By Dr. Richard Pankhurst:-
The camera, over the centuries, made an
immense impact in Ethiopia, and the photographic record of the country
is one that cannot be ignored.
The Camera Obscura
Optical science made its earliest impact on the recording of
Ethiopian images in the late eighteenth century. The first to make use
of it was the Scottish traveller James Bruce, who obtained a camera
obscura to assist him in sketching the country.
The apparatus, a cumbersome affair, was
constructed according to his
own specifications by the London firm of Nairne and Blunt, and was
modified several times before he was satisfied. When eventually accepted
the instrument, as Bruce notes in his Travels, proved both “large and
expensive” Hexagonal in shape, and no less than six feet in diameter, it
consisted of two separate units, a conical top and a bottom, which
folded together compactly, so that the whole was “neither heavy,
cumbersome, nor inconvenient”.The draftsman sat within, as in a
summer-house, and drew without being seen.
James Bruce
The instrument, Bruce claims, was of great value, for it enabled a
person of but moderate drawing skill to do more and better work in an
hour than the best draftsman could, without it, do in seven. With its
help it was possible moreover to sketch, not only an entire building
with the “utmost truth and justest proportion”, but also to depict its
light and shade, and even little shrubs around it. The resultant picture
had the “inestimable advantage” of being “real”, rather than a fruit of
the imagination, and was so detailed that passing clouds, and even
persons, and the folds of dresses, could be “fixed by two or three
unstudied strokes of a pencil”.
Despite Bruce’s enthusiasm for the camera obscura in the drawing of
buildings it should be noted that, though it contributed to many North
African scenes preserved in the Scotsman’s archives, only one such
Ethiopian picture is extant. It is a simple sketch of the largest of the
standing obelisks at Aksum, sunsequently published in his Travels. The
remaining Ethiopian pictures consist principally of drawings of flora
and fauna, later reproduced as engravings in the fifth volume of his
book, and a few sketches of people, including portraits of two Ethiopian
ladies of rank, Astr and Takla Maryam, which were long afterwards
included in J.M. Reid’s Traveller Extraordinary. (London, 1968).
To Be Regretted
It is to be regretted that Bruce, one of the first foreigners to
reside in the then capital, Gondar, left no pictorial image of that
important town, in which he had spent several years, or of its
political, social and religious life. One further point about Bruce’s
artistic work deserves to be made. Virtually all the Ethiopian drawings
which the Scotsman claims to have produced were apparently in fact made
by his Italian assistant, Luigi Balugani, whose considerable artistic
achievements, studiously concealed by his employer, found recognition
over two centuries after his death, in Paul Hulton, F. Nigel Hepper and
Ib Friis, Luigi Balugani’s Drawings of African Plants (Rotterdam, 1991).
The coming of the camera obscura, which Bruce – and. we must add,
Balugani – were the first to use in the region, was an important event,
which led to great improvement in pictorial images of Ethiopia. This can
be seen in not a few early nineteenth century engravings, which seem to
have owed much to the instrument. Such images were however, destined to
be once again transformed, a little over a century later, by a further
major technological development: the advent of photography.
The Reign of Tewodros
The earliest use of the photographic camera in Ethiopia dates back to
the second half of the nineteenth century, more precisely to the reign
of Emperor Twodros. This period, which witnessed increasing contacts
between Ethiopia and Europe, coincided with significant progress in the
photographic field, and in particular the increasing international
popularisation of the camera.
Henry Aaron Stern
The first photographer to visit Ethiopia, as far as is known, was
Henry Aaron Stern, a British Protestant missionary of German Jewish
descent, who arrived in the country in 1859, to convert the Falashas, or
Beta Esra’el, to Christianity. Though primarily involved in what were
then often termed “missionary labours” he was also much interested in
photography, and took a number of photographs of people and places.
These pictures have apparently long since disappeared, but twenty of
them were later published as engravings in Stern’s book Wanderings among
the Falashas in Abyssinia (London, 1852). They included: a fine
portrait of Abuna Salama, the Egyptian patriarch of the Ethiopian
church; scenes of the then capital Dabra Tabor; a Falasha village; one
of the famous castles at the previous capital, Gondar; and a group of
elegantly dressed Ethiopian noblewomen with their attendants or slaves.
Several other engravings apparently based on the missionary’s
photographs later found their way into A.A. Isaacs’ Biography of the
Rev. Henry Aaron Stern, (London, 1886).
Through the Hand of the Engraver
Stern’s photographs, though presented through the eyes and hand of
the engraver, were important in that they constituted the first visual
documentation on the country based on the camera. The published
engravings resulting from them enjoy a unique position in the history of
Ethiopian illustration. Based as they were on photography they inspire a
sense of veracity lacking in drawings, where the artist’s imagination
may always be suspected of having distorted the “true” image, or at
least of having introduced an element of ambiguity, into the picture.
A Bigot
Stern, an opinionated and intolerant bigot, soon incurred the wrath
of the excitable Emperor Twodros, who had him arrested, and his house
searched for seditious documents. The officials charged with this task
are reported by the missionary to have displayed great curiosity in
examining his “photographic sketches”, and in their admiration of some
mountain scene or village group, he claims, “entirely forgot their
commissio”, thus reducing the investigation to a “perfect farce”. The
search party nevertheless ended by carrying off most of the missionary’s
property, including his photographic equipment, which was taken to the
king. The latter, he relates, thereupon “made a variety of inquiries
about me, the illustrations in the book [Wanderings amongst the
Falashas], and the mode and method of taking photographs”.
Stern’s Ethiopian servant Josef, who was “supposed to be initiated in
all the mysteries of his master’s lens and collodion”, if we can
believe the German’s ironic account, then gave the monarch a “most
elaborate, and no doubt, most lucid explanation of the process”. Samwel,
one of Twodros’s courtiers, was also present, but “did not feel
disposed to share the honours of his profound photographic lore with an
ignorant, self-conceited African”. In support of this condescending
statement Stern claims that Samwel later declared that he had refused to
talk about photography, because he was “determined to oppose”, if he
“could not humble”, the sovereign’s “arrogant pretensions”. Whether
anyone would in fact have dared to risk the monarch’s well-known wrath
in this manner may, however, be doubted, and Stern, dear reader, was of
course undoubtedly arrogant in his own way.
Imprisonment
Stern’s imprisonment, and that of several other Europeans, among them
the British Consul Cameron, later provoked the British Government to
despatch an armed expedition, as we have seen, against Tewodros and his
fortress at Maqdala, where the captives were detained.
In the late 1870s King Menilek of Shawa arranged to employ three Swiss craftsmen to help him in the modernisation of his country.
Alfred Ilg
The most notable of them, Alfred Ilg, a graduate of the Zurich polytechnic, arrived in 1879, and served for many years as both technician and diplomatic advisor. An enthusiastic photographer he was soon taking many shots with a large camera, but had not been long in the country, as long he afterwards recounted, when he was summoned to his master’s presence. “I have heard something about you”, Menilek is supposed to have declared, “which was very bad of you, and of which I surely would not have believed you capable. At the same time it is so ridiculous, so improbable, that I would not have believed it at all had I not heard it from trustworthy people”.
Ilg, surprised by this accusation, at once inquired to what the monarch was referring, whereupon Menilek continued, “I have been informed that without my knowledge you made me very small, and stuffed me into a black box with my whole town, together with houses, people and mules. And, what is even more unbelievable, in this box I was standing on my head with my legs in the air”.
“Finally Understood the Workings of a Camera”
Ilg, who, as his biographer Conrad Keller relates, was embarrassed by this report of his photographic exploits, found himself obliged to explain to His Majesty the principal laws of optics. This, he says, required some pedagogical skill, but passed off all right, and the monarch “finally understood the workings of a photographic camera”.
A subsequent German traveller Felix Rosen, retelling the story, commented that Menilek as a result “knew not only the phenomenon of the photographic camera, but much else in the field of applied physics, mechanics and chemistry”.
Many of Ilg’s photographs have been preserved, in the possession of the craftsman’s descendants in Zurich. A number have been reproduced by the Swiss photographer’s second biographer, Willi Loepfe, in his monograph Alfred Ilg und die thiopische Eisenbahn (Frauenfeld and Zurich, 1978).
Menilek’s Interest in Innovations
Menilek’s acceptance of the camera, it should be emphasised, was much more than an isolated incident. It typifies the ruler’s keen interest in modern inventions, and determination to overcome the then widespread Ethiopian prejudice against foreign innovations. It was this spirit of technological adventure which led Menilek to introduce into his country the railway, the first modern roads and bridges, the telephone and telegraph, the printing press, the first foreign-type schools and a hospital, a bank, coined money and postage stamps, modern innovations for which he is to this day famous.
Foreign Travellers
The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the advent in the Ethiopian and Horn of African region of several dozen European traveller-photographers. Arriving first in the nearby French, Italian and British colonies on the coast, they soon also made their appearance in Ethiopia, initially at the capital and its environs, but before long throughout virtually the entire country, including some of the remotest provinces to the south, east and west.
Through their individual endeavours such travellers amassed a wealth of photographic documentation. This was more important as far as Ethiopia’s visual image is concerned in that it coincided with major advances in the art of printing, which enabled photographs to be reproduced with increasing accuracy and beauty. The result was that engravings, by this time themselves largely based on photographs, were replaced within little more than a decade by actual photographic reproductions.
Northern Somaliland
One of the first foreign travellers in the region to make significant use of photography was the French geographer Georges Revoil who in 1880-1 investigated the coastal strip of northern Somaliland, and took numerous pictures of it and its proud inhabitants. He was followed by the British explorer Frank Linsly James, who journeyed from the northern Somali coast into the Ethiopian Ogaden province in 1884-5.
James recalls in his Unknown Horn of Africa (London, 1888) that though numerous “natives”, as he terms them, had “no objection to being immortalised” by photography, “many were frightened and ran away”. In one place his efforts to take photographs evoked “considerable abuse” from the inhabitants, who angrily “called all who sat for their portraits dogs and rats”. Despite such opposition James was able to include in his book numerous photographs of the local population.
The Somali region, including the Ogaden, was also visited at about the same time by James’s compatriot Major Henry George Charles Swayne, a great traveller, who undertook the first of numerous journeys into the area in 1884. He later observed in his Seventeen Trips through Somaliland (London, 1903) that he always kept a camera in his tent by his bed so as to capture any interesting situation which might arise. Advising would-be travellers of the usefulness of small hand cameras, which had come on the market round 1880, he declared them “invaluable”, and added, “I suggest that no large camera be used, nor chemicals, but that small photographs be taken with the hand camera and developed and enlarged on return to England”. His book contains a variety of photographs of the Somalis and of their country taken by himself, and a few others by a contemporary Polish traveller Prince Boris Czetwertynski.
Italy’s seizure of Massawa in 1885 had led meanwhile to the arrival of several Italian photographers. They included Luigi Fiorillo, Mauro Ledru, Francesco Nicotra, and Luigi Naretti, the latter a cousin of Giacomo Naretti, a craftsman in the service of Emperor Yohannes IV. They took numerous pictures of the port, its quay and fort, the former Egyptian governor’s palace, and some of the more colourful inhabitants. Subsequent Italian penetration, which was temporarily checked by Ras Alula at the battle of Dogali in 1887, was also accompanied by further photography.
The advent of the camera was symbolised at around this time by the photographing of Emperor Yohannes, the first Ethiopian imperial ruler whose image was thus recorded for posterity. A rare picture of him with his son Ras Araya Sellas was later included in the French edition of Gabra Sellase’s chronicle of Menilek, Chronique du regne de Menelik II, roi des rois d’Ethiopie (Paris, 1930-31).
Shots, several of them by the afore-mentioned Italian photographer Naretti, were also taken of several of his courtiers. A portrait of Ras Mangasha Yohannes, the then governor of Tegray, was later reproduced in the said edition of the chronicle, which also contains several of the Italian’s views of Adegrat, Maqale, Adwa, and other northern cities.
Photography was by this time also increasing in Eastern Ethiopia, where the Austrian ethnographer Dr Philipp Paulitschke, travelled in the Somali and Oromo inhabited areas, in 1885-7, and reached the walled city of Harar, which Richard Burton had first been described, without the help of photography, forty years earlier. In his major studies Harar and Beitrage zur Ethnographie und Anthropologie der Somal, Galla und Harari, both of which appeared in Leipzig in 1888, Paulitschke published a number of remarkable photographs. In the first of these books he relates that the Amir of Harar’s soldiers were happy to be immortalised by his camera in all their finery.
Their master, Abdulahi, the last Amir of Harar, would not, however, agree to be taken until his ullemas were convinced that photography was not contrary to the Qoran. The Austrian duly explained that the Caliphs of Istanbul and Cairo, and even the Great Sheriff of Mecca, had all been photographed, and that the camera did not produce any shadow like that made by graven images. The ullemas were at length persuaded, and the Amir’s photograph was eventually authorised. The chief nevertheless insisted that the traveller should refrain from showing the photograph in Harar, or indeed generally. Paulitschke also took photographs of “ethnographic types”, a striking panoramic view of the city, and picture of houses used by both the nomads of the interior and the settled peoples of the coast.
The first photographs of Ethiopia’s western provinces were made at around the same time by a Frenchman, Jules Borelli, who visited the central and western provinces of Shawa, Jimma and Kafa in 1885-8. He took numerous interesting photographs, among them views of Menilek’s palace at the then capital, Entotto, portraits of persons he had met, and scenes of the countryside, all of which he reproduced in his Ethiopie meridionale (Paris, 1890).
Another distinguished traveller of the late 1880′s was an Italian engineer, Luigi Robecchi-Bricchetti, who explored the Somali region and Harar, in 1888, and returned to the area in 1890 and 1891. In the course of his travels he took a considerable number of good photographs, including a portrait of Menilek’s cousin, Ras Makonnen. the renowned governor of the province, as wells as many pictures of ethnographic interest. Some of these are reproduced in Robecchi-Bricchetti’s Nell’ Harrar (Milan, 1896).
The Italian Geographical Society meanwhile had established a station at Let Marafeya, near the old Shawan capital, Ankobar. The second director of this establishment. Dr Leopoldo Traversi, who arrived in 1888, was responsible in the next decade for a significant amount of photography. Pictures taken by him or under his auspices include scenes of Ankobar and Let Marafeya, and several interesting portraits. Among them is one of Grazmach Josf Negus, the Ethiopian who translated into Amharic the famous treaty of Wuchale of 1889 as a result of which the Italians were soon to claim a Protectorate over Ethiopia, and another of Abba Jifar, king of the westerly Muslim province of Jimma. There was also a dramatic shot of Ras Mangasha Yohannes of Tegray bearing a stone on his shoulder in 1894 as a sign of his submission to Menilek, who had by then assumed the title of Emperor. Several of Traversi’s pictures were subsequently reproduced as engravings in the Italian missionary Guglielmo Massaja’s great multi-volume memoir I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell’ alta Etiopia (Rome and Milan, 1885-1895), while others later appeared as photographs in Traversi’s Let-Marefia (Milan, 1931).
The southernmost stretch of Ethiopia had by then been investigated by a Hungarian, Count Teleki von Szek, who took a number of photographs of the land and its people in 1888. Some of the best were published by his companion Lieutenant Ludwig von Hohnel in Ostaquatorial-Afrika (Gotha, 1890) and Zum Rudolf-See und Stephanie-See (Wien, 1892), the latter translated into English as Discovery of Lakes Rudolph and Stefanie (London, 1894).
In the late 1870s King Menilek of Shawa arranged to employ three Swiss craftsmen to help him in the modernisation of his country.
Alfred Ilg
The most notable of them, Alfred Ilg, a graduate of the Zurich polytechnic, arrived in 1879, and served for many years as both technician and diplomatic advisor. An enthusiastic photographer he was soon taking many shots with a large camera, but had not been long in the country, as long he afterwards recounted, when he was summoned to his master’s presence. “I have heard something about you”, Menilek is supposed to have declared, “which was very bad of you, and of which I surely would not have believed you capable. At the same time it is so ridiculous, so improbable, that I would not have believed it at all had I not heard it from trustworthy people”.
Ilg, surprised by this accusation, at once inquired to what the monarch was referring, whereupon Menilek continued, “I have been informed that without my knowledge you made me very small, and stuffed me into a black box with my whole town, together with houses, people and mules. And, what is even more unbelievable, in this box I was standing on my head with my legs in the air”.
“Finally Understood the Workings of a Camera”
Ilg, who, as his biographer Conrad Keller relates, was embarrassed by this report of his photographic exploits, found himself obliged to explain to His Majesty the principal laws of optics. This, he says, required some pedagogical skill, but passed off all right, and the monarch “finally understood the workings of a photographic camera”.
A subsequent German traveller Felix Rosen, retelling the story, commented that Menilek as a result “knew not only the phenomenon of the photographic camera, but much else in the field of applied physics, mechanics and chemistry”.
Many of Ilg’s photographs have been preserved, in the possession of the craftsman’s descendants in Zurich. A number have been reproduced by the Swiss photographer’s second biographer, Willi Loepfe, in his monograph Alfred Ilg und die thiopische Eisenbahn (Frauenfeld and Zurich, 1978).
Menilek’s Interest in Innovations
Menilek’s acceptance of the camera, it should be emphasised, was much more than an isolated incident. It typifies the ruler’s keen interest in modern inventions, and determination to overcome the then widespread Ethiopian prejudice against foreign innovations. It was this spirit of technological adventure which led Menilek to introduce into his country the railway, the first modern roads and bridges, the telephone and telegraph, the printing press, the first foreign-type schools and a hospital, a bank, coined money and postage stamps, modern innovations for which he is to this day famous.
Foreign Travellers
The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the advent in the Ethiopian and Horn of African region of several dozen European traveller-photographers. Arriving first in the nearby French, Italian and British colonies on the coast, they soon also made their appearance in Ethiopia, initially at the capital and its environs, but before long throughout virtually the entire country, including some of the remotest provinces to the south, east and west.
Through their individual endeavours such travellers amassed a wealth of photographic documentation. This was more important as far as Ethiopia’s visual image is concerned in that it coincided with major advances in the art of printing, which enabled photographs to be reproduced with increasing accuracy and beauty. The result was that engravings, by this time themselves largely based on photographs, were replaced within little more than a decade by actual photographic reproductions.
Northern Somaliland
One of the first foreign travellers in the region to make significant use of photography was the French geographer Georges Revoil who in 1880-1 investigated the coastal strip of northern Somaliland, and took numerous pictures of it and its proud inhabitants. He was followed by the British explorer Frank Linsly James, who journeyed from the northern Somali coast into the Ethiopian Ogaden province in 1884-5.
James recalls in his Unknown Horn of Africa (London, 1888) that though numerous “natives”, as he terms them, had “no objection to being immortalised” by photography, “many were frightened and ran away”. In one place his efforts to take photographs evoked “considerable abuse” from the inhabitants, who angrily “called all who sat for their portraits dogs and rats”. Despite such opposition James was able to include in his book numerous photographs of the local population.
The Somali region, including the Ogaden, was also visited at about the same time by James’s compatriot Major Henry George Charles Swayne, a great traveller, who undertook the first of numerous journeys into the area in 1884. He later observed in his Seventeen Trips through Somaliland (London, 1903) that he always kept a camera in his tent by his bed so as to capture any interesting situation which might arise. Advising would-be travellers of the usefulness of small hand cameras, which had come on the market round 1880, he declared them “invaluable”, and added, “I suggest that no large camera be used, nor chemicals, but that small photographs be taken with the hand camera and developed and enlarged on return to England”. His book contains a variety of photographs of the Somalis and of their country taken by himself, and a few others by a contemporary Polish traveller Prince Boris Czetwertynski.
Italy’s seizure of Massawa in 1885 had led meanwhile to the arrival of several Italian photographers. They included Luigi Fiorillo, Mauro Ledru, Francesco Nicotra, and Luigi Naretti, the latter a cousin of Giacomo Naretti, a craftsman in the service of Emperor Yohannes IV. They took numerous pictures of the port, its quay and fort, the former Egyptian governor’s palace, and some of the more colourful inhabitants. Subsequent Italian penetration, which was temporarily checked by Ras Alula at the battle of Dogali in 1887, was also accompanied by further photography.
The advent of the camera was symbolised at around this time by the photographing of Emperor Yohannes, the first Ethiopian imperial ruler whose image was thus recorded for posterity. A rare picture of him with his son Ras Araya Sellas was later included in the French edition of Gabra Sellase’s chronicle of Menilek, Chronique du regne de Menelik II, roi des rois d’Ethiopie (Paris, 1930-31).
Shots, several of them by the afore-mentioned Italian photographer Naretti, were also taken of several of his courtiers. A portrait of Ras Mangasha Yohannes, the then governor of Tegray, was later reproduced in the said edition of the chronicle, which also contains several of the Italian’s views of Adegrat, Maqale, Adwa, and other northern cities.
Photography was by this time also increasing in Eastern Ethiopia, where the Austrian ethnographer Dr Philipp Paulitschke, travelled in the Somali and Oromo inhabited areas, in 1885-7, and reached the walled city of Harar, which Richard Burton had first been described, without the help of photography, forty years earlier. In his major studies Harar and Beitrage zur Ethnographie und Anthropologie der Somal, Galla und Harari, both of which appeared in Leipzig in 1888, Paulitschke published a number of remarkable photographs. In the first of these books he relates that the Amir of Harar’s soldiers were happy to be immortalised by his camera in all their finery.
Their master, Abdulahi, the last Amir of Harar, would not, however, agree to be taken until his ullemas were convinced that photography was not contrary to the Qoran. The Austrian duly explained that the Caliphs of Istanbul and Cairo, and even the Great Sheriff of Mecca, had all been photographed, and that the camera did not produce any shadow like that made by graven images. The ullemas were at length persuaded, and the Amir’s photograph was eventually authorised. The chief nevertheless insisted that the traveller should refrain from showing the photograph in Harar, or indeed generally. Paulitschke also took photographs of “ethnographic types”, a striking panoramic view of the city, and picture of houses used by both the nomads of the interior and the settled peoples of the coast.
The first photographs of Ethiopia’s western provinces were made at around the same time by a Frenchman, Jules Borelli, who visited the central and western provinces of Shawa, Jimma and Kafa in 1885-8. He took numerous interesting photographs, among them views of Menilek’s palace at the then capital, Entotto, portraits of persons he had met, and scenes of the countryside, all of which he reproduced in his Ethiopie meridionale (Paris, 1890).
Another distinguished traveller of the late 1880′s was an Italian engineer, Luigi Robecchi-Bricchetti, who explored the Somali region and Harar, in 1888, and returned to the area in 1890 and 1891. In the course of his travels he took a considerable number of good photographs, including a portrait of Menilek’s cousin, Ras Makonnen. the renowned governor of the province, as wells as many pictures of ethnographic interest. Some of these are reproduced in Robecchi-Bricchetti’s Nell’ Harrar (Milan, 1896).
The Italian Geographical Society meanwhile had established a station at Let Marafeya, near the old Shawan capital, Ankobar. The second director of this establishment. Dr Leopoldo Traversi, who arrived in 1888, was responsible in the next decade for a significant amount of photography. Pictures taken by him or under his auspices include scenes of Ankobar and Let Marafeya, and several interesting portraits. Among them is one of Grazmach Josf Negus, the Ethiopian who translated into Amharic the famous treaty of Wuchale of 1889 as a result of which the Italians were soon to claim a Protectorate over Ethiopia, and another of Abba Jifar, king of the westerly Muslim province of Jimma. There was also a dramatic shot of Ras Mangasha Yohannes of Tegray bearing a stone on his shoulder in 1894 as a sign of his submission to Menilek, who had by then assumed the title of Emperor. Several of Traversi’s pictures were subsequently reproduced as engravings in the Italian missionary Guglielmo Massaja’s great multi-volume memoir I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell’ alta Etiopia (Rome and Milan, 1885-1895), while others later appeared as photographs in Traversi’s Let-Marefia (Milan, 1931).
The southernmost stretch of Ethiopia had by then been investigated by a Hungarian, Count Teleki von Szek, who took a number of photographs of the land and its people in 1888. Some of the best were published by his companion Lieutenant Ludwig von Hohnel in Ostaquatorial-Afrika (Gotha, 1890) and Zum Rudolf-See und Stephanie-See (Wien, 1892), the latter translated into English as Discovery of Lakes Rudolph and Stefanie (London, 1894).
Source: http://www.linkethiopia.org
No comments:
Post a Comment