Decolonising Female Missionary Photography

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My research will contribute to decolonising feminist art history through a study of photographs made by Britishfemale missionaries working in Africa. European archives of missionary photography constitute one of the largestvisual collections of the late nineteenth-century colonial encounter yet photographs of and by missionary womenremain strangely absent from histories of photography; women's work; and colonialism. From a decolonialperspective, my research will examine how female missionary photography gave aesthetic shape to colonialideologies of difference by mobilising evangelical sentiment and at the same time created a space of agency forthemselves as European women. In studying photographs by missionary women, I aim to explore contradictionsbetween post-colonial and feminist approaches, examples will include images of and by missionaries working in theCongo, Togo, Nigeria and Zambia between 1876 and 1931: Alice Seeley Harris, Rebecca Wareham, Mary Slessorand Mabel Shaw