Photography in Sudan refers to both historical as well as to contemporary photographs taken in the cultural history of today's Republic of the Sudan. This includes the former territory of present-day South Sudan, as well as what was once Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and some of the oldest photographs from the 1860s, taken during the Turkish-Egyptian rule (Turkiyya). As in other countries, the growing importance of photography for mass media like newspapers, as well as for amateur photographers has led to a wider photographic documentation and use of photographs in Sudan during the 20th century and beyond. In the 21st century, photography in Sudan has undergone important changes, mainly due to digital photography and distribution through social media and the Internet.
After the earliest periods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for which only foreign photographers have been credited with photographs or films of life in Sudan, indigenous photographers like Gadalla Gubara or Rashid Mahdi added their own visions to the photographic inventory of the country from the 1950s onwards. In 2017, the Sudan Historical Photography Archive in Khartoum started to build a visual inventory of everyday life from Sudan's independence in 1956 until the early 1980s. As documented in the comprehensive exhibition at the Sharjah Art Foundation on "The making of the modern art movement in Sudan", this period also includes Gubara and Mahdi as photographic artists during the country's prolific period for modern art.
Since the end of World War II, professional photographers travelling the world, such as British photojournalist George Rodger, German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl or photographer Sebastião Salgado from Brazil have created photographic stories of rural ethnic groups in southern Sudan that became famous in the history of photography in Sudan.Compare, for example, the following quote: "Indeed, probably the best known books of photographs of the Sudan are of the Nuba, Leni Riefenstahl's The Last of the Nuba and People of Kao..." (pp. 59-60) in and the chapter George Rodgers Koronga Nuba wrestlers of Kordofan, South Sudan, 1949 (pp.18-19) in More recently, developments in tourism, global demand for photographs in mass media and the digital media of the 21st century have allowed an increasing number of Sudanese and foreign photographers to closely observe and record life in Sudan.
Colonial period – from pictures of 'natives' to real people
Early foreign photographers The earliest existing photographs from Sudan were taken from the late 1840s onwards by French, British, Austrian or other foreign photographers and served as documents of life in Africa or the colonial enterprise. Among other archives, the digital collections of the New York Public Library have a number of such early photographs taken in the Sudan. An archive of several thousand photographs, mainly taken by British officials and visitors during the years from 1899 and up to the 1950s, is kept at the Sudan Archive at Durham University in the UK.In their book, The Sudan: Photographs from the Sudan Archive, the authors have published 240 photographs, presenting "events of historical or military significance, feats of engineering, and the daily life and recreation of the Sudanese and their temporary rulers." The same university also holds several other archives of British colonial officers, including photographs from various cities and regions of Sudan, with an online catalogue.
Following his travels to Upper Egypt, Eastern Sudan and Ethiopia in 18471848, French photographer and author of scientific and ethnographic publications Pierre Trémaux published the second volume of his , dedicated to Sudan in 1862, including prints made from his photographs of people of Darfur, Sennar or the Nuba mountains.Trémaux, Pierre. Voyage en Éthiopie, au Soudan Oriental et dans la Nigritie, Vol. 2: Le Soudan, textes de l'Atlas, Paris, Hachette 1862. - For a discussion of his photographs, see
In the 1880s, the Austrian explorer and photographer Richard Buchta published several books in German about his travels along the Nile, including a large number of photographs of ethnic people in southern Sudan.For his publications, see the list in the article on Richard Buchta and some of his photographs can be found in Wikimedia Commons under his name. At the turn of 1884/85, the Italian-British photographer Felice Beato documented the unsuccessful Nile Expedition of the British Army that came to the aid of Charles George Gordon at Khartoum, who was besieged by Mahdist forces.In the book Felice Beato: A photographer on the Eastern Road, the authors give the following short account: 1885 - Beato travels to the Sudan to photograph the events of the Mahdist rebellion against the British, but arrives three months after the major events. On April 30, he meets Lord [Baron] G.J. Wolseley onboard ship from Suez to Suakim. (sic) He documents Wolseley's expedition to Suakim to superintend the withdrawal of the troops. Following the short-lived Mahdist State, the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan provided new opportunities for photographs of British military and civilian officials. At that time, the early technology of photography was extremely difficult and expensive to use, as large format cameras and glass plates were used.In his article "Capturing the light of the Nile" about the earliest photographs taken in Egypt, Jeff Koehler makes the following remarks about the photographic technology of the late 19th century: "The technology continued to improve and diversify, and the paper negatives were soon superseded by glass ones in the wet-collodion process that combined the sharpness of daguerreotypes with the reproducibility of calotypes." See Koehler 2015, in the section 'Further reading'
Accompanying the Anglo-Egyptian re-conquest of Sudan from 1896 to 1898, war correspondent Francis Gregson documented both the advance of British troops and the victory of Lord Kitchener's troops over the Mahdist forces in Khartoum 1898, his album of 232 silver gelatin print photographs. Among other photographs of defeated Sudanese, this includes a photograph of the commander at the Battle of Atbara, Emir Mahmoud, as a prisoner of war.
In 19121913, new photographic technology in Sudan was used for aerial photography in archaeology, when British entrepreneur and amateur archaeologist Sir Henry Wellcome applied his automatic kite trolley aerial camera device during excavations at Jebel Moya, which was documented by several other photographs on this archaeological campaign.The 1905 book by John Ward, Our Sudan - its pyramids and progress. J. Murrey, 1905 presents information and photographs on archaeological sites in Sudan around the turn of the century and before.
Between 1926 and 1936, the British anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard took thousands of photographs during his anthropological fieldwork in southern Sudan. About 2500 of his images, mainly showing the life of the Azande, Moro, Ingessana, Nuer and Bongo peoples are in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, with many of them published online.
Documenting the military activities of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, photographs of soldiers and other military scenes, like the inspection of the Sudan Defense Force Guard of Honour, were taken during 1925 and 1955 and later collected in archives in the United Kingdom.Ahmed A. Sikanga (1983). “The Sudan Defence Force, Origin and Role, 1925-55.” Occasional Paper by the University of Khartoum’s Institute for African and Asian Studies.
A critical appreciation of these early non-Sudanese photographers and their interest in exotic images of Sudan is expressed in the following quote by Danish researcher Elsa Yvanez:
Hugo Bernatzik's ethnographic photographs and book In 1927, Austrian photographer and travel writer Hugo Bernatzik travelled by boat and his own automobile to southern Sudan. He returned with 1,400 photographs and 30,000 ft. of cinema film and published his impressions and ethnographic pictures of Shilluk, Nuer and Nuba people in 1930 in a popular travelogue, first in German and later in English titled Gari Gari: The Call of the African Wilderness (1936). Thus, exotic images and descriptions of ethnic life in remote areas of southern Sudan became known to European audiences and were later followed by photo stories by George Rodger and Leni Riefenstahl.
George Rodger's photographs of the Nuba and Latuka A professional photojournalist, interested in traditional lifestyles in Africa, was George Rodger, a founding member of Magnum Photos. His photographs were taken in 1948 and 1949 of indigenous people of the Nuba mountains in the Sudanese province of Kordofan as well as of the Latuka and other peoples of southern Sudan. In the introduction to the book Nuba and Latuka. The colour photographs, they were called "some of the most historically important and influential images taken in sub-Saharan Africa during the twentieth century." As Rodger wrote several years later, "When we came to leave the Nuba Jebels (mountains), we took with us only memories of a people ... so much more hospitable, chivalrous and gracious than many of us who live in the 'Dark Continents' outside Africa." In 1951, Rodger published his photo essay of this journey in National Geographic. In the 1960s, his pictures prompted controversial German photographer and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to travel to the Nuba mountains for her own photo stories on the Nuba people.
The first Sudanese photographers
As far as has been documented, one of the first professional Sudanese photographers and film cameramen was Gadalla Gubara, a pioneer of cinema in Sudan and Africa at large. During and after the Second World War, he filmed and photographed many current events, one of them being the raising of the Sudanese flag on the Day of Independence.Omar Zaki wrote in his article Sudan: Gadalla Gubara - a Forgotten Filmmaking Legend: "Gubara and fellow scriptwriter Kamal Ibrahim, were the only cameramen to record Sudan's Independence on January 1st 1956. He captured the symbolic moments when democratically elected Prime Minister Ismail Al-Azhari walked from the parliament to the presidential palace and replaced the British and Egyptian flags with the blue, gold, and green flag of Sudan." - See Another early Sudanese photographer was the self-taught photographer Rashid Mahdi.In an article about the exhibition "The Khartoum School: the making of the modern art movement in Sudan (1945–present)" in Sharja, UAE, 2017, the author writes about photography in Sudan: "The exhibition highlights the work of two pioneer master-photographers, Rashid Mahdi and Gadalla Gubara, as well as other studio photographers, for example, Abbas Habib Alla, Mohamed Yahya Issa, Fouad Hamza Tibin, Osman Hamid Khalifa, Omar Addow, Richard Lokiden Wani and Joua, in the context of the historical linkages between photography, decolonisation and self-representation." Source: The French photographer Claude Iverné, who also created his own photo stories in Sudan, called Rashid Mahdi "certainly the most sophisticated and one of the major African photographers of the XXth century". On his webpage, which claims to present a collection of about 12.000 digitized images from 1890 up to 2015, Iverné has published many photographs by Rashid Mahdi, both in Inverné's own collection, as well as in the Musée du quai Branly in Paris.
Commenting on the important change of representation in photographs of Africans in cities during the 1930s, the authors of the article An outline history of photography in Africa to ca. 1940, David Killingray and Andrew Roberts, have called this change "a shift to pictures of people, not 'natives.
Post-independence (19562010)
The Golden Years of photography (1950s1980s)