18 février 1908’, postcard, Archives du ministère

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des Affaires étrangères (La Courneuve, France), Gandini collection, N053225. 54 Anon., ‘L’occupation de l’Extrême-Sud Oranais,’ Bulletin du comité de l’Afrique française, 1900, 178. 55 J. B. Martial, ‘Morts au champ d’honneur. Combat d’In-Rhar [19 mars 1900],’ Sergent Delay’s album entitled Souvenir du Sahara, FR ANOM 8Fi451/114. 56 J. B. Martial, Souvenir d’In-Rhar (Algiers: Geiser, 1901). 57 Lectures pour tous, 1900, 906. 58 See Dominique Kalifa, Biribi: les bagnes coloniaux de l’armée française (Paris: Perrin, 2009). 59 Jacques Dhur, ‘Le Camp Des Supplices’, Le Journal, 17 January 1907, 1. 60 Black and White Budget, 17 March 1900, 19. 61 Paul Azan, Souvenirs de Casablanca (Paris: Hachette, 1911), facing 176. 62 See L’Illustration, 3 May 1908, 319 or L’Afrique du Nord illustrée, 18 January 1913, 7. 63 Azan, Souvenirs de Casablanca, 11. 64 Stéphane Moulin, Le Tonkin. Exploration du Mékong (Paris: Delagrave, 1888), facing 134. 65 Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (London: Nelson, 1898), 324. 66 Richard N. Price, ‘The Psychology of Colonial Violence’, in Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck, eds, Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 25–52. 67 Azan, Souvenirs de Casablanca, 176. 68 Lucien Corpechot, ‘La Campagne Contre Fadel. Allah – Honneurs Funèbres Rendus Aux Restes de l’explorateur de Béhagle’, L’Illustration, 25 January 1902. 69 Francis Gregson, ‘Staircase on which Gordon was killed [Khartoum 1898]’, September 1898, gelatin silver print, 8.1 cm × 8.0 cm, RCIN 2501865. 70 Hubert Jacques, Les Journées sanglantes de Fès (Paris: Chapelot, 1913), 24. 71 L’Illustration, 18 May 1912, 424. 72 Le Petit Parisien, 23 April 1912, 1. 73 L’Illustrazione italiana, 12 May 1912, 1. 74 This photograph was sold by the Albert Harlingue Agency, a pioneering French news photography service: ‘Le quartier du Mellah, à Fès (Maroc), après le massacre consécutif à la révolte de 1911’ (Roger Viollet, Paris, n°HRL-521901). Anon., ‘Moulay Hafid abidquera-t-il?’, Le Journal, 4 May 1912, 1. 75 Some of these images were sold by Bain News Service (Library of Congress, LC-B2- 232714 [P & P]).

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76 On this concept, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 77 Allan Sekula, ‘Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)’, The Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (December 1978), 859–83. 78 See Georges Humbert’s album (Musée de l’Armée, Paris no. 21800-1). Humbert was part of General Duchesne’s staff during the conquest of Madagascar in 1895. Views nos 56 and

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57 show the execution of two Malagasy ‘tirailleurs’. The Martelly albums documenting the conquest of what was known as the French Soudan in 1891 (CHETOM, Fréjus, no. 11545) contain the photograph of the hanging of a spahi (indigenous light cavalry) who had deserted.

9 Invisible wars? Reflections of extra-European conflicts in France and Britain 1 Excelsior, 16 November 1910, 2. 2 Excelsior, 11 September 1912, 3. See also pp. 4, 7, 10, 18, and 21 September 1912. 3 André Gunthert, ‘Les Icônes du photojournalisme, ou la narration visuelle inavouable’, L’Atelier des icônes (blog), 25 January 2013, https://histoirevisuelle.fr/cv/icones/2609. 4 Jean Baudrillard, La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (Paris: Galilée, 1991). 5 Thierry Gervais, ‘Photographies de presse?’, Études photographiques, no. 16 (2005), 166–81. 6 Paul Fyfe and Qian Ge, ‘Image Analytics and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Newspaper’, Journal of Cultural Analytics 3, no. 1 (2018), 11–32. 7 Gerry Beegan, The Mass Image: A Cultural History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London (Basingtoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 77. 8 Myriam Chermette-Richard, ‘La Similigravure dans la presse quotidienne, une fausse révolution? L’exemple Du Journal (1900–1903)’, Bibliothèque de l’École Des Chartes 167, no. 1 (2009), 89–101. See also the Journal accounts and archives, Archives Nationales (France), 81AR/297. 9 Sarah Mirseyedi, ‘Side by Side: The Halftone’s Visual Culture of Pragmatism: History of Photography’, History of Photography 41, no. 3 (2017), 286–310. 10 Andie Tucher, ‘“I Believe in Faking”: The Dilemma of Photographic Realism at the Dawn of Photojournalism’, Photography and Culture 10, no. 3 (2017), 195–214. 11 George E. Brown, Finishing the Negative (London: Dawbarn and Ward, 1901), 91. 12 See Georges Bertin Scott Papers, La Contemporaine (Nanterre, France) and Georges Scott, Dans Les Balkans, 1912–1913. Récits et Visions de Guerre (Paris: Chapelot, 1913). 13 L’Excelsior, 1 March 1913. 14 Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, ‘Du Dessin de Presse à La Photographie (1878–1914): Histoire d’une Mutation Technique et Culturelle - Persée’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine 39, no. 1 (1992), 6–28.

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15 Tom Gretton, ‘Le statut subalterne de la photographie’, trans. Marc Phéline, Études photographiques, no. 20 (2007), 34–49. 16 Neil Harris, ‘Iconography and Intellectual History: The Halftone Effect’, in John Higham and Paul Keith Conkin, eds, New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 196–211. 17 Kevin Grant, ‘The Limits of Exposure: Atrocity Photographs in the Congo Reform

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Campaign’, in Davide Rodogno and Heide Fehrenbach, eds, Humanitarian Photography: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 64–88. 18 Dominique Kalifa, Crime et culture au XIXe siècle, pour l’histoire (Paris: Perrin, 2005), chapter 9. 19 Catherine Waters, Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850–1886 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 11. 20 Tom Gretton, ‘Elegant and Dignified Military Operations in the Present Age: The Imperfect Invisibility of Collateral Damage in Late 19th-century Metropolitan Illustrated Magazines’, in Stephen J. Rockel and Rick Halpern, eds, Inventing Collateral Damage: Civilian Casualties, War, and Empire (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009), 205–32. 21 Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England, 1855–1914 (London: Totowa, N.J: Croom Helm; Rowman and Littlefield, 1976), 161. 22 Anon., ‘The Horrors of War’, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 11 April 1913, 9. 23 The Sphere, 24 December 1904, 11; L’Illustration, 24 September 1904, 208–09. 24 The Sphere, 25 September 1909, 1. 25 Potter, News and the British World. 26 See Auguste Terrier Papers, Bibliothèque de l’Institut (Paris), no. 5896. 27 Simon Potter, ‘Jingoism, Public Opinion, and the New Imperialism: Newspapers and Imperial Rivalries at the Fin de Siècle: Media History’, Media History 20, no. 1 (2014), 34–50. 28 Jane E. Elliott, Some Did It for Civilisation, Some Did It for Their Country: A Revised View of the Boxer War (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002), 67. 29 Emily Hobhouse, The Brunt of the War, and Where It Fell (London: Methuen, 1902). 30 Dominique Kalifa, ed., La Civilisation du journal: histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse Française au XIXe siècle (Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions, 2011), 269. 31 Anon., ‘The Kodak Exhibition of War Pictures’, The Amateur Photographer, 19 July 1901, 42. 32 British Pathé, Turkish Troops & Civilian Refugees in the Balkan War, film, 1912, 1922.46. 33 As illustrated a few years ago by the Mackenzie-Porter debate: John M. MacKenzie, ed., Popular Imperialism and the Military: 1850–1950 (Manchester; New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1992); Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004). For France, see Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, Culture coloniale: La France conquise par son empire, 1871–1931 (Paris: Autrement, 2003).

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34 Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, La Fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: la Découverte, 2006). 35 Simon J. Potter, ‘Empire, Cultures and Identities in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain: Empire, Cultures and Identities in Britain’, History Compass 5, no. 1 (2007), 51–71; Andrew S. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century, 1st edition (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005).

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36 Two online databases were used: Gallica.fr and Britishnewspapers.com. OCR accuracy can vary considerably between the two, or between two press titles within each database. 37 Dominique Kalifa, ‘Faits divers en guerre (1870–1914)’, Romantisme 27, no. 97 (1997), 89–102. 38 Anon., ‘L’illustration and Lucien Marc’, The Sketch, 15 January 1896, 18. 39 Cited in Anon., ‘Études générales’, Le Droit d’auteur, 15 December 1905, 154. 40 Andrew Hobbs, A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–1900 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018), figures 3.2 and 5.2. 41 Richard Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working-Class Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War, 1899–1902 (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1972). 42 See, for instance, Winston Churchill’s well-timed outrage against the desecration of the Mahdi’s remains in 1898 (see anon., ‘Bambaata’s head,’ Dundee Courier, 19 July 1906). 43 Richard Finlay, ‘The Scottish Press and Empire, 1850–1914’, in Simon Potter, ed., Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c.1857–1921 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 70–71. On Welsh opposition to the Boer War, see Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Wales and the Boer war’, in Kenneth O. Morgan, ed., Modern Wales: Politics, Places and People (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), 52–53. 44 For a more comprehensive analysis of these internal contradictions see Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’, The American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995), 303–34. 45 Julie d’Andurain, ‘Entretien avec Julie d’Andurain. La photographie en terrain colonial, un objet d’études’, Les Clés du Moyen-Orient, 1 March 2017 (www.lesclesdumoyenorient. com). 46 Emmanuelle Sibeud, ‘La gauche et l’empire colonial avant 1945’, in Jean-Jacques Becker et Gilles Candar, eds, Histoire des gauches en France (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 341–56. 47 Coll., Report of the International Commission to Inquire Into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, WS: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), 12. 48 McCullagh, Italy’s War for a Desert. 49 Ibid., 287. 50 Ibid., facing title page. 51 Bruno Bertherat, ‘Visiter les morts’, Hypotheses 19, no. 1 (2016), 377–90. 52 Randall McGowen, ‘Civilizing Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in England’, Journal of British Studies 33, no. 3 (1994), 257–82.

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53 Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, ‘C’etait un spectacle horrible à voir. Images de violences dans la presse de la belle époque’, Histoire & Société 4 (2002), 6–28. 54 Paul Fyfe, ‘Illustrating the Accident: Railways and the Catastrophic Picturesque in “The Illustrated London News”’, Victorian Periodicals Review 46, no. 1 (2013), 61–91. See also The Sphere front page on the 1907 earthquake in Jamaica (9 February 1907), 5. 55 L’Excelsior, 20 April 1913, 1.

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56 L’Aurore, 8 April 1900; The Quarterly Review, vol. 188, 219; see the review of Henry Savage Landor’s book in The Outlook, vol. 7, 1901. 57 John A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 29. 58 Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1896). 59 Cited in anon., ‘Sugar-coated’, Ross-shire Journal, 4 June 1897, 3. 60 Louis Thomas, Histoire de la guerre contre les Turcs (1912–1913), vol. 1 (Paris: Les Marches de l’Est, 1913), 11. 61 On indifference and apathy as cultural processes, see Anne Vincent-Buffault, L’Eclipse de la sensibilité: éléments d’une histoire de l’indifférence, subjectivités contemporaines (Lyon: Parangon-VS, 2009). 62 Walter Walsh, The Moral Damage of War (Boston: Ginn, 1906), 213–14. 63 Anon., ‘Sensationalism and its Fruits’, Kentish Independent, 21 May 1870, 4. 64 Christopher A. Casey, ‘Common Misperceptions: The Press and Victorian Views of Crime’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. 3 (2010), 367–91. For contemporaneous analyses, see Henri Henrot, De l’influence de la presse sur la criminalité (Paris: De Chaix, 1883); Paul Aubry, La Contagion du meurtre: étude d’anthropologie criminelle (Paris: Alcan, 1894). 65 Paul Henri Benjamin Balluet d’Estournelles de Constant, ‘Le respect que la race blanche doit aux autres races’, Conciliation Internationale, no. 12, December 1910, 28. 66 Louis Noir, Le Coupeur de têtes (Paris: Petite Bibliothèque universelle, 1886). 67 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 213–14. 68 Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 313. 69 Dominique Kalifa, Les Bas-fonds: histoire d’un imaginaire, l’univers historique (Paris: Seuil, 2013). 70 The Harlingue Agency sold photographs of Bonnot’s corpse taken at the morgue: ‘Le cadavre de Jules Joseph Bonnot (1876-1912), anarchiste français. Choisy-le-Roi (ValdeMarne), avril 1912’, Roger-Viollet collection (Paris, France), RV-46324. 71 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, ‘The African Roots of War’, The Atlantic Monthly, May 1915, 707–14. 72 See in particular Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1951).

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73 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, 1. Printing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk Nach Auschwitz? Beiträge Zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus Und Holocaust (Berlin: Lit, 2011); Thomas Kühne, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, and Complexities’, Journal of Genocide Research 15, no. 3 (2013), 339–62. 74 Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan, and Andreas Rose, The Wars before the Great War:

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Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 343–48. 75 Louis Corvisart, ‘Campagne de Mandchourie. Photographies réalisées par le lieutenantcolonel Corvisart’, 6 albums, Bibliothèque de l’École militaire (Paris, France), CESAT 30780. 76 Moreman, The Army in India, 93–95. 77 Olivier Cosson, ‘Expériences de guerre et anticipation à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale. Les milieux militaires franco-britanniques et les conflits extérieurs,’ Revue d'histoire moderne contemporaine 50, no. 3 (2003), 127–47. 78 MacKenzie, Popular Imperialism and the Military, 17. 79 Jean de Bloch, La Guerre future aux points de vue technique, économique et politique, vol. 3 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1899), 244.

Conclusion: ceci n’est pas un illustration 1 A photograph by Pierre Drouhin, ‘Le jardin du vétérinaire à Kayes’ (FR ANOM 8Fi393/82), taken some time after 1894, seems to show the exact location of Bonnetain’s photograph. 2 Henri Sarrazin, Races humaines du Soudan Français (Chambéry: Imprimerie générale de Savoie, 1901). 3 Person, Samori. 4 Raymonde Bonnetain, Une française au Soudan. Sur la route de Tombouctou, du Sénégal au Niger (Paris: Imprimeries réunies, 1894), 95. 5 Margot Irvine, ‘“On colonise par la femme et non par le fusil” Raymonde Bonnetain au Soudan (1892)’, text, http://revues-msh.uca.fr/viatica, 12 January 2021. 6 Bonnetain, Une française au Soudan, 178. 7 Paul Bonnetain harshly criticised Archinard in the Figaro (11 August 1893): ‘The French Sudan is the sole property of the artillerie de marine (French Marines artillery) which uses it as a field where only military stripes grow … a baptism of fire: nothing more!’ 8 The photograph was digitised a few years ago and is available online at https://biblio theques-specialisees.paris.fr/. 9 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Signes, traces, pistes’, Le Debat, no. 6 (1980), 3–44. 10 Georges Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position (Paris: Minuit, 2009), 67. 11 Barthes, Mythologies, 195.

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12 Siegfried Kracauer and Thomas Y. Levin, ‘Photography’, Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (1993), 421–36. 13 This is one of the powerful arguments put forward in Susan A. Crane, ‘Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography’, History and Theory 47, no. 3 (2008), 309–30. 14 François Brunet, La Photographie, histoire et contre-histoire, 1st edition (Paris: PUF, Presses

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Universitaire de France, 2017), introduction. 15 Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India, 4. 16 Shahid Amin, ‘Writing the recalcitrant event’, paper presented at the Remembering/ Forgetting: Writing Histories in Asia, Australia and the Pacific conference colloque, Sydney, July 2002. 17 See, for instance, Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011); Sylvie Thénault, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale: Camps, internements, assignations à résidence (Paris: Jacob, 2012). 18 Isabelle Surun, Dévoiler l’Afrique? Lieux et pratiques de l’exploration Afrique occidentale, 1780–1880 (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2018). 19 Callwell, Small Wars, 10, 30 and chapter 7.

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Selected bibliography

Primary documentation – Overview of archival repositories Australia National Gallery of Australia

France Archives du Ministères des Affaires Étrangères, La Courneuve Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine Archives Nationales d’Outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale de France et Société de Géographie Bibliothèque Patrimoniale de l’École Militaire, Paris Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand Centre d’Histoire et d’Études des Troupes d’Outre-Mer, Fréjus ECPAD, Ivry-sur-Seine Fondation Pathé Musée de l’Armée Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle Musée du Service de Santé des Armées, Paris Musée Historique de Strasbourg Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes

Netherlands Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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New Zealand National Library of New Zealand University of Otago, Hocken Library

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Norway Mission and Diakonia Archives VID, Stavanger

South Africa Historical Papers Research Archive, Witwatersrand University KwZulu-Natal University

United Kingdom Bodleian Library Bristol Museum British Library British Museum British Pathé and Reuters Collection Imperial War Museum King’s Own Royal Regiment, Lancaster King’s Own Scottish Borderers Regimental Museum Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College National Archives National Army Museum National Maritime Museum Pitts River Museum Royal Collection Trust Royal Commonwealth Society Royal Engineers Museum Royal Geographical Society Science Museum Sudan Archive, Durham Victoria and Albert Museum Wellcome Library

Selected bibliography

327

United States Getty Collection, Los Angeles Harry Ransom Center, Austin Library of Congress, Washington Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Patrick Montgomery Collection, foundation Aperture, New York Princeton University Library Smithsonian Museum, Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, Washington Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston

Secondary documentation Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Theory and History of Literature, v. 21. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, MN, 1986. Arendt, Hannah. Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics Civil Disobedience on Violence Thoughts on Politics and Revolution. A Harvest Book 219. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. ———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1951. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2008. Barnes, John. The Beginnings of the Cinema in England: 1894–1901. 1: 1894–1896. Revised and enlarged edition. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998. Barthes, Roland. ‘Le message photographique’. Communications 1 (1961): 127–138. ———. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil, 1957. Bat, Jean-Pierre, ed. Maintenir l’ordre colonial: Afrique et Madagascar (XIXe–XXe siècles). Collection ‘Histoire’. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012. Batchen, Geoffrey, and Jay Prosser, eds. Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. Baudrillard, Jean. La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu. Paris: Galilée, 1991. Becker, Annette, and Octave Debary, eds. Montrer les violences extrêmes: théoriser, créer, historiciser, muséographier. Paris: Creaphis Éditions, 2012. Beegan, Gerry. The Mass Image: A Cultural History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London. Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Benjamin, Walter, Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Selected Writings. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996.

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Beurier, Joëlle. Photographier la Grande guerre: France-Allemagne, l’héroïsme et la violence dans les magazines. Collection ‘Histoire’. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016. Bijl, Paul. Emerging Memory: Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Binns, C. T. Dinuzulu: The Death of the House of Shaka. London: Longmans, 1968. Blackburn, Terence R. Executions by the Half-Dozen: The Pacification of Burma. New Delhi:

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Tarr, Michael Aram and Stuart H. Blackburn. Through the Eye of Time: Photographs of Arunachal Pradesh, 1859–2006: Tribal Cultures in the Eastern Himalayas. Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library, v. 16/1. Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2008. Taylor, John. Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War. The Critical Image. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Teulié, Gilles. Les Afrikaners et la guerre Anglo-Boer, 1899–1902. Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry, 2000. Thénault, Sylvie. Violence Ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale: Camps, internements, assignations à résidence. Histoire. Paris: Jacob, 2012. Thomas, Martin. Violence and Colonial Order Police, Workers and Protest in the European  Colonial Empires, 1918–1940. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Thomas, Martin and Richard Toye. Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882–1956. 1st edition. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017. Thompson, Andrew S. The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century. 1st edn. Harlow ; New York, NY: Pearson Longman, 2005. Tillier, Bertrand. La Commune de Paris, révolution sans images? Politique et représentations dans la France républicaine (1871–1914). Epoques. Seyssel: Champ vallon, 2004. Tilly, Charles. From Mobilization to Revolution. New York, NY: Random House, 1978. Vincent-Buffault, Anne. L’Eclipse de la sensibilité  : Éléments d’une histoire de l’indifférence. Subjectivités Contemporaines. Lyon : Parangon-VS, 2009. Virilio, Paul. Guerre et cinéma. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Paris : Editions de l’Etoile, 1984. Wagner, Kim A. The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Walter, Dierk, and Peter Lewis. Colonial Violence: European Empires and the Use of Force. Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017. Wang, Dewei. The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. Waters, Catherine. Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850–1886. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

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Index Page numbers in bold refer to figures and their captions. Abbat, Émile-Louis 78–80, 79, 232 Abdullah ibn Muhammad, the Khalifa 212–13, 212 Abor Hills expedition (1911–12) 38, 39 accusatory photographs 172 Adana massacres (1909) 5–6 advertising 81 aesthetic awkwardness 79 aesthetic choice 208 aesthetics 52, 88, 98, 107, 111, 218 affaires coloniales 24 Afghanistan 68–9 Africa 16, 91, 92 albums 65, 66, 70, 70, 87, 97, 100–2, 101, 104, 139, 231–2, 263 collective codes 120 colonial experiences 125–9, 127, 128 narratives 120, 124, 129 personal 119–25, 122, 123 private 133 purpose 132–3, 132 regimental 131 voyeurism 201–2 Algeria 32, 59–60, 62, 63, 160, 162, 233, 234 Algiers 85–6 Almanach du Marsouin 226 Ambeyla Campaign 61 American Civil War 59, 61, 76, 112 Amritsar Massacre 46 anachronism 273 Anderson, Clare 200 Angell, Norman 264 Anglo-Afghan War, Second (1878–82) 68–9, 86 Anglo-Ashanti Wars 68, 253, 253, 254 Anglo-Burmese War, Second (1852–53) 60

Anglo-Burmese War, Third (1885–86) 74–6, 74 Anglo-Sikh War, Second (1848–49) 60 Anglo-Zulu War 69, 70, 185–7, 186, 230, 253, 253 Annam 44 anthropometric images 30–3, 32, 33, 51, 189 anti-colonialism 7, 153, 164, 268–9 anti-imperialist photography 46–7 approximations 12 Archer, John 133 Archinard, Louis 93, 148, 149 archives 271 distortions 14–16 editing 14–16 grain 6 Armenian massacres 5–6, 108, 162 Armstrong, H. W. 172 Army and Navy Illustrated, The 244, 245 Ashanti Empire 94 Asia 16, 91 Aspinall, Cecil 192 Asseraf, Arthur 160 Atbara, Battle of 17–19, 18, 188, 190 atrocities 108, 236 Belgian Empire 166–7, 247–8, 248 denials 143 effects 10 Morocco 138 obfuscation 143–4 Sino–Japanese War (1894–95) 86 visibility 257–62 atrocity photographs xvii, 18, 44–7, 46, 67, 184, 213–14, 257–62 audience 5 Auschwitz 10 Australia 11, 117, 119

336

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authenticity 101, 178 authority 119 Azan, Paul 136, 235, 236 Azoulay, Ariella 5, 11 Baden-Powell, Robert 113, 117, 181–3, 182, 205–6 Bailey, Frederick 134 Bain News Service 249 Bakel pictures scandal 148–54, 149, 150, 158, 172 Balaklava, Battle of 55 balance of power 203 Baldwin, Herbert 107–8 Balkan massacres 10 Balkan Wars (1912–13) 107–8, 109, 110, 141, 146, 172, 222, 252, 253, 253, 257, 259–60, 263, 264 Bambatha Rebellion 128–9 Barbier, Joannès 148–9 Bakel pictures scandal 149, 150–3, 150 Baring, Evelyn 159 Barnett brothers 113–15, 114 Barthes, Roland 130 Baschet, René 244 Bataille, George 201 Bate, George Thomas 62 Baudrillard, Jean 242 Bazeilles, Battle of 226 Beato, Felice 55, 56, 57, 60, 65, 197 Beaux-Arts de Paris 94 Beevor, Walter Calverley 227 Béhanzin, the King of Dahomey 40–1, 41–2, 42, 44 Belgian Congo 141 Belgian Empire 108, 166–7, 247–8, 248 Benin 165–6 Benjamin, Walter 57 Bennett, Ernest 213 Berlin Conference (1884–85) 73–6, 91 Bertillon, Alphonse 32 bertillonage 32, 33 Betts, Charles S. 55 Bhambatha kaMancinza 47, 256, 275 Binger, Louis Gustave 94 Birsa Munda 188, 189 Black and White 89, 98, 103, 175, 235, 243 Black and White Budget 243–4 Black and White War Albums 100–2, 101

Index black legends 190 Black Mountain Campaign 52 Blackwood, Frederick Temple 74 blind spots 7–8, 129, 131–3, 132 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen 156 bodies, enemy 181–216, 266–9, 267 clichés 185 defeated leaders 185–9, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192–3 photographic perspective 205–6, 207, 208–16, 208, 212 profanation 206, 207, 208–14, 208 and punishment 193–7, 194, 195, 198, 199–205, 204 reframed 185–8, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192–3 resistance 205 symbolically subdued 192–3 victor’s gaze 187 bodies, own dead 217–21, 218, 219 anonymity 218 cause of death 221–2 commemoration 226 documenting 231 graves 229, 230–3, 232, 233 mourning 229 mutilated 235 photographic substitutes 227, 229–33, 230, 232 restraint 233 visibility 217–21, 218, 219, 233, 234, 235–9, 236 body language 186 Boer War, Second (1899–1902) 2–3, 81, 83–4, 89, 102–4, 124, 131, 132–3, 132, 146, 172, 175, 176, 178, 223, 227, 228, 231, 235, 251, 255, 263, 264 Battle of Spion Kop 104–5, 217–21, 218, 219, 256, 274 Bogle, Paul, execution of 52 Bolak agency 155–6 Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon 70 Bonnetain, Raymonde 272 Bonnetain, Renée, portrait 266–9, 267 Bopp, Petra 13 Botha Pass, Battle of 175 Bourdon, Georges 108 Bourgon, Jérôme 45, 201 Bourne, Samuel 34 Boussuge, Joseph 136

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Index Boxer Rebellion 84, 91, 102, 121–5, 122, 123, 142, 172, 203, 222, 232, 251 Brady, Mathew 61 Brau de Saint-Pol Lias, Xavier 229, 230 British South Africa Company 92–3, 113 Brooks, Sydney 146 Brown, William Harvey 117 brutality 133, 159–60, 161, 183 Bakel pictures scandal 148–54, 149, 150 documenting 46–7, 46 tolerable 95 Bull, René 89–90, 90, 98, 100, 103, 174, 174, 235–6, 236, 251 Burke, John 68–9, 86 Burma 154, 158 Burmi, Battle of 47–8 Burot, Prosper 221 Bystander, The 247–8, 248 Callwell, Charles 25, 209 cameras 1, 5, 16, 64, 68, 82 as agent of subjection 28 cost 81–2 durability 81 first contact with 34, 35, 36–8, 36 Kodak Brownie 82 ownership 104 panoramic 1 performative function 33–4, 36–8 presence 28 shutter mechanisms 89, 90 size 79–80, 88, 103 technological changes 79–80 tropicalised 82 the Verascope 29–30, 29 Cameron, Charles 143 Capa, Robert 112 capital punishment 26 captions 177, 268 Cardwell Reforms 222 Cargopoulo, Basile 162, 163 Carnegie Endowment 257 Carnegie Foundation 108 Casablanca, bombardment of 26, 136 Casement, Roger 166, 169 casualties 22, 104, 129, 221–4, 223, 224, 225, 226–7, 264 caution 11 Cavaignac, Antoinette Charlotte 139

337 censorship 17, 81, 103, 115, 142–7, 238, 241, 271, 274 Central News Agency 108 ceremonies of submission 192–3 Cetshwayo kaMpande 185–7, 186 Chailley-Bert, Joseph 31, 75 Charles-Roux, Jules 97 Chérau, Gaston 257–8 children xvii, 266–70, 267, 270 China 1–2, 2, 21, 24, 60, 91, 201 anti-British museum 11–12 denunciation photographs 164 vernacular photography 45 China Relief Expedition, 1900 2 Churchill, Winston 101, 217–18, 235 cinema 251–2 civilians 105, 106, 107, 109, 236–7 Clarke, George 146 Clemenceau, Georges 148, 171–2 clichés 185 codes of representation 42–3 Coillard, François 43 co-imperialism 167–9 collateral damage 105 collections, editing 13–16 collective memory, erasures 16 Collomb, Jean-Marie 93–4, 192 colonial, understanding 23–4 colonial contexts 59–62, 75, 91 colonial cultures 242, 252–7 colonial development 4 colonial expansion 1–2, 50, 54, 79, 80, 90, 261 sanitised 4 visualisation 250 colonial experiences, visibility 125–9, 127, 128 colonial habitus 126 colonial infiltration 28, 29–34, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36–8, 36 colonial legacies 13 colonial library, the 271 colonial neuropathy 143 colonial policies, reformist 26 colonial scandals 81 colonial turn 65, 66, 67–73, 70, 72 colonial violence 274 photographic perspective 205–6, 207, 208–16, 208, 212 realities of 276 as spectacle xvi

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338 colonial warfare 22–3 coverage 242–4, 245, 246–52, 246, 247, 248, 252, 253, 254, 255 distance 53 intensity 57 press coverage 252–6, 253, 254, 255 terminology 24–7 visibility 240–65 visualisation 250 colonialism 23–4, 92 colonies, definition 23 colonisation 2, 23–4 commemoration 226 commercial photography 73–4 Committee of Imperial Defence 146 commodification 95 commonplaces 12 communication 96 composite images 152 Comptoir Photographique Colonial 81, 82 conflict photography 2–3 1890s 91–7, 95 1898–1901 97–8, 99, 100–5, 100, 101 1900–14 105–12 early 52–77 later 78–112 pioneering experiences 59–62 visual economy 105–12 Congo Free State 47, 108, 166–7, 169, 172, 247–8, 248 Congo Reform Association 166–7 conquest 25–7 conscientious objectors (to photography) 51 context 110, 148–55 importance of xvi loss of 8 Renée Bonnetain portrait 266–9, 267 control 142–7, 237–8 illusion of 31 limits of 204–5 loss of 28 Coquibus, Captain Émile 40–1, 41 Coriat, Percy 13 corporal punishment 26, 200–1, 204 corpses 60, 65, 87, 95, 100, 101, 108, 109, 123–4, 129, 130, 132–3, 132, 137, 138–40, 139, 151, 152, 258 Corvisart, Charles 146, 263 Couadou, Paul 126

Index Couppier, Jules 58, 59 Cremnitz, Henry 71–2 Crete 196–7, 198 Crimean War 55, 56, 57, 59, 63, 76, 222, 223 critical reaction 256 criticism 10 Cronwright, Samuel 117 Crozier, Frank P. 47 Cundall, Joseph 223 Curzon, George Nathaniel 14 d’Albéca, Alexandre 40 d’Amade, Albert 25, 84 d’Andurain, Julie 250 d’Estournelles de Constant, Paul Henri Balluet 261 d’Heudecourt, Louis Armand 65, 67 d’Orléans, Philippe 61 d’Orléans, Robert, Duc de Chartres 61 Dahomey 40–2, 42, 93, 94, 95, 165, 179 dark tourism 125 darkrooms 56 Davitt, Michael 219–20 de Béhagle, Ferdinand 236 de Bloch, Jean 264 de Cointet, Émile 206 de La Pradelle, Albert 103 de La Sizerann, Robert 88 de Lamothe, Henri-Félix 144, 151 de Lanessan, Jean-Marie 31 de Traversay, Marie Emmeran 120 death 74, 74, 129, 131, 197, 199, 258 debate culture 257 decapitations 47, 126, 138, 152, 160, 161, 164, 168, 173, 175, 177, 177, 190, 202, 203, 206, 207, 208–12, 208, 256, 258–9 decolonisation 15 defeated leaders, treatment of bodies 185–9, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192–3 degradation 267 Deleuze, Gilles 115 Denshawai incident 155–6, 157, 158, 159, 159, 180, 200 denunciation photographs 155, 162–9, 165, 247–8, 248 derealisation 242–3 Derrida, Jacques 15 desecration 12, 131, 168 development 25

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Index Devès, Gaspard 153–4 devotion to duty 226 Dickens, Charles 61 Didi-Huberman, Georges 10, 269 Dieulefils, Pierre 49, 135 Disdéri, Eugène 64 diseases 221–2 display 117, 118 dissemination 5–6, 94, 102, 114–15 dissonance 52, 268, 269 distance 10, 22–7, 53, 60, 62, 76, 98, 177–8, 180, 221, 256, 263 distant reading 252–6, 253, 254, 255 documentary corrosion 13–16 documentary positivism, illusion of 7 Dogba, Battle of 95 domestic bliss xvii domination 49–50 Doré, Gustave 67 double discourse 143 double effect 193 double-standards xv–xvi Doutté, Edmond 37 dread 209 Driefontein, Battle of 132–3, 132 Drury, William Price 196–7 Du Bois, W. E. B. 20, 262 dubious agendas 11–12 Duquesne, Frederick Joubert 167 Durand, Marguerite 269 Durand-Brager, Henri 58 Duruy, Victor 175 East Africa 31 East India Company 60 editing, collections 13–16 Edwards, Dennis 220 Egypt 69–70, 145, 245 Denshawai incident 155–6, 157, 158, 159, 159, 180, 200 Egyptian Delegation to the Peace Conference 46–7, 46 Elias, Norbert 199, 259 Ellerton-Fry, Lieutenant William 93 emotion, capturing 122 emotional reactions 259 emotions, power of 12 empathy 215 empires 23, 24

339 enemies, definitions of 110 English language, colonial warfare 24–5 engravers 98, 111 Entente Cordiale, the 168 erasures 13–14 Établissement de communication et de production audiovisuelle de la Défense (ECPAD) 125 Ethiopia 65, 67 Ethnological Society of London 31 Etienne, Eugène 152 euro-centrism 23 evidence 172 exceptionalism 6 exchange value 4, 73 executions 59–60, 72, 73–6, 74, 76, 102, 106, 113–14, 114, 117, 118, 122–3, 122, 124, 125, 126–7, 128, 143, 147, 151, 152, 155–6, 157, 158, 159, 192–3, 194, 195, 197, 198, 200, 202, 203, 205 exhumed pictures, dubious uses 11–12 exoticism 86, 107 experience, communicating 134–40, 137, 139 exposure times 56 extra-European wars coverage 242–4, 245, 246–52, 246, 247, 248, 252, 253, 254, 255 press coverage 252–6, 253, 254, 255 visibility 240–65 see also American Civil War; Balkan Wars (1912–13); colonial warfare; Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) extreme historical objects, literature 10 face value 4 Fairbridge, Dora 231 fake battles 172, 174–5 falsification 172 famine 62, 63, 78, 89 Fauchery, Antoine 61 Fenton, Roger 55, 222 Ferneyhough, George 69 Fez massacres 237, 238 fictionalisation 248–9 filters 14 Fiorillo, Luigi 69 firepower, demonstration of 136–8, 137 First World War 16, 86, 88, 106, 110, 227, 238, 239, 242, 262, 265, 273

Index

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340 Flandrin, Marcelin 273 flash photography 72 Forbin, Victor 22 Ford, Walter 131 foreign interventionism, support 92 formalist approach 215 Foster Fraser, John, Pictures from the Balkans 10, 11 Foucault, Michel 183, 199, 261 Foulkes, Charles 83–4, 132–3, 132, 232, 232 Fox, Paul 98 framing 19–22, 28, 99, 208 violence France 7 archival editing 15 colonial exactions 3 colonial policy 250 Dépôt de la Guerre 64 foreign policy 68 image-collection campaigns 30–3, 34 Franco-British silence 167–9 Franco-Prussian War (1870) 67, 145, 226 freedom of the press 146 Freetown, Sierra Leone 43 Frémeaux, Jacques 226–7 French language, colonial warfare 24–5 French Photography Company (Compagnie Française de Photographie) 79–80, 81 French Sudan 148–54, 149, 150 Friedrich, Ernst, Krieg Dem Kriege! (War on War) 12

globalisation 147 Godfrey, John Henry 1–2, 2 Goldie, George 142 good taste 238 Gordon, Charles 17, 213, 236 Gorst, Eldon 159 government archives 15–16 gradations, in the depiction of violence 140–2 grand narratives 20, 54 Graphic, The 17, 18–19, 18, 22, 88, 93, 106, 108, 155, 156, 193, 197, 213, 244, 249 grave photographs 229, 230–3, 232 Great Britain 7 archival editing 15 colonial policy 250 foreign policy 68 General Photographic Establishment 63 image-collection campaigns 30–3 national differences within 256–7 Greco–Turkish War (1897) 89, 90, 196–7 Green, Jonathan A. 187 Gregson, Francis 89, 98, 99, 101 grieving 221, 229, 239 group portraits 131 guerres lointaines 25 guerrilla forces 78 Guinea 48 Gulf War 242 Gulland, Alexander Dudgeon 52 Gyantse, anti-British museum 11–12

Gaden, Henri 164, 269–70, 270 Gallieni, Joseph 25, 30, 93–4, 96–7, 125, 192, 193–6, 194, 195, 211, 231 Gardner, Alexander 61 Gaudin, Alexis 61 Geary, Grattan 75 Geiser, Jean 69 Gell, Robert 220 generational distance 13 Gentil, Émile 206 geographical horizons, extension of 23 geography, of violence 141–2 Germany 137, 140, 262 Gervais, Thierry 105–6, 243, 258 Gifford, D. H. 38, 39 Ginzburg, Carlo 269

halftone printing 243–4, 246–7 Hanoi 127 Harding, William J. 62 Hardouin, Georges 235 Hare, James H. 22, 106, 251 Harfeld, Ferdinand-Joseph 36 Harlingue, Albert 211 Harris, Clare 12, 134 Harris, Neil 246–7 Harrison, Frederic 257 Harrold, John 65 Harte, William 128–9 Harvey, Colonel Frederic 175, 176 Head, Francis B. 63–4 heirlooms 14 Henri-Gouraud 120

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Index Henry, Edward 33 Herero and Nama genocide 140 heroisation 249 heroism 100, 107, 224, 225 Hevia, James 91, 196 history books, iconography 14–15 Hoàng Hoa Thám 49, 50, 190, 191 Hobhouse, Emily 251 Hobson, John Atkinson 259 Hocquard, Charles-Édouard 71–3, 72, 96 Holm, Neils Walwin 43 Holocaust, the 262 Hooper, William Wallace 91 scandal 73–6, 74, 154, 158, 197, 199 Hooper affair, the 73–6, 74, 154, 158, 197, 199 horror 208 Howard, Hubert 85 Howlett, Robert 223 humanitarian discourses 3, 164, 165–6, 213–14 humiliation 48, 76, 91, 140, 186, 191 Huxley, Thomas 31 iconography 14–15, 61 iconophobia 10 ideas, speed of spread 19–20 Illustrated London News, The 65, 68, 98, 100, 156, 172, 175, 256 illustrations 84 illustrators 98 image management 145 image selection 269–71 image-collection campaigns 30–3, 34 images, role 107–8 image-texts 135–6 Imbert, Edgar 83, 125–7, 127, 128 Imbert, Edgard 30 immediacy 89, 99, 203 imperfection, deliberate 132 imperial, understanding 23–4 imperial dynamics 1–2 imperial expansion 25–7 imperial influence 92 imperial lessons 196 imperial narratives 4 imperial nostalgia xvii imperialism 147 imposed meanings 46–7

341 impropriety 259 incomes 103 India 135, 140, 188, 189, 223 Abor Hills expedition (1911–12) 38, 39 Amritsar Massacre 46 anthropometric images 32–3 famine, 1897 89 northwest frontier 235–6, 236 Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–49) 60 topographic service 96–7 vernacular photography 44, 44–5 Indian Mutiny 30–1, 55, 60, 197, 237–8 indifference 259–60 Indochina 31, 32, 91, 127, 127, 144, 190, 191, 203, 225, 229, 230 industrial warfare 54 inhumanity 267 Institute of International Law 214 institutional collections 15–16 interpretation 266–77, 267, 270 inverted images 154–5, 155–62, 157, 159, 161, 163 invisible violence 19 Iraq War 238 Irish question 156 irregular fighters 184 Italy, intervention in Libya 106, 107, 141, 166, 257–8 James, William 261 Japan 84, 146 Jaurès, Jean 160 Jiang Zhaotang 45 Jones, Corporal E. W. 60 journals 83 judicial systems 201 justice, quest for 169 juxtaposition 190, 191 Kadungure Mapondera 188 Kalifa, Dominique 248–9 Kentish Independent 260 Khartoum 17, 85, 168 King, The 247 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert 17, 213 Koreaki, Kamei 22 Kousséri, Battle of 22 Kowloon 202 Kracauer, Siegfried 271

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342 L’Excelsior 240–2, 241, 258 L’Humanité 160, 161 L’Illustration 17, 95, 108, 109, 149, 150, 151–3, 168, 190, 194, 195, 203, 207, 210, 224, 226, 236, 237, 240, 243, 244, 249, 250, 254, 256, 258 La Justice 148 L’Univers illustré 73 Labouret, Henri 200 Lacan, Ernest 56–7 L’Amateur photographe 69 Lamy, François 22, 96, 206 Lamy, Paul 34 Landor, Arnold Henry Savage, In the Forbidden Land 34, 35, 36 Langeberg Mountains 128 Langlois, Charles 56 Langlois, Jean-Charles 63 Laperrine, François-Henry 231–2 Lartigue, Major 164, 165 Lavée, Jules 206 Le Bon, Gustave 259 Le Journal 106, 244 Le Matin 106 Le Mée, Alexandre 83 Le Myre de Vilers, Charles 127–8, 143–4 Le Petit journal 244, 254 Le Petit Parisien 244, 254 Le Temps 94 Lebesgue, Octave 153 Leclerc, Max 142 lectures 251, 264 legitimacy 43 legitimate violence, colonial authorities claim to 203, 204 Leopold II, King of Belgium 166–7 Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul 68 Les Hommes du jour 26 letters 139 Leune, Jean 108 liberation 164 Libya 84, 106, 107, 141, 166, 257–8 Linfield, Susie 215 literature 275–6 Lloyd, James 69, 70 Loch, Edward D. 98, 101 López, Javier 62 Louis, Paul 21 Lugard, Frederick 92, 168, 192, 201

Index Lusty, G. H. 189 Lyautey, Hubert 3, 14, 30, 31, 86, 97, 127, 129, 130, 142, 211, 241 Lydon, Jane 11, 50 lynching postcards 12 macabre pictures, market for 13 McCosh, John 60, 71 McCullagh, Francis 166, 257–8, 273 McDonald, James 64 MacNeill, John Gordon Swift 156 Madagascar 29–30, 29, 44, 73, 125, 127, 127–8, 128, 135, 144, 175, 192 cemeteries 231 executions 192–3, 194, 195 pacification 14, 96 press coverage 253, 255 Mafeking 235 Mahmud Ahmad 188, 190 Maji-Maji War (1905–07) 31 Mali 266–9, 267 Mangin, Charles 120, 138, 241 manipulation 18, 96, 151, 154, 155, 171–2, 173, 176, 177–8, 177, 180, 271 captions 177 fake battles 172, 174–5 photomontages 175, 177, 177, 178, 179 stagings 172, 174–5, 174 Manual of the Laws of War on Land (Moynier) 214 Maori Wars (1845–72) 62 mapping and mapmaking 64 Marc, Lucien 152, 153, 254 Marchand, Jean-Baptiste 34, 47 Marchand Mission (1898) 34, 102 Martial, J. B. 233 Martin, Albert 144 martyrs 236–7 Mashonaland 92–3, 188 mass violence 262–3 massification 95 mastery, signs of 51 Matabele War, Second 181–3, 182 Matabeleland 113–15, 114, 116, 141 Matania, Fortunino 155 materiality xvii, 59, 119 Maux, André 138, 139 Mbembe, Achille 183 media environment 155

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Index media internationalisation 273 media sensations 92 mediatisation 86 medicine 227, 228 Méhédin, Léon 63 Melegnano cemetery 59, 59 memory 13, 14, 120–1, 122 Merlaud-Ponty, William 144 Mexican–American War 55 Michel, François 40, 94 microphotography 67 military attachés 84 military medicine 227, 228 military photography 26, 62–4, 67 military/civilian porosity 96 missionaries 45, 65, 166, 169 modernity 33–4, 42–3, 57, 90, 205 Mokoena, Hlonipha 187 Mome Gorge, Battle of 47–8 Monnier, Marcel 94 montage 270 Montorgueil, Georges 153 moral metrics 91 moral polyphony 4 moralities 73–6 Morant Bay Rebellion, Jamaica 52 morbidity 258 Morel, Edmund 166–7 Morning Leader 103 Morocco 85–6, 87, 129, 130, 134, 159–60, 161, 175, 177, 202, 222, 235, 240–2, 241 atrocities 138 bombardment of Casablanca 136 conquest of 136–40, 137, 139 Fez massacres 237, 238 mourning 221, 229, 239 Moynier, Gustave 214 Muafangejo, John Ndevasia 49 Mumler, William H. 171 Murchison, Roderick 65 Musée de l’Armée 121 Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac 42 Muséum national d’histoire naturelle 143 Mwanga II, King of Buganda 187 Myanmar 37 myth making 45 Namibia 140 Napier, Robert 65, 67, 71

343 Napoléon, Prince Imperial 230 Napoleon III 58 narratives 6, 48–9, 54, 75, 120, 124, 129, 156, 165, 235, 273 Natal 47, 172, 173 National Army Museum 104 National Maritime Museum 123 national power 142 nationalist narratives 48–9 native barbarism, stereotypes of 261–2 Naudeau, Ludovic 22, 106 necropolitics 183 negatives, printing choices 14 Nehanda Nyakasikana 188 new journalism 249 New York Times 167 New Zealand 62, 71 newspaper civilisation 251 newspapers 24 Nicklin, Richard 57 Niger Bend, the 167–8 non-combatants 105 normalization 19 obscenity 259, 260 official secrets 145–6 Omdurman, Battle of xv, 85, 97, 98, 99, 100, 100, 101 Opium War, Second (1856–60) 60–1, 204 Ottoman Empire 162, 163, 164, 196–7 Ouagadougou 78 Ovonramwen Nogbaisi 187 pacifist movement 169, 170, 171 paper cemeteries 229 Papillon, John Ashton 60–1 paradigms, clash of 6 Paris Commune 67, 261 Paris Conference (1919) 46–7, 46 Paris Evangelical Missionary Society 43 Paris Universal Exhibition, 1855 56–7 Pathé 106, 172, 201, 251, 258 Pennequin, Théophile 73 performance 55 personal, albums 119–25, 122, 123 Peruvian Amazon 169 Petitdemange, Charles 172

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344 Philippine–American War (1899–1902) 17–18, 141 Phillips, Lisle March 104 photo agencies 17, 22, 249–50 photographers 100 incomes 103 role 80–1 photographic act, the 28, 40–1, 41 photographic culture 83 photographic literacy 37 Photographic News, The 58, 111–12 photographic perspective, colonial violence 205–6, 207, 208–16, 208, 212 photographic presence 34 photographic relations 36–7 photographic resistance 46–7, 46 photography and photographs 5–6, 12 accessibility 104, 273 anti-imperialist 46–7, 46 apparatus 56 and conflict 3 contradictory deployments 238–9 democratisation 133 grand narratives 54 growth 273–5 loss of control 28 main function 2 major inflation 26–7, 54 popularity of 7, 104 potential dominance 88 power of 178, 180, 209, 261, 271, 276 relational dimension 5 relevance 28 role 4, 21 photography-focused collections 16 photo-inflation 26–7, 54 photojournalism 3, 54 early 88–9 photomontages 175, 177, 177, 178, 179 physicality 208 Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature 20 Pinney, Christopher 44–5, 271 Poincet, Maurice 83 police operations 26 political submission 192–3 Poole, Deborah 4 pornographic photographs 44, 260 Porter, Captain Thomas 62

Index postcards xvi, 1, 49, 51, 134–40, 137, 139, 146, 169, 170, 190 Potter, Simon 250 power relations 23–4, 28, 38, 39, 40–7, 41, 42, 46, 47, 50–1, 204–5, 238–9, 275 precedent, lack of 215 Prempeh 187 press coverage 252–6, 253, 254, 255 press freedom 146 printing technologies 73, 243–4, 246–7 Prior, Melton 68 prisoners of war 31, 129, 151 private photographs 119, 119–25, 122, 123, 133, 268 profanation 206, 207, 208–12, 208 professionalisation 105 progress 196 property rights 36–7 proselytising 43 prostitution 122 protest movements 141 Protschky, Susie 126 Prussian–Danish War, Second (1864) 61 public awareness raising 160 public images 124 public opinion 104–5, 154, 220, 260, 276 Publishers’ Circular 254 punctum, the 130 punishment 3, 123–4, 180 Denshawai incident 155–6, 157, 158, 159, 159, 200 and enemy bodies 193–7, 194, 195, 198, 199–205, 204 local 202–3 perspectives 199–200 racial dimension 200–1 spectacular 24–5, 76 symbolic gestures 199 punitive expeditions 24–5 Rabah, decapitation 206, 207, 208–12, 208, 236–7, 256 racial differentiation 103 racial mapping 30 racialised logic xvi radicalisation 87 railways 23 Rausch, William 116, 118 realism 17–19, 98, 175, 244, 247, 260, 261

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Index reality 171, 242 reassurance, sense of 2 reception 256–7 Reclus, Élisée 68–9, 153 Redmond, William 48 reframing 49–50 enemy bodies 185–8, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192–3 regimental albums 131 Reibell, Émile 22, 209 reinventions 12 Rémond, Georges 107 representation, codes of 42–4 repression 3, 158 repulsion 10 resistance 141–2, 275 restraint marks 188 retaliation 221 retribution, spectacular 196–7, 205 revelation narratives 6 revenge 161, 168 Review of Reviews 115, 116 revulsion 12 Rhodes, Cecil 92–3, 113 Rhodesia 113–15, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118 Ricalton, James 251, 252 Rigadin aux Balkans (film) 172 risk 85 ritual portrait sessions 40 Rivière, Henri 229, 230 Robertson, James 56, 57 Rochefort, Henri 153 Rochfort, John Downes 69 Rodes, Jean 22, 106 Roque, Ricardo 210 Rorke’s Drift, Battle of 69 Rosenthal, Joseph 106 Royal Engineers 63–4, 83–4 Royal Geographical Society 65 Royal Niger Company 142 Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) 3, 22, 84, 105–6, 108, 141, 146, 169, 170, 184, 222, 249, 251, 252, 253, 253, 255, 263, 264 Ryan, James R. 65 Sachtleben, William 162 sacrilegious power 209 St James Gazette 89 Sala, George Augustus 61

345 sale, of photographs 114–15 Salles, Firmin-André 31–2, 32, 40 Samory Touré 40, 48, 164–5, 165, 187, 266 Sarrault, Alfred 62, 63 Sarrazin, Henry 266 Sassoon, Joanna 15 Savaron, Calixte 127–8 scalar value 242 Schreiner, Olive 118, 154–5 scientific endeavour 65 Scott, George 244 Scramble for Africa xv, 91 secrecy 15 Sekula, Allan 37 Sekuru Kaguvi 188 selection criteria 8 selective denunciation 167–9 self-censorship 115, 145 self-documentation 120–1 Selous, Frederick 181 Sémelin, Jacques 183 Sénèque, Jules 135 Senior, Lieutenant Henry 61 sensitivities 5 sensitivity thresholds 257–62 Septans, Albert 25 Service historique de la Défense 138 settler colonialism 117, 119 sexual violence 108 shared experience 131 Shaw, George Bernard 156, 213 shock and awe tactics 208 shooting techniques 84 Sierra Leone 197 Simpson, William 58 Sino–Japanese War (1894–95) 22, 86 Sketch, The 197, 223, 254 small wars 2, 90–1, 91, 226–7, 263 Smith, Ernest W. 103 Smith, Frank G. 123–4, 123, 232 social Darwinism 214 social inequalities, racialisation of 261 social order, enforcing 199 Société de secours aux blessés militaires 222 soldier-photographers 83–6, 111, 135, 243 Sonolet, Louis 164 Sontag, Susan 2, 11, 12 souvenirs 121, 123–4, 125, 146 Spanish–American War (1898) 141

Index

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346 spectacle of information 258 Spectator, The 259 spectators 5 Sphere, The 106, 156, 168, 192, 244, 249 spheres of influence 23–4, 24 Spiller, John 63 Spion Kop, Battle of 104–5, 217–21, 218, 219, 256, 274 spirit photographs 171 stagings 50, 55, 172, 174–5, 174, 247–8, 248, 275 status 40 stereotypes 46, 72 Stoler, Ann 6 storytelling 101 Strassler, Karen 28 subgenres 21–2 submission, ceremonies of 192–3 Sudan Campaign 89, 97–8, 99, 100–2, 100, 101 suffering 3, 4, 52, 54, 91, 162, 166, 169, 171, 180, 224, 239 Surtees, Herbert Conyers 70 Swinhoe, Robert 60 Sykes, Frank 118 Szathmari, Carol 56–7, 57 tableaux vivants 129 Takata, Ellen 49 Taro, Gerda 112 technological changes 4, 68, 75, 79–80, 111 technological limitations 56–7 temporality 90, 272–5 tendentious images 171–2, 173, 174–5, 174, 176, 177–8, 177, 178, 179, 180 terminology, understanding 23–7 Terrier, Auguste 144, 250 Teulié, Gilles 135 textual information 102 themes 111 Thiele, Reinhold 103 Thiriat, Henri 150 Thomas, Louis 259–60 Thomas, Martin 167 Tibet 11–12, 34, 36, 134 Tilly, Émile 152 time, perceptions of 90, 272–5 Timm, Margo 49–50 Tinayre, Louis 96

Tirah Valley Campaign (1897–98) 91 Toffa, King of Porto-Novo 43 tolerance thresholds 131, 158, 257–62, 274–5 Tonkin 30, 34, 71–3, 72 torn photographs 13–14 torture tourism 122 Toucouleur Empire 93 tourism 124 Toye, Richard 167 trafficking 94 Tripolitania 166 trophy photographs 47–51, 50, 117, 131, 181–3, 182, 212–13, 212 truth 171, 171–2, 229 see also manipulation Trýõng Vãn San 44 Tugela, Battle of 103–4 Tukulor Empire 148–54, 149, 150 Tunisia 69 Tylar, William 221 Uccello, Paolo 100 Underwood and Underwood 106 unfolding events 28 Unger, Frederic William 219 United States of America Civil War 59, 61, 76, 112 debate culture 257 halftone printing 246–7 lynching postcards 12 photography-focused collections 16 Universal Peace Congress 169 Upper Zambezi 43 Urban Bioscope 106 van Hoepen, Jan 217–21, 218 vernacular photography 43–7, 46 victims, definitions of 110 Victoria, Queen 61, 213, 222–3, 224 victor’s gaze 187 Vigné d’Octon, Paul 143–4 Villiers, Frederic 86, 89 violence 2, 272 centrality of 275 disagreements over use 211–12 distancing 10, 22–7 education on 159–60 European distance from 3–4

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Index framing 19–22 geography of 141–2 gradations in the depiction 140–2 hierarchy of 141 intersections of 210–11 invisible 19 legitimate 203, 204 making visible 17–19, 18 mass 262–3 normalization xvii, 19 organised 3, 5 power of photographed 7–8 replication 11 selective visibilities 238 sensitivity to 115, 117 as social phenomenon 20–1 specificity of 76 terminology 25–6 use of 3–4 visualisation xvii, 10 Virilio, Paul 34 Virkar, Narayan Vinayak 46 visibility 17–19, 239, 263, 269 atrocities 257–62 blind spots 129, 131–3, 132 censorship 17, 81, 103, 142–7 colonial experiences 125–9, 127, 128 display 117, 118 extra-European wars 240–65 own dead 217–21, 218, 219, 233, 234, 235–9, 236 postcards 134–40, 137, 139 private photographs 119, 119–25, 122, 123 regimes of 113–47, 206 selective 238 self-censorship 115 vision, importance of 115 visual absence 51 visual crudeness 79 visual dissonance 2 visual economy xv–xvi, 4, 105–12 visual fix 10 visual illiteracy 37–8 visual information channels 251–2 visual innovation 52, 53 visual legacy 48 visual messaging 224 visual modernity 4 visual production, regime of 80

347 visual records 13–16, 79 visual repertoire 26 visual system 81 visual turn 65, 66, 67–73, 70, 72 Viti, Fabio 185 Vitou, J. 179 Voulet, Paul 78 voyeurism 10, 11, 129, 201–2 War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70) 62 war photographers 22, 53, 103 first use of term 103 war photography 3 birth of 17–18, 22 colonial contexts 59–62 military photography 62–4 visual turn 65, 66, 67–73, 70, 72 war-and-peace framework 3 warfare becomes ugly 98 changing image of 104–5 futility of 239 industrial 54 intensity 57 new perspectives 86, 88–91, 90 petrification of 58 privatisation 134–40, 137, 139 representations of 85, 86, 87, 98, 100, 111, 262–5 shock of 59 types 91–2 visibility 17–19 weapons 85, 87, 89–90, 90, 97 Weber, Max 199 Webster, R. V. 17, 18 Wellcome Library 104 West Africa 78–80, 79 Weule, Karl 31 Williamson, Noel 38 Wilson, Charles 67 Windsor Magazine, The 84 Wingate, Reginald 97–8, 188, 190, 212–13, 212 Wolseley, Garnet 92 women xvi, 139 Woodbury, Walter Bentley 73 Woodburytypes 73 Woolwich 63 wounded in action 222–4, 223, 224, 225

Index

348 wounding apertures 13 written depictions 12

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X-rays 227, 228

Yule, Henry 37 Zaki, A. H. 158, 159 Zimbabwe 92–3, 181, 188