The violence of colonial photography by Daniel Foliard

Author:Daniel Foliard [Foliard, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2022-11-14T18:30:00+00:00

A matter of scales

Photographs that were described as ‘harrowing’ were not only used to denounce imperial violence or to break deliberate silences over the use of force in colonial environments. In fact, the 1890s saw the emergence of a vast internationalist and pacifist movement dominated by English-speaking networks. The influence of this constellation of anti-war groups was greater in the United Kingdom than in France in a number of respects.65 Highly active British missionary networks had been sharply critical of European imperial practices for decades, but photographs now played an important role in campaigns organised by various groups linked to the Universal Peace Congress. It should be emphasised once again that pictures of organised violence were used on a number of different, interlinked levels. The use of force in empires was indeed criticised, and so one can say that there was a specific discourse against empires or colonisation, but a more general denunciation of war and atrocities committed against civilians also emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The frame of reference expanded to encompass the entire world and all its misery. With the geographical scope now so wide, it was sometimes difficult to distinguish pacifism from criticism specifically directed at practices that could be described as colonial. Roger Casement, for example, who revealed the violence in the Congo, was first and foremost an internationalist and a pacifist; for Casement, the colonial dimension of the problem was only a secondary element. He continued his quest for justice in the Amazon, where his photographs revealed atrocities committed by employees of the Peruvian Amazon Company against the inhabitants of the Putumayo district.66

The first photographs to record suffering in distant territories appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Although they were superseded by other iconic images in the twentieth century, they nonetheless formed a substrate, now eroded, on which contemporary understandings of war, its victims, and abuses of all kinds could be built.67 The new aesthetics of mass death moved away from the engravings of the nineteenth century in favour of photography. Of course, some of the subject matter came from the colonies, but for those who were beginning to look at the world as an interconnected whole, English-speaking evangelists or French internationalists for example, the insanity was not only found in the clashes between empires, or colonial violence in particular, but in war itself. Images of the Russo-Japanese War, which was especially bloody, fuelled a pacifist discourse in a range of different visual formats, particularly postcards (Figure 6.8). And we have already seen that the fate of civilians was also highlighted in the Balkan wars, another crucial episode.

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