Fortier, photographe, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2018, is the first substantial monograph devoted to Edmond Fortier and his work. Born in the Vosges in 1862, Fortier moved to Paris before becoming a naturalized Frenchman and settling in Dakar at the end of the nineteenth century. From there, he photographed West Africa in the early twentieth century, producing more than 3,500 images as postcards, a popular medium whose original negatives or prints have not been located.
This volume concentrates on a defining expedition: Fortier’s journey from Conakry, the capital of French Guinea, to Timbuktu in present-day Mali. Covering more than 5,000 kilometres along routes away from the standard itineraries, the journey passes through the Bandiagara cliffs and Dogon country. Fortier recorded ceremonies and dances in Dogon and Bamako regions, the antelope-mask figures associated with chiwara, and a range of musical instruments. His photographs also preserve the deteriorated state of Timbuktu’s Sankore, Djinguereber, and Sidi Yahya mosques before their reconstruction.
The book’s importance lies not only in the breadth of its visual record, but in the editorial method applied to it. At least half of the 500 postcards in the “general Fortier collection” relating to the journey are brought together here. Historian Daniela Moreau places the images alongside bibliographic references and commentary on the events depicted, Fortier’s unconventional career, and the historical and technical circumstances of postcard photography. The result is neither a conventional ethnographic survey nor a loose archive selection: it is a sustained account of a photographer who, without claiming to be an ethnographer, relied on an alert and responsive eye.
For collectors of photography and African visual history, the book offers a particularly focused encounter with a body of work that circulated widely while leaving its originals untraced. Its 384 pages and 263 colour illustrations give the expedition room to unfold as both historical document and photographic sequence. The French-language softcover edition, with flaps, measures 19 × 24.5 cm and preserves the collaboration between Fortier’s images and Moreau’s research without obscuring the photographer’s distinctive point of view.
