Photograph by Sergeant John Harrold, R.E., 'Abyssinian Landscape', albumen print, 1868

A mounted sepia-coloured photograph showing a rock formation.

The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A, acquired with the generous assistance of the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Art Fund

Frustrated by a lack of communication from Queen Victoria’s government, in 1864 the Ethiopian emperor Tewodros II (Theodore) took a number of Europeans captive, including the British consul, Captain Cameron. The British response was a military expedition of huge complexity and expense led by General Sir Robert Napier. The expedition marched to Tewodros’s fortress at Maqdala (Magdala) where a brief battle took place. Britain won the conflict, but not before the captives were released and Tewodros himself had committed suicide.

The expedition, which involved more than 13,000 men and a journey of some 400 miles, received unprecedented publicity in Britain. Crucially, it was one of Britain’s earliest military operations to be captured via the relatively new science of photography.

Regarding the logistics of the photographic campaign and the subsequent publishing and circulation of the views, historian James R. Ryan states:

‘Two bulky sets of photographic stores and equipment (of which only one was used) were sent from England at the suggestion of the director of the Royal Engineers’ Establishment at Chatham. The equipment was supervised in the field by a chief photographer, Sergeant John Harrold, and seven assistants. Besides their other duties, the Royal Engineers used the camera to record scenes of the expeditionary forces, portraits of officers and landscape views (p. 74). As noted by Ryan, this selection rendered "Abyssinia's indigenous inhabitants virtually invisible ... The Abyssinian Campaign was thus collectively presented as a war waged against nature"’ (p. 92-93).

‘Although it is not known how many such photographs were made in total, a series of seventy-eight, including landscape views, camp scenes, sketches and portraits were subsequently assembled into albums and presented to various worthy institutions of government and science, from the RGS to the Foreign Office, by the Secretary of State for War in 1869. A number of the photographs were also used, along with drawings by various officers, as a basis for the illustrations in the official Record of the Expedition to Abyssinia.' (p. 74)

'Unlike commercial photographers who accompanied earlier and subsequent campaigns, the photographers of the Royal Engineers were not treated as privileged artists. Nor were they individually acknowledged on their photographs. Their work was represented as a collective record rather than a series of subjective studies.' (p. 81)

Chapter 3, ‘The Art of Campaigning’, in Picturing Empire, Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire, James R. Ryan, London: Reaktion Books, 1997.

RPS.4097-2024