Title: Light on darkness? : missionary photography of Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries /
Authors: Thompson, T. Jack.
Publisher: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.,
Year: 2012
Subjects: Missions Africa, Sub-Saharan History; Photography Africa, Sub-Saharan History; Missions Africa, Sub-Saharan History; Photography Africa, Sub-Saharan History; Africa, Sub-Saharan Church history; Africa, Sub-Saharan Church history
Abstract: "In its earliest days, photography was seen as depicting its subjects with such objectivity as to be inherently free of ideological bias. Today we are rightly more skeptical -- at least most of the time. When it comes to photography from the past, we tend to set some of our skepticism aside. But should we? In Light on Darkness? T. Jack Thompson, a leading historian of African Christianity, revisits the body of photography generated by British missionaries to sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and demonstrates that much more is going on in these images than meets the eye. This volume offers a careful reassessment of missionary photographers, their photographs, and their African and European audiences. Several dozen fascinating photographs from the period are included." -- Publisher's description.
Contents: The beginnings of photography -- The photographer and the artist : visual representation on Livingstone's Zambezi expedition -- "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" : visual representations of Stanley's expedition to "find" Livingstone -- Creating an Africa for Africans? : Scottish missions in South Africa and Malawi -- The camera and the Congo : missionary photography and Leopold's atrocities -- Missionaries and the magic lantern -- New ways of seeing : radical missionaries and critical theories.