Staring Back: Anthropometric-style African Colonial Photography and Picasso'sDemoiselles

Abstract

This article explores new ground regarding the role of colonial African photography in the development of Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, building on our knowledge of his use of photographs as source material for other paintings at the time. I offer consideration of the role of a specific type of colonial photographic practice that has not previously been discussed in the context of this painting: multi-figural, anthropometric-style photographs taken of African subjects for European markets in the years prior to and following the turn of the twentieth century. I discuss the distribution of such photographs in European capitals and their ubiquity in Paris at the time, proposing that Picasso found in this genre a number of solutions for Demoiselles: a framework for its final composition, specific poses, elements that contributed to his nascent interest in simultaneous multiple perspectives, an expressive affect fundamental to the transgressive power of the painting at the time, and impetus for the Africanization of his prostitutes. Finally, I examine the significance of colonial African photographic sources serving as catalytic prompts—along with the masks and sculpture at the Trocadéro—for Picasso's radical alteration of Demoiselles in the summer of 1907.

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