Decolonising Female Missionary Photography
Lead Research Organisation:
Birkbeck, University of London
Department Name: History of Art
Abstract
My research will contribute to decolonising feminist art history through a study of photographs made by British
female missionaries working in Africa. European archives of missionary photography constitute one of the largest
visual collections of the late nineteenth-century colonial encounter yet photographs of and by missionary women
remain strangely absent from histories of photography; women's work; and colonialism. From a decolonial
perspective, my research will examine how female missionary photography gave aesthetic shape to colonial
ideologies of difference by mobilising evangelical sentiment and at the same time created a space of agency for
themselves as European women. In studying photographs by missionary women, I aim to explore contradictions
between post-colonial and feminist approaches, examples will include images of and by missionaries working in the
Congo, Togo, Nigeria and Zambia between 1876 and 1931: Alice Seeley Harris, Rebecca Wareham, Mary Slessor
and Mabel Shaw
female missionaries working in Africa. European archives of missionary photography constitute one of the largest
visual collections of the late nineteenth-century colonial encounter yet photographs of and by missionary women
remain strangely absent from histories of photography; women's work; and colonialism. From a decolonial
perspective, my research will examine how female missionary photography gave aesthetic shape to colonial
ideologies of difference by mobilising evangelical sentiment and at the same time created a space of agency for
themselves as European women. In studying photographs by missionary women, I aim to explore contradictions
between post-colonial and feminist approaches, examples will include images of and by missionaries working in the
Congo, Togo, Nigeria and Zambia between 1876 and 1931: Alice Seeley Harris, Rebecca Wareham, Mary Slessor
and Mabel Shaw
People |
ORCID iD |
| Sasha Morse (Student) |