Behind the Scenes: Backdrops, Space, and Sudanese Portraiture in Motion

There is a paradox in the colonial history of photography: How can a photographic blackout in Sudan lead to a flourishing of photographic portraits representing it outside of Sudan? In 1881, Muhammad Ahmed al-Mahdi founded an independent, African Islamic state during the height of the “Scramble for Africa.” After driving out the forces of the Ottoman-Egyptian colonial state from what is today much of Sudan and South Sudan, the reformist movement instituted an effective photographic blackout. Between 1884 to the state’s violent dismantling in the late 1890s, not one photograph was taken in spaces under Mahdist control. Yet, during this era, there was an explosion of photographic material representing Sudan and Sudanese peoples taken by Ottoman, Egyptian, European, and American photographers in Cairo, Zanzibar, Paris, London, and Chicago.

This paper addresses the case in two ways. First, it examines the creation and proliferation of images of Sudanese peoples made outside Sudan during this era, paying special attention to the photographic backdrops. The portraits convey significant information about the sitters, yet the backdrops link them to imagined spaces ranging from deserts to jungles, government buildings to interiors connecting people to a space. Second, it considers the absence of photography within the Mahdist state as sophisticated engagement with the imperial modernism and colonial economies embedded within the practice of photography. This paper concludes with recent Sudanese and Sudanese diasporic artists using these same images—now available through digital archives—to reconfigure these complicated pasts into their contemporary artistic practice.