Welcome aboard our archival photo tour of the maritime societies of the Indian Ocean of the 1840s to early 20th c. Our home port is the National Museum of African Art; the only national museum in the United States dedicated to collection, exhibition, conservation, and study of the arts of Africa. This tour, Sailors and Daughters, focuses attention on a diverse cross-section of people living on the shores of the Indian Ocean and their cosmopolitan cities by the sea. Click the links to explore.

SCENES FROM OMAN - During 1903-4, Hermann Burchardt—a financially independent traveler from Berlin—voyaged by dhow around the Middle East with the goal of photographing cities rarely visited by other itinerant photographers. In the Omani port cities of Muscat and Matrah, he found his camera welcomed in public spaces. As he walked through the city making pictures, he sparked the curiosity of local observers.

SWAHILI COAST DAUGHTERS - From the 1850s, photographs captivated people across the globe, and Zanzibar was no exception. By 1883, Sultan Barghash bin Said created a camera obscura room in a high tower of his new palace, called the House of Wonders. Life-sized portraits in oil, stereopticon viewers, and photo albums replete with cartes-de-visite of local and European sovereigns graced the Sultan’s many residences.

ZANZIBAR COSMORAMA: CITY VIEWS IN STONE TOWN AND N’GAMBO - By the turn of the twentieth century, Zanzibar was an important economic center of Indian Ocean trade. Photography studios flourished, creating a “cosmorama” of the city and its people. As with other early centers of photography in Egypt, Mauritius, Réunion, and Mozambique, Zanzibar became a hub of Indian Ocean enthusiasm for the medium, and its early photographers hailed from across the region.

IN QAJAR, PERSIA - The practice of photography was taken up in Iran soon after its invention. Antoin Sevruguin established one of the most successful commercial photography studios in Tehran from the 1870s, portraying many prosperous and royal families of the region. His photographs captured the last decades of the Qajar dynastic period (1795-1925), during which African men, women and children were brought to Iran in unprecedented numbers.

INDIAN OCEAN PORTRAITS - Some early experiments with photography in the western Indian Ocean came through avid patronage by the economic elite of the mercantile and plantation economies. Given regional dependence on imported labor, it is no surprise that by the 1860s companies and governments used photography to document the faces of transported people.