Unlike any other medium, photography spread across the world like a whirlwind in just ten months after François Arago (inventor of Photography) officially announced the first photograph in 1839.
Places like Togo, Sierra Leone and Senegal in West Africa were one of the first places to be introduced to the daguerreotype in the late 19th century. (Daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process in the history of photography where the images were plastered onto a silvered copper plate).
As the first daguerreotypes arrived, European artists began documenting Egypt’s and North Africa’s extraordinary monuments and landmarks with their heavy cameras.
In West Africa, explorers and government officials such as the French Louis Bouët and Jules Itier were among the first to employ this technology in the early 1840s. And despite photography being invented in Europe, it is in Africa that it truly thrived.
This encouraged other African descendants and locals to open their own photography studios in the 1860s. And by the time you know it, permanent Photography studios stood all across Africa by the 1900s.
Great names would come out of this era such as Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta. And their work is still frozen in time as if we could see into the past and really imagine how Africa was at the time, a real gift of photography.