Five Women with Two Children, Indoors
Unidentified
Saint Louisian photographer
Not on view
Three generations of women are immortalized in this photograph. Alongside dozens of other families from Saint-Louis, they are the result of a rooted history of mixed marriages between Europeans and Senegalese that has its origins in the Portuguese presence in Senegal in the sixteenth century. In this mixed society, women played a significant role and had exceptional economic and political power. Here, the room is modestly decorated with an iron bed, a calendar indicating 1915 as the current year, two small photographs, and a mirror. As this amateur strove to achieve the image’s optimal sharpness, his shot reveals the sitter’s movement with one of the standing women slightly out-of-focus. This blurred quality betrays the incidental nature of photography.
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