Photographs of Africa mainly follow the geographies of Italian, French, Belgian, and German imperial control on the continent. The largest archive relates to the collecting activities of the Association Connaissance de l'histoire de l'Afrique contemporaine (ACHAC), a consortium of scholars founded in 1990 devoted to exploring the legacies of European colonialism. Accounting mostly for the impact of French colonialism in Africa, the collection contains over 32 linear feet of photographs, albums, postcards and other ephemera relating mainly to the former French colonies of North, West and Central Africa. Produced by government agencies, commercial concerns, and private individuals, the images provide a cross-section of propaganda, ethnographic, and other visual materials, including those used in French colonial expositions in the first half of the twentieth century.
Other French holdings include seven albums by the explorer and photographer, Edouard Foà, who published nine books on Africa between 1895 and 1908. In 1886, he was hired by a Marseilles-based colonial trading company to manage a trading post in Porto-Novo, Dahomey (now Benin). In the following years he travelled extensively across Africa, taking photographs in West and East Africa, as well as modern South Africa, Mozambique, and Malawi. Further French-derived photographs of Africa include views documenting the building of a railroad in French Guinea, and images showing the French protectorate of Niger.
Image: Edouard Foà (French, 1862-1901). Mosquée à Salaga (Ghana). 1886-1890. Albumen print. Getty Research Institute, 93.R.114.
Belgian items include an important album from the Belgian Congo from 1908 and 1909, documenting the region during the first year of the often- brutal annexation of the territory. Italian colonial ambitions are represented by an album from Eritrea from the early 1940s, amd an album of photographs by Philipp Remelé taken during Gerhard Rolhlfs’s 1873 expedition in the Libyan-Egyptian desert.
The significant collection of photographs devoted to North Africa, mainly from French colonial Algeria, is outlined further down this page.