Immaculata Abba
Immaculata Abba is a researcher, writer, and photographer. She has a masters in Global and Imperial History from the University of Oxford and was a 2022 West African writer-in-residence at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora, Ghana.
In the entire collection, many of the photographed people look directly at Thomas (and his Nigerian assistants) with indifference, irritation, suspicion, disgust, humor, calm, and rarely joy. The existence of these photos represents a colonial gaze, anthropology’s birth defect. But despite what the object of the photographs represents, the expressions in them destabilize the right to scrutiny that the colonial gaze claims as a sole proprietor.
