ABSTRACT
The spread of photography from Europe to the rest of the world from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century is an extremely important origin point for a politically attuned understanding of visuality. The early globalisation of photography was systematically enabled by the existing structures and power relations of colonialism. It also reproduced, strengthened and extended those relations in ways that substantially reduced the freedom of colonised populations. Indeed, we cannot separate the birth of photography from its colonial context – from the fact that the early photographers who took their cameras around the world to visually document “exotic” scenes carried with them the assumptions and prejudices of a supposedly superior European culture.
