From photography’s beginnings, practitioners and theorists indulged in the fantasy of universal knowledge facilitated by the camera’s capacity to document the world. But it was a fantasy overwhelmingly devoid of critical acknowledgement of the skewed optic of imperialism. The GRI’s collection of world photographies, dominantly nineteenth-century, offers the possibility of pursuing counter perspectives. Few photographs are untouched by the contexts of imperialism, even when produced by indigenous photographers. The GRI’s holdings engage the legacies of photography and colonial control from the 1840s to the 1980s, including images from the Ottoman, British, French, German, U.S., and Soviet empires.
Areas of particular focus are Africa, Asia Minor, East Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, with particularly strong holdings in its North African, Latin American, and Asian photographs. World photographies are represented in a wide variety of photographic media, and formats including albums and photographically illustrated books. Collections amassed by collectors working in specific areas include the Middle East and North Africa, the Pierre de Gigord collection of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, the Oscar Birkett Payne Views of China, and the Clark Worswick collection of China and Southeast Asia.
Gathered together are a substantial collection of photographs of the international expositions from the 1850s to the 1930s that were the key emporia for the visualization of an increasingly integrated world market. Guidebooks and catalogs for the expositions and related ephemera and objects complement the visual record. The showcasing of peoples and goods by the empires represented at these expositions is augmented by a collection of over 630 photographic and printed panoramic images of cities and sites in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North and South America amassed by the French photographer and collector, Joachim Bonnemaison.
Image: Osman Hamdi Bey (Turkish, 1842-1910). Skodra from Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie en 1873. Constantinople: Imprimerie du “Levant Times & Shipping Gazette,” 1873. Photolithograph. Getty Research Institute, 96.R.14.