From Photography to Church Painting: Iconographic Narratives at the Court of the Ethiopian King of Kings, Menelik II (1880s–1913)

Photographs of Haile Selassie (r. 1930–1974) can be seen today on the streets of Addis Ababa and in books, museums, and photo agencies around the world; they have gained as well a new life on the Internet, partly through Rastafarianism activism. While the reign of this King of Kings has been widely depicted in photographic images, particularly in countless portraits (Hirsch and Perret 1995, Perret 1995), Haile Selassie was not the first Ethiopian ruler to exploit photography. Foreigners had brought this medium to the court of Yohannes IV (r. 1872–1889), but it was his successor, Menelik II (r. 1889–1913), who was the first to make extensive use of photography (Pankhurst 1994). A glimpse at his portraits reveals that they were laid out carefully and seem to reflect a triumphant political power (Fig. 1–3). How can these documents be deciphered, beyond the mere observation that these scenes took place, beyond the Barthesian “it-has-been” (Barthes 1980)?

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the advent and development of photography opened new worlds to viewers, who became able to visualize themselves, their communities, and the world beyond through growing numbers of images (Schwartz and Ryan 2003). Inspired by postcolonial theory’s critique of colonial discourses and representations, a number of writings since the 1980s have emphasized the power relations conveyed by photographs taken during this period of rising colonialism, when cameras were used worldwide in a context of cultural, economic, and political inequality and domination. Photography came to be used as an instrument of cultural imperialism, producing symbols of colonialism which stimulated its expansion (see for instance Schwartz 1996, Landau and Kaspin 2002, Palma 2005, Ama Asaa Engmann 2012).

Nevertheless, researchers have recently emphasized the plural quality of what we call photography (Rouillé 2005) and the need to take into account the environment of a photograph’s creation and the visual culture from which it stems, so as to apprehend how these shape the production, use, and interpretation of images. A photograph implies a “floating chain of signifieds” that can be deciphered in different ways or ignored by viewers (Barthes 1964:44); its meanings can’t be anchored, a feature that facilitated its appropriation by different visual cultures. Disseminated rapidly throughout the world since its invention, this medium was in fact appropriated locally in myriad ways. We know photography was used as a vehicle of symbolic power during the colonial period, but recent studies have enriched this debate by moving away from the Euro-American center of gravity (see Pinney and Peterson 2003). Several authors have shed light on the conditions for the appropriation of the technology in distinct African regions (Geary 1988, 1991; Triulzi 1995; Ouédraogo 2002; Nimis 2005), or on the appropriation of the images themselves, whose meanings change in accord with different ways of seeing, such as in the multiple uses and lives of a 1913 photograph of Sheikh Amadou Bamba in Senegal (Roberts and Roberts 2003).

Ethiopia occupies an exceptional place in the history of African colonization: following the resounding victory of Menelik II’s army against Italy in 1896 at the Battle of Adwa, the country defended its independence right up until the invasion by Mussolini’s troops in 1936. It became an international symbol of resistance to colonization and entered the international system of sovereign nation-states through diplomatic exchanges. As a warrior-king and nation builder, Menelik II had gained heroic status globally, notably in the black world (Hill 2008:28).

If photography had been used as a tool of symbolic power by European colonialists, how might the government of an African country have used this same medium against colonialism and to defend its independence? Could it use images to inscribe Ethiopia as a recognized nation in a global “image-world” (Poole 1997), that is, in the realm of images circulating among Africa, Europe, and the United States? In other words, to what extent did the Ethiopian court recognize the communication function of photography and the power of its images? What publics...