My attention has been drawn to an article published in the Summer 2012 issue of African Arts (vol. 45, no. 2): Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann, “Under Imperial Eyes, Black Bodies, Buttocks, and Breasts. British Colonial Photography and Asante ‘Fetish Girls’.”
I think the author allowed herself to be seriously misled when she implies that the photographer of the portraits she analyses, Frederick Grant, was an Englishman. Grant is a well-known family name in Cape Coast, a Ghanaian coastal settlement. Furthermore, in a database of Basel Mission photographs which was put on general access online almost fifteen years ago, and for which I was co-director, “Fred Grant” is listed in the alphabetical browsing list of photographers and can be identified as a professional who was taking photographs in Cape Coast in 1874. The database, which is now in the hands of the University of Southern California, can be found online at...