Namibia In Living Color

Seen here in 1910 is a rather unassuming beachside church in one of the long dismantled German Empire's former colonial holdings. Photographed by early color photographer Robert Lohmeyer, this photo is more about what is unseen rather than what is actually in frame.

Lohmeyer traveled across the German Empire in the 1910's to photograph the people and places under German colonial rule with the intention of showing Germans back home what their overseas territories and the people who lived in them looked like. But the intention was also to categorize the cultures that lived abroad into a social hierarchy with the Germans themselves at the top of the societal pyramid reminiscent of Spanish colonial Castas paintings of the 18th Century. The German Empire often used these racialized hierarchical structures developed through biased ethnography and photojournalism to legitimize genocides they committed against indigenous peoples including the Herero of modern-day Namibia who still struggle to gain international recognition for the brutal genocide the German Empire committed against them.