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Martinique: vues & types
95.R.97
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Title: Martinique: vues & types
Date (inclusive): 1870s-1880s
Number: 95.R.97
Physical Description:
1.5 Linear Feet
(69 photographs in 1 album)
Repository:
The Getty Research Institute
Special Collections
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles 90049-1688
reference@getty.edu
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/askref
(310) 440-7390
Abstract: The album of 69 photographs taken by an
unidentified photographer(s) contains views of Martinique and studio portraits of the
island's inhabitants.
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Language: Collection material is in
French .
The album was likely produced by one of the early photographers working in Martinique.
Sources consulted:
Garcia, Claire Oberon. "My first visit to 'Le Pays des Revenants': Color, Caste, and Class
in Martinque: Then and…?" https://sites.coloradocollege.edu/martinique/2011/07/21/79/
Northrup, David. "Indentured Indians in the French Antilles. Les immigrants indiens engagés
aux Antilles françaises,"
Outre-Mers: Revue d'histoire, Année
2000: 245-271.
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Martinique: vues & types, 1870s-1880s, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,
Accession no. 95.R.97.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa95r97
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Acquired in 1995.
Beth Ann Guynn wrote the finding aid in 2021.
The collection was digitized by the repository in 2021 and the images are available
online:
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/95r97
Scope and Content of Collection
The album contains 69 albumen photographs of Martinique by an unidentified maker(s)
including 24 large format and 25 carte-de-visite size views of Fort-de-France, Balata, St.
Pierre, and environs; three large format portraits; and 17 carte-de-visite size studio
portraits. One of the large photographs depicts a group of East Indian immigrants, likely
recruited to the island as indentured laborers; the other two are studio portraits of a
multiracial woman and a Congolese man respectively. Slavery was abolished in Martinique in
1848. Lacking a labor force French coffee and sugar planters first looked to coastal western
Africa where they purchased enslaved persons, emancipated them, and then signed them into
long-term contracts to work in Martinique. This practice was quickly viewed as enslavement
in another guise, and the planters then looked to East India for laborers.
The album is half bound in dark red leather with pebbled boards. The title is debossed on
the front cover.
Titles for most of the individual photographs are from the French captions written on the
mounts below the images. Consequently, some of the language used to describe Black persons
in the titles, such as négresses and mulâtresses (negro women and mulatto women), are now
considered to be outdated, racist, or offensive. Fifteen of the carte-de-visite size
portraits depict women of color. Grouped on two pages and collectively captioned as
representing racial types, these images extend the 1860s and 1870s craze of collecting
cartes-de-visite of one's friends, family, heads of state, and other celebrities to the
collecting of exoticized and objectified unnamed women. Since the names of the sitters are
unknown descriptive titles for their portraits were devised by the archivist.
Arranged in a single series:
Series I. Martinique: vues & types,
1870s-1880s.
Indentured servants -- Martinique
Blacks -- Martinique -- Portraits
Martinique -- Description and travel
France -- Colonies -- America
Albumen prints -- Martinique -- 19th century
Photograph albums -- Martinique -- 19th century
Group portraits -- Martinique -- 19th century
Studio portraits -- Martinique -- 19th century
Photographs, Original.