Further Consideration of Two Photographs Ascribed to Christian Hornberger

Extract

Two reactions to the essay on the earliest generation of missionary photographers in West Africa published earlier in HA set up trains of thought which deserve to be minuted here as a further contribution to our praxis with images of Africa in the nineteenth century. It was pointed out by two readers of the original article that a pair of the images which, it had been asserted (104), derive from the last phase of Hornberger's photographic work, were published very early on in a non-mission context: that of three women spinning and that of one man weaving (figures 1 and 2 below).

Both images exist as photographs, as stereographic vintage prints. Both were also published as wood engravings in mission periodicals (figures 3 and 4). Two readers of the original essay have pointed out that these images were conflated into a single engraving on page 211 of Richard Oberländer's Westafrika vom Senegal bis Benguela (Leipzig, 1874). In this image (figure 5), however, only two members of the group of spinning women are depicted, placed separately in the foreground, one on each side of the weaver. It is an ironic reflection on the quality of the documentation we have to fear in this field that Oberländer's caption—“Spinnende und webende Aschanti. (Nach einer Photographie)”—asserts specifically that the engraving was taken “from a photograph,” using the singular form.