The Violence of Colonial Photography

(Paperback)

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A ground-breaking study of the development of conflict photography in the British and French empires, looking at how the new technology of the camera was used to enforce colonial control.

The late nineteenth century saw a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the camera began to be widely available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and to project an image of supremacy across the world.

Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, this book offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades leading up to the First World War. It explores the various ways in which the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, it reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression.

Reviews

'I am happy to warmly recommend this book to those interested in how photography has shaped debates about the colonial world and how the visual influences our world view.'
Nathaniel Gardner, Amerika

The violence of colonial photography is a compelling account of photography as an instrument of British and French imperialisms. Mining a wide range of archival images from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Daniel Foliard offers a rich, albeit disturbing, history of how the production, dissemination and circulation of photographic depictions of symbolic and literal violence enabled and justified colonial power.
Professor Ali Behdad, author of Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East

The photographic archives of colonial expansion and the tainted ways of looking they have engendered have never been read with such thoughtful sensitivity, compassion and insight as in this book. Foliard powerfully exposes the imbrication of the camera in colonial violence even as he enjoins us to attend with care to the brutalised bodies and, as much as possible, to the people whose images confront us in this chilling and illuminating book.
Professor Marianne Hirsch, co-author of School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference

Praise for the French edition

In this brilliant study, Daniel Foliard delivers a subtle history of violence and its representations. Steamships, quinine, the machinegun: to these instruments of western colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth-century we must now add the camera. Such is the lesson of Combat, punish, photograph, which is dedicated to images of violence from the pre-1914 imperial world After closing this powerful and demanding book, youll never look at photos of violence, whether historical or contemporary, in the same way again. (French edition)
Andr Loez, Le Monde

Drawing on fascinating research in the British and French archives, [the author] recounts the creation of war photography in a colonial context. With great precision, he shows how the expeditions of the years 1890 to 1914 the inaptly named little wars radically transformed the representation of the suffering of others Far from being sensationalist, the book, which appears in the new series Histoire-monde from Editions La Dcouverte, is a rigorous demonstration of the combined power of Kodak and empire. (French edition)
Sylvain Venayre, LHistoire

'...in its exceptional scope, nuance and sophisticated linking of histories of photography and violence, this book is a landmark publication in the field and must surely be the go-to for a comprehensive study of early colonial conflict photography.' (French edition)
Will Fysh, H-France Review

Author Bio

Daniel Foliard is a Professor of Modern History at Universit Paris Cit