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Visual Anthropology14 (2001); 251–268.PHOTOGRAPHY IN AFRICA: EAST AND
INDIAN OCEAN ISLANDS
Throughout the twentieth century, the East Afri-
can photographic images in widest circulation in
the West were those related to safaris and disasters.
Within the region, portrait photography flourished
and became integrated into political life and
society. While less known and studied than work
from elsewhere in Africa, the region’s photographic
practices (including those of adjoining Indian
Ocean islands) embody a long history and several
rich traditions.
With its exotic animal life, East Africa was and
is regarded as a natural wonder. As early as the
1850s, Westerners were using photography to
scientifically document animals and create meme-
ntos of big-game hunts in the present-day nations
of Kenya, Tanzania, and Sudan. The telephoto
lens and other technical developments of the
1880s and 1890s made possible the prospect of
‘‘hunting’’ with the camera rather than the gun.
Pioneering camera adventurer A. Radclyffe Dug-
more wrote in 1910 of the challenge of such hunts:
‘‘shooting animals is so much easier than photo-
graphing them that there is no possible compar-
ison’’ (226). Typical of works published before
1914, including those by C.G. Shillings and
Edward North Buxton, Dugmore’s book features
140 photographs, mostly of wild animals. The
accompanying text narrates the capture of the
photos and offers practical information on arrang-
ing and equipping a trip to British East Africa.
James Ryan’sPicturing Empire: Photography and
the Visualization of the British Empire(1997) dis-
cusses the ideological underpinnings of these early
wildlife photo books and places them in the con-
text of the visual construction of British imperial-
ism. Photosafaris remain popular and, despite
technological advances, archetypes established by
photographers a century ago remain current.
The prominence of East African images in the
world news media is, by and large, a development
of the last quarter of the twentieth century even
though Ethiopian Emper or Haile Sellassie’s coro-
nation in 1930 was covered by European illustrated
periodicals, and Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed
Italy’s 1935 invasion of the country. Images of
Ethiopia’s devastating 1984 famine created one of
the century’s most significant media events, and
the most important documentation was a video
produced by South African reporter Michael
Buerk and Kenya-based cameraman Mohammed
Amin. Amin, who co-founded Nairobi’s Camera-
pix agency in 1969, was one of the region’s most
active and celebrated photojournalists until his
death in 1996. In general, the development of indi-
genous photojournalism has been limited, though
Se ́bastien Porte’s article ‘‘The Press in Kenya’’
(Porte 1999) highlights the against-the-odds dyna-
mism of Kenya’s indigenous press photography.
Usually, crisis-driven coverage of East African
events in the Western media is undertaken by photo-
graphers from outside the region: for example, the
1993 famine in Sudan was photographed by South
African Kevin Carter and the 1994 Rwandan geno-
cide by Frenchman Gilles Peress. Susan Moeller’s
article provocatively frames the vital question of
whether such coverage in the Western press of East
Africa’s disasters serves to educate the public or
simply inures its viewers to suffering (Moeller 1999).
Photography’s political role in the region spans
colonial and postcolonial eras. In turn of the centuryAFRICA: CENTRAL AND WEST, PHOTOGRAPHY IN