Collection Guide
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Martinique: vues & types
95.R.97
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Contributing Institution:
Special Collections
Title: Martinique: vues & types
Identifier/Call Number: 95.R.97
Physical Description:
1.5 Linear Feet
(69 photographs in 1 album)
Date (inclusive): 1870s-1880s
Physical Location: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the
catalog record for this collection. Click here for the
access policy .
Abstract: The album of 69 photographs taken by an unidentified photographer(s) contains views of Martinique and studio portraits of
the island's inhabitants.
Language of Material:
French
.
Contact
Library Reproductions and Permissions .
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.
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women), are now considered to be outdated, racist, or offensive.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.
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.
Arranged in a single series: Series I. Martinique: vues & types, 1870s-1880s.
The collection was digitized by the repository in 2021 and the images are available online:
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/95r97
Beth Ann Guynn wrote the finding aid in 2021.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Martinique -- Description and travel
Indentured servants -- Martinique
Albumen prints -- Martinique -- 19th century
Photograph albums -- Martinique -- 19th century
Group portraits -- Martinique -- 19th century
Studio portraits -- Martinique -- 19th century
Photographs, Original.
Blacks -- Martinique -- Portraits
France -- Colonies -- America