Nouba Girl

Shortly after its invention, photography became an important tool for the sciences to record facts with accuracy and precision. The emerging discipline of anthropology--the scientific study of man--used it as a cataloguing tool. Amateur and professional photographers were scattered throughout the world, and by the 1880s, nearly every land had been recorded and made accessible to the public without traveling. Trémaux studied central African ethnic groups and made some of the earliest known portraits of them. The frontal view and neutral background follow the standards of anthropological photography. The heavy retouching of the negative, especially evident in the hair and skirt, betrays Trémaux's lack of experience and the limits of early paper negative processing.