The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary: Photography between France and Africa 1900–1939

Simon Dell’s The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary: Photography between France and Africa 1900–1939 sets out to excavate, from colonial photographic practices, new knowledge about the inner workings of both coloniality and photography. Provocatively framed and touching on diverse archives, Dell’s book demonstrates the ongoing necessity, now established after decades of transformative scholarship, of reading colonial archives from new perspectives – both ‘along’ and against the grain. The volume not only brings new material from these archives to our attention, but makes a cogent argument about why this material merits our consideration. At the same time, Dell’s research points to the many ethical and methodological challenges of working exclusively with visual and photographic images produced by colonial actors – or almost exclusively, as chapter four, on the astonishing photographic worlds of King Ibrahim Njoya of Bamum, is a notable exception to this rule. This is not colonial apologia, and Dell’s aim to ‘understand images of the colonized together with their frames of reference’ is sound. Yet his core theoretical framework, which maintains a laser-sharp focus on the colonisers’ desires visa-vis photography, severely limits the frames that are brought into play. Dell argues that, during the second half of the Third Republic (1870–1939), French colonial actors moving between France and West and Central Africa – Cameroon and Congo are key sites, although other sites are implicated – deployed photographic portraiture in ways that worked to shore up European notions of subjectivity in tandem with Western notions of representation. All three terms – subjectivity, representation, portraiture – become entangled, in this moment, in a seemingly unstoppable colonial-ideological machine, the ‘colonial imaginary’. Dell’s book is concerned with the role of photographic portraiture in a distinct subfield of this imaginary, that of ‘making men’. The precise pathologies of the Third Republic, which brought us free and secular public education, alongside a massive expansion, achieved through brutal military means, of the French colonial empire, are cast into sharp relief here. This is the era when, despite numerous internal contradictions, the Republican and the colonial imaginaries become definitively fused. Photographic portraiture is on hand to envision and embody this fusion. The argument is convincing. Yet it relies on an exceedingly narrow definition of portraiture, one that is premised on ‘a quite specific convergence of personhood and pictorial procedures’ that is, as Dell acknowledges, wholly European. To establish this convergence, in chapter one, he walks us through a philosophical story about the twin evolution of subjectivity and perspective in European art. Through