The Thomas Hardie Dalrymple Grassfields Photographs Collection 1937-1942 (Royal Commonwealth Society Collections, University of Cambridge Library)

Collections of photographs by colonial officers, missionaries and medical personnel taken during the colonial era, can be found in many public and private archives and museums, in Africa, Europe and America. Although the existence of most of these collections have been made known to the public through exhibitions, catalogues and publications (Geary 1991, 2000; Webb 1987, 1988), some have received scant or no attention. This, however, is in spite of the role of colonial photographs as “testimony about early explorations and distant peoples and places” (Geary 1988). Colonial photography, Geary notes, is part of the “discourse about foreign worlds and foreign peoples—a discourse revealing as much about ‘us’ as it reveals about ‘them'” (Geary 1988: 11).