Photography and Agency: the German-Cameroonian Colonial History Through the Visual Sources

The history of colonialism and photography is closely linked to the industrial and imperialist expansion of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. The establishment of colonial rule over the African continent and the spread of photography as a means of documenting and transmitting images of distant regions began at the end of the nineteenth century. Colonial photography belongs to an incalculable number of images produced on the African continent during the era of the European presence, and which somehow found their way to Europe. Like its European neighbours, France, England and Belgium, the German colonial empire and its protagonists have left an indelible mark on the history of the photographic collections of German institutions. This intervention focuses on the vast archive of colonial photographs, those showing Cameroon, a colony under German rule between 1884 and 1919. By focusing on the photographs taken during the expeditions, I will show that they constitute sources and visual traces of German colonial history in Cameroon. Initially, I will look at imperial biographies, the direct links between agents and photographic collections for the benefit of the colonial empire, and the receptions they received. I will then address the question of the mutation of colonial objects, in this case photography, and its local agency. My analyses will be based not only on the theoretical postulates of the “biographical turn,” but also on the work of the British historian of photography Elizabeth Edwards, who studies the intersections between photography and history. To this end, we are no longer simply interested in the conception of
photographs as historical sources, which has long dominated the historical sciences, but rather in what “photographs do to history.”