The white actress is not. Indeed, the lower photograph depicts Gehrts-Schomburgk reclining on a leopard skin rug, while a topless native woman fans her with an elaborate fan made of feathers. The ludicrous excess of the colonialist fantasy could not be more evident here.
Yet this actress is the same woman whose "anthropological" photographs would be included in the English-langugage publication of Felix Bryk's Dark Rapture. As a result of the photographer's own strange backstory, Meg Gehrts-Schomburgk's photographs of Africa occupy a rather unique place: although some are included in her early memoir of the "ethnodramas" -- whose English-language version (published in 1915 in Philadelphia and London) was entitled A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland -- they would be collected by themselves in 1930 under the title Negertypen Des Schwartzen Erdteils, or "Negro Types of the Dark Continent," indicating an ethnographic survey but also an intrinsic artistic interest (at a period in time when African native art was well-established with the European avant-garde as having its own particular aesthetic). It is these 1930 photographs -- now credited to "M. Gehrts-Schomburgk," to elide the photographer's gender (and possibly her earlier celebrity) -- that accompany the 1944 publication of Felix Bryk's Dark Rapture. As a result of this complicated history, the same set of photographs has essentially served several different cultural functions for its target audience. As an accompaniment to Schomburgk's "ethnodramas," Meg Gehrts-Schomburgk's photographs of African natives taken by the white star ingenue of the films would basically qualify as straight-up colonialism: a native product (in this case, authenticity) was being packaged and sold in the normal commercial processes within Europe, as the 1915 memoir is clearly intended to accompany the marketing of the films (and the films were intended to pay for Schomburgk's own African expeditions). By 1930, the photographs have become art, and a sort of dilettante's ethnography. By 1944, for the English language audience, the veneer of ethnography is important, but in essence the work -- along with Bryk's work -- is now being sold under the dubious category of "erotica," i.e., as something little better than pornography. Although neither Gehrts-Schomburgk's photographs nor Bryk's book are particularly salacious or prurient, the hint as to the book's intent is provided by the fly-by-night publishing venture that issued them, "Juno Books" of Forest Hills, New York -- which seems to have issued no other recorded publications at all. The 1944 publication of Bryk's text and Gehrts-Schomburgk's photographs seem to indicate a climate in which titillating material was frequently issued under the guise of "scientific" validity, because scientific utility was harder to censor than something obviously intended to be pornographic. But to a certain degree, Meg Gehrts-Schomburgk's ethnographic photographs of Africa were already to a certain extent contaminated by her fame as a film star making silent film melodramas about the German colonial enterprise. The actual photos -- while they may depict topless women -- are hardly intended to titillate, but at the same time the captions indicate a vast condescension which is hardly appropriate for professional anthropology: we may see this in Gehrts-Schomburgk's plate 3 (depicted in Figure 2 at the end) whose caption reads "Mangbetu woman. She wears no hat. She does not need one, with that imposing edifice of hair." (Bryk, ix). While there is some utility to the caption -- the woman depicted in the photo has an elaborate hairstyle that resembles a hat -- nonetheless this ends up sounding like a condescending version of Vogue magazine.
How does this somewhat preposterous work that passes for anthropology bear upon the work of someone like Isaac Schapera? First, as noted earlier, Alfred Kinsey accorded Schapera the same status as Bryk when assessing anthropological work on the sexual habits of African tribes -- then again, Kinsey was not really an anthropologist himself, although he too was essentially making up a scientistic paradigm for himself as he collected ethnographic information. (It is perhaps no accident that Kinsey's own pioneering report has come under the same harsh critique that has also been leveled against Margaret Mead, Sigmund Freud, and others.) From the standpoint of contemporary twenty-first century anthropology, certainly no-one would want to place Schapera in the same category as Felix Bryk, whose work may not have been intended to titillate, but whose dedication to "exoticism" was sufficient that the work could easily serve that purpose when packaged for an English-language readership. Yet the basis of Schapera's work is, as Ugochukwu...
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