Starting point

As a communications network the Basel Mission - like other missionary societies - made early use of photography. The first Basel missionary in West Africa to take photographs was Wilhelm Locher, who was active with a camera in south-eastern Ghana in the 1860s. At the same time his colleague C. G. Richter was taking photographs in what are now the Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala (see illustration 11 A).The Mission also began at this time to acquire images from professional photographers working in coastal cities in Africa and Asia. Photographic images began to be reproduced as engravings in the Mission’s publications both for home and overseas consumption (see illustration 11 B).

It is clear that in practice over the generations photography has remained an important activity among Basel missionaries. In the 1890s and early 1900s, for example, Basel Mission explorers in Cameroon took cameras with them on their journeys to open up new mission districts. Yet pioneer photography plays no part in the traditional identity of this Basel Mission or even in its insiders’ oral tradition. The formidable Fritz Ramseyer (Basel Missionary in Ghana from 1864 to 1908), still a name to conjure with in Ghana, has been completely forgotten as a photographer, although he took many excellent photographs, starting at the latest in 1888 (see illustration 10). By the time, in the 1980s, scholars from outside the Basel Mission began to point out that there had been photographs in Basel Mission hands in earlier decades, which would be of considerable anthropological and historical significance if they could be found, the collection of old photographs in the Mission House had fallen into decay and disregard.

Dr Christraud Geary, now Conservator of African Photography in the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, was primarily responsible in the early 1980s for focussing attention on the need to recover and recatalogue our holdings of old photographs. It was during the period when she was a frequent visitor in Basel that the potential dimensions of the collection began to be visible. We began to realise that we had vintage prints dating back to the 1860s. We also began to realise that the collection numbered not just a few thousand images but tens of thousands (see Table 3a). Indeed, even after our project planning had reached a detailed stage, we found a small attic in the Mission House in Basel stuffed with yet more materials relevant to the history of photography in the organisation, including thousands of glass plate negatives from the late 19th century.

In 1988 Dr Geary set up an exhibition in Washington on "German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya, Cameroon …1902-1915", and included a number of vintag prints on loan from the Basel Mission archive. This made it finally clear that Basel Mission photography is far more than merely documentation of missionary activities, narrowly defined. It is a major potential source on indigenous social history everywhere where the organisation has been active. And people began to realise that it reflects a much broader and more humane contact between missionaries and the indigenous population than some of us had expected. Dr Geary’s characterisation of what is probably the outstanding photographic oevre in the Basel Mission archive deserves to be repeated in this connection: " … one photographer [among all those who took photographs in Bamum before 1915] …overcame the limitations inherent in the ethnographic way of picturing the Other. Anna Wuhrmann, a [Basel] missionary teacher, developed close friendships with the Bamum people. In her photography she … created strikingly intimate images that are almost modern in their conception" (Geary, Christraud M., Images from Bamum, German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya, Cameroon, West Africa, 1902-1915 , Washington 1988, here p. 119) (see illustration 4)

During the 1980s the collection was attracting steadily increasing attention. Two problems began to worry archival staff, however. Firstly, since the original organisation of the collection had fallen into decay, there was no reliable system for identifying individual images, or ensuring that a specific image, once published, could be located again. And it began to be clear that research itself could itself represent a threat to conservation. The photographs could only be consulted as original prints, using the photographs themselves as a form of card-index. They were thus exposed to various kinds of environmental stress, especially the changes of temperature and humidity when they were being moved between storerooms and the archive’s reading facilities. In the course of handling they were also being rubbed against each other and friction damage began to be visible.

Alongside the need to ensure access to the collection for western scholars working on Africa and Asia, a further major concern began to make itself felt. The potential interest in these pictures in the regions where they were originally taken is enormous. But making photographic reproductions for customers in Asia and Africa is expensive and, ultimately, frustrating. In regions where the organisation of libraries and archives is weak, repeated requests can be sent to Basel for copies of the same well-known image. Although in principle good reproductions exist and are publicly available there, people still depend on the archive in Basel to supply them with copies. At the same time people in far-off communities - like Abetifi in Ghana or Bali-Nyonga in Cameroon - rarely have the chance to visit Basel, and we had no means of communicating to them the full variety of images in our collection, numbered in their hundreds, which document their history. In an archive like that of the Basel Mission problems of international access are posed in an especially pressing way.

It was at this stage that the Christoph Merian Foundation in Basel suggested that a pilot project be worked out using modern media to tackle the specific problems of conservation and international access we were facing. In order to prepare this project proposal the anthropologist Barbara Frey N&aml;f joined Paul Jenkins, who had been responsible for the Basel Mission archive since the early 1970s. At the same time the Foundation suggested the formation of a Technical Advisory Group (see Table 3c) which played a key role in establishing the procedures which helped to convince the Foundation that the project was both worthwhile and viable. In 1988 the Christoph Merian Foundation approved a grant of SFr. 200’000 to enable us to take the first steps with the procedures we had proposed - on condition, however, that the Basel Mission found other donors prepared to support the project. This condition was fulfilled by the early months of 1990. A project team was recruited and work began on 1st July 1990.

Starting point