The IfL’s Archive for Geography holds unique materials documenting expeditions and geographical research since the 1860s. Of the many stories, landscapes, human lives and networks, it also reveals how geographical knowledge has been acquired, formed, and shared at various times and under different political regimes. Of the roughly 120,000 photographs, some of the most haunting are those taken in colonial contexts—including many landscapes and scenes from everyday life, some revealing relationships between the colonists and local populations, some depicting violence. These photos, contained in albums or in neat rows of labeled boxes, are rarely seen. We are motivated to unpack them by two unsettling realizations: that for their communities of origin they may be unfindable and inaccessible, and that they reveal and may reproduce ways of seeing and categorizing that persist today. Critically unpacking the institute’s history and practices is a priority for the IfL, which recently launched the initiative “Geschichte des IfL” (History of the IfL) to do so. Its strategic competence field Visual Regional Geographies (VisRegGeo) is especially concerned with analyzing the role of visual materials. While we understand that we cannot “decolonize” an archive, because such work can never be completed,1 we can acknowledge colonial structures that have shaped our discipline and work, the harm they caused (and continue to cause), and search for better ways to catalog and share collections. In addition to familiarizing ourselves with guidance concerning anticolonial practices,2 we wanted to reach out to experts from the materials’ heritage communities.
To begin, we issued a call for archival photographs stipends within the scope of VisRegGeo, inviting proposals from researchers and cultural heritage practitioners from the communities of the collections’ origins to Leipzig to assess the collections and talk with us about what an ethical description, digitization and presentation might look like as well as ideas for research or cultural uses of the collections. We hoped to become more aware of our blind spots and think together about how to ethically describe them and make them findable and accessible internationally. We identified two photograph collections that are rarely used, not digitized and only usable on site: the photo collections of Günther Tessmann’s expeditions to Cameroon as leader of the Lübeck Pangwe Expedition 1907–09 and in 1913-1914 as leader of the Ssanga-Lobaje-Reichsexpedition to the newly acquired territory of “New Cameroon.” The collection includes photos of vegetation and agriculture, everyday life, and encounters between Tessmann and the local population, including practices now clearly understood as racist, such as the measurement and documentation of local people’s bodies. We also identified a second collection: geographer Wilhelm Volz’s photographs from the Dutch colonies in the East Indies between 1897 and 1906. The strongest proposals, however, focused on the Tessmann collection. We invited three individuals who would take very different perspectives and approaches to these photos during their eight-week visits in 2025.
The first archival photograph stipend holders came as in researcher-artist tandem from March to April. Fogha Mc Cornilius Refem (Wan wo Layir) is a Ph.D. candidate in the “Minor Cosmopolitanisms” program at Potsdam University, interested in decolonial thought, subaltern studies, Black feminist theory, decolonial ecologies, and critical museum studies. His partner for this project, Wan Shey, is a rapper, producer, and spoken word artist from northwest Cameroon. Together, they reevaluated Tessmann’s photographs using creative practices such as critical fabulation and wake work. Inspired by Black Feminist Scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, critical fabulation uses creative writing to explore the “voids” and “silences” within the archive. Wake work uses creative expression to confront the ongoing effects of historical injustices, and aims to create spaces for remembrance and collective healing. After examining the collection, they choose one man who appears in multiple photographs, who we know from the inscription was called Schok. Together, they give Schok a voice, imagining a perspective that is missing from the historical record. In poems such as “Schok’s Lullaby,” composed and hummed, while showing photos from the collection, Wan Shey addresses Tessmann with a haunting voice he creates for Schock:
Your camera made you god over all
A figure among cyphers
I was caught
Not by the shackles of slavery
Aboard an over packed vessel
But by curiosity
Caught between my kin and a white mage
In July and August, we hosted Dr. Romuald Valentin Nkouda Sopgui, Senior Lecturer in German Literature and Regional Studies in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Maroua in Cameroon. An experienced researcher of the shared German-Cameroonian colonial heritage/memory in German archives, he has published on other colonial photography collections including that of German geographer Franz Thorbecke and his wife Marie Pauline from their expedition in Cameroon 1911-13. In taking an historical approach grounded in archival research and inspired by thinking relationally, visual economy, and deconstruction of the imperial gaze, Romuald shared considerations for reading the Tessmann photos and finding relevance beyond colonial inscription, particularly for regional audiences in Cameroon. In particular, he emphasized the value of the collection for documenting a regional identity of Pangwe cultural traditions and material culture (as he describes here), while emphasizing the importance of contextualizing the photographs as products of the colonial gaze and colonial project. In addition to extensive discussions, Romuald’s visit resulted in a well-received colloquium lecture. He also plans to use the images in his teaching and is pursuing the possibility of their inclusion in a planned exhibition in Yaoundé.
These three visits, though altogether lasting only four weeks, dramatically transformed my understanding not only of the Tessmann collection, but even of the role of the archive. When I wrote the call,I was thinking of the photographs as unique historic sources usable for research or cultural work, preserved in boxes that were seldom opened. I understood that colonial photographs were “collected” and brought back to European institutions to serve European interests, including showing control of indigenous or black bodies, that the photos often position individuals as nameless research objects, racialized “types” or even as property. Although the formal colonial relationship has ended, the “coloniality” lives on in the archive in the categories and descriptions, the effects of which extend to biases and world views. What I have come to understand is that this isn’t (only) academic matter; it is personal and affects us all. The knowledge and worldviews produced from these continues to influence our understanding about who belongs or does not belong in a place. White agents of German archives like me are less directly confronted with the effects; we can choose when and how to open the boxes and how to engage with coloniality. By disrupting this privilege, Fogha helped me see it. Of course, we earnestly want our archive to be accessible to everyone. But how accessible is it really, when the catalog is in German, when the photos are only usable onsite, and when interested users have difficulties obtaining a visa to enter the country? If when, on their way to us, visitors are harassed for appearing to “not belong”? The colonial episteme of the photographs is not historical; it is happening right now.
It is true that archives can perpetuate ways of seeing, but they can also challenge them. They preserve and provide documentation that make memory cultures (Erinnerungskulturen) possible. From Romuald, we learn to see how, for example, a focus on depicted cultural heritage can help it live on, strengthening communities’ understanding of their pasts. Rather than erasing a painful history, it is our responsibility to recognize it, contextualize it, and make it findable. Nor is there one easy way forward: digitization is expensive, and its funders (such as the German Research Foundation) require open access online publication of the digitized photos, which, due to sensitive content or potential for misuse, may or may not be in the interest of the heritage communities. We look forward to hearing more of Romuald’s ideas for making the collection selectively available for education and cultural heritage work. Collections can be disturbing to look at; hearing criticism of our practices can be uncomfortable; and offering such criticisms as a guest is surely even more so. To answer such a call, to speak and listen openly about these issues, to meet skepticism, to challenge what is taken for granted—this takes real courage. I am grateful to Fogha, to Wan Shey and to Romuald for doing this. I look forward to continuing these conversations and to beginning new ones.
About the author
Dr. Kimberly Coulter is a geographer and head of the department Central Geographical Library and Archive for Geography at the IfL.
1 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1. (2012): 1-40.
2 Archives can find many forms of anticolonial guidance, including literature concerning archival practices and the role of digitization (e.g., Michael Karabinos, Decolonisation in Dutch Archives: Defining and Debating, in: BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 134.2 (2019): 129 -141); the FAIR and CARE principles (FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-Usable; see Mark D. Wilkenson et al., The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, in: Scientific Data 3 (March 2016), 1-9, https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18. CARE stands for Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility and Ethics; see Stephanie Carroll et al., The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, in: Data Science Journal 19.43 (2020), 1-12, DOI: 10.5334/dsj-2020-043); practical guidelines of image archives that have invested in such work (see Ziu Bruckmann et al. [2025], Dekolonialisierung der Sammlungen und Archive der ETH Zürich – ein Leitfaden aus der Praxis); and practical interventions such as the state funded open-access discovery platform Collections from Colonial Contexts hosted by the German Digital Library (Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Portal Sammlungsgut aus kolonialen Kontexten).
3 Romuald Valentin Nkouda Sopgui, „Kolonialfotographie und kritisches Blickregime: Franz und Marie Pauline Thorbeckes Fotosammlungen zu Kamerun (1911-1913), Werkstattgeschichte 91 (2025). https://www.transcript-verlag.de/author/sopgui-romuald_valentin_nkouda-257656/