Other Lives of the Image

In the wake of intensifying debates on decolonisation and restitution in Africa and its francophone diaspora, a Facebook posting of 6 February 2020 gave an other life to a photographic portrait of the French-Italian explorer Savorgnan de Brazza taken in 1882.1 The uploaded digital scan of a photograph from nearly 140 years ago flashed up in a moment of contemporary hypervisibility, offering a visual pretext to denounce de Brazza and the effect of his interventions in Africa virtually and openly on a public post, pulling the image out of the academic and archival environments it had until then mostly inhabited. Trained at the French naval academy, de Brazza undertook three expeditions to West and Central Africa between 1878 and 1885 under the banner of anti-slavery and supported by the Société de Géographie de Paris and powerful political patrons. Effectively his expeditions helped to establish French territorial claims along the Ogooué and Congo rivers, and the French colony of Congo-Brazzaville was named after him. After his second expedition in the Congo which checked King Leopold’s ambitions in the region, de Brazza’s public reputation soared. A number of portraits were taken of the explorer at the renowned Nadar studio in Paris, where de Brazza appears against a painted backdrop of the seaside.2 Prints of these were placed in albums and can now be seen as single digitised images in the online portal of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.