Getting Pictures Right: Context and Interpretation.

Seton, Rosemary

Edited by Michael Albrecht, Veit Arlt, Barbara Muller, and Jurg Schneider. Cologne: Rudiger Koppe, 2004. Pp. 192. 29.80. [euro]

This volume contains most of the papers presented at a symposium held in Basel in September 2003 to mark the retirement, after thirty-one years, of Paul Jenkins as archivist of the Basel Mission. The occasion and this publication particularly addressed Jenkins's pioneering role in preserving and interpreting mission photographs and in promoting them as a unique and valuable resource for the study of the missionary encounter with, and perception of, indigenous cultures and peoples.

As John Ruskin observed in the 1860s, photographs are "of great use if you know how to examine them" (quoted in Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence [London: Reaction Books, 2001], p. 25). Jenkins's essay explores how we fully encounter photographic images and "the situations from which they are derived" only by "freeing ourselves from manipulative, narrow or closed-ended fashions." What is gained from this liberation can be an "experience of transformation" (p. 119), as Jenkins demonstrates, using three images from the Basel Mission Archive. Several other contributions are based either wholly or in part on the Basel photographs. Christraud Geary considers photographic portraiture of the Bamum elite in the Cameroon over an eighty-year period beginning in 1902, and Richard Fardon unravels the puzzling authorship of photographs taken at a ceremony in the Cameroon Grassfields in 1908. Basel cataloguer Barbara Frey Naf compares images in the mission archive with others from The People of India, a series of photographic illustrations ... of the races and tribes of Hindustan (1868-72), finding valuable information to fill gaps in her documentation, and Thorald Klein makes some surprising finds in historical photographs of Chinese Christians.

This is a rich, absorbing, and well-illustrated compilation, impossible to do justice to in so short a review, and the editors are to be congratulated for bringing it to press so expeditiously. Photographs in the Basel Mission Archive can be accessed at http://www.bmpix.org.

Rosemary Seton served from 1979 to 2004 as Keeper of Archives and Special Collections at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.