The Visual Anthropology Archive. Images of Africa in Italian Collections

Italy preserves a wide number of collections of photographic and cinematographic images realized in Africa by explorers, travellers, missionaries, soldiers and colonial administrators. These documents were realized not only in the Italian colonial territories but also in other contexts, for instance the Congo. It is an abundant and poorly studied heritage, whose safeguard is nowadays endangered. The article takes into consideration the theoretical and methodological challenges connected with the use of visual sources by Africanist historiography and anthropology. It then focuses on the images realized by two travellers from Biella, Vittorio Sella and Guido Piacenza, who produced an important documentation of their journeys in Central and East Africa at the beginning of the Twenty Century. The comparison of these documents can suggest the mostly unexplored opportunities offered by Italian visual archives.