'The violence of colonial photography is a compelling account of photography as an instrument of British and French imperialisms. Mining a wide range of archival images from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Daniel Foliard offers a rich, albeit disturbing, history of how the production, dissemination and circulation of photographic depictions of symbolic and literal violence enabled and justified colonial power.'
Professor Ali Behdad, author of Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East
'The photographic archives of colonial expansion and the tainted ways of looking they have engendered have never been read with such thoughtful sensitivity, compassion and insight as in this book. Foliard powerfully exposes the imbrication of the camera in colonial violence even as he enjoins us to attend with care to the brutalised bodies and, as much as possible, to the people whose images confront us in this chilling and illuminating book.'
Professor Marianne Hirsch, co-author of School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference
Praise for the French edition
'In this brilliant study, Daniel Foliard delivers a subtle history of violence and its representations. Steamships, quinine, the machinegun: to these instruments of western colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth-century we must now add the camera. Such is the lesson of Combat, punish, photograph, which is dedicated to images of violence from the pre-1914 imperial world ... After closing this powerful and demanding book, you'll never look at photos of violence, whether historical or contemporary, in the same way again.' (French edition)
Andre Loez, Le Monde
'Drawing on fascinating research in the British and French archives, [the author] recounts the creation of war photography in a colonial context. With great precision, he shows how the expeditions of the years 1890 to 1914 - the inaptly named little wars - radically transformed the representation of the suffering of others ... Far from being sensationalist, the book, which appears in the new series Histoire-monde from Editions La Decouverte, is a rigorous demonstration of the combined power of Kodak and empire.' (French edition)
Sylvain Venayre, L'Histoire
'...in its exceptional scope, nuance and sophisticated linking of histories of photography and violence, this book is a landmark publication in the field and must surely be the go-to for a comprehensive study of early colonial conflict photography.' (French edition)
Will Fysh, H-France Review
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