Images du Dahomey brings together a selection of Edmond Fortier’s photographs made in 1908 and 1909 in the French colony of Dahomey, now the Republic of Benin. Fortier, a French photographer based in Dakar, accompanied colonial authorities on two journeys and recorded encounters with kings, ministers, communities, and religious practitioners, as well as ceremonies, celebrations, markets, waterways, and urban scenes in places including Cotonou, Ouidah, Allada, Abomey, Sakété, and Porto-Novo.
The book treats these pictures not simply as illustrations of a vanished colonial setting, but as documents requiring reconstruction. Fortier’s larger body of work consisted of approximately 4,000 photographs, many issued as postcards; because the original negatives have not been located, the surviving material is dispersed among objects and correspondence gathered from widely separated sources. This volume therefore studies a selected group and places them in historical sequence, allowing the images to be read alongside the conditions of their production and circulation.
That context is essential. Fortier was an outsider, present in Dahomey only briefly and operating in the service of a colonial economy of travel, classification, and representation. Yet his photographs also preserve details of social life, material culture, and religious practice, including important Vodun ceremonies. Their value lies in this unresolved tension: they are shaped by the colonial gaze while remaining substantial records of early twentieth-century Benin and of forms of African culture whose visual traces might otherwise be more difficult to study.
Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2020, the French-language volume includes 260 pages in a 19 × 24.5 cm format. For collectors, its particular importance is the conjunction of primary photographic material and sustained historical interpretation: a carefully bounded study of Fortier’s Dahomey images that makes a scattered postcard archive available as a coherent object of research and close looking.
