Paper Short Abstract:

Combining ethnography and visual montages, this paper analyzes photojournalist Federico Patellani’s photos from the Naples Colonial Exhibition in 1940. I aim to rehumanize the obscure lives of the indigenous people exhibited and to highlight aspects of colonialism's history and heritage.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores colonial visual culture, rethinking ways of doing anthropology by engaging with colonial archives. I analyze photojournalist Federico Patellani's work, which brings us into contact with the nameless indigenous people brought as living samples from Italian colonies at Naples Colonial Exhibition. My approach brings ethnography and visual montages into dialogue (Warburg, 2010; Didi-Huberman, 2010; Samain, 2012), enabling a curatorship of photographs arranged in panels that explore beyond the visible. I treat the images as agents with multiple expressions that have a fundamental role in shaping national identities, racism, and sexism, therefore as agents of the “visual construction of the social field” (Mitchell, 2002). Photography emerged in the late 19th century as a supposedly faithful technology of representation, establishing a new way of seeing and thinking about the world, birthing a new type of observer (Crary, 1994). Metropolises widely used photography to legitimize racist theories through anthropometric and anthropological studies. My effort is to rehumanize the “obscure lives” (Foucault, 1977) of those photographed for the Exhibition and to highlight colonialism's history, and heritage, which persists today in many museums, universities, cities, and scientific and literary forms. This work on a silenced event and easily forgotten subjects prompts an ethnographic reevaluation of what images can express and how we can sensitively deal with them, exploring what emerges from this experience and avoiding further violence in narration (Hartman, 2008). I argue, as in Glissant's reflections on black culture in archives (Glissant 1989), these images are not lost or found but undiscovered.