Marie Pauline Thorbeckes und Anna Rein-Wuhrmanns Fotografien aus dem Kameruner Grasland

The current debate about objects collected from the colonies offers an opportunity to explore the stories surrounding the objects and their collectors. In doing so, it is also possible to reconstruct the active engagement of collectors with the material at different stages of the object’s biography, from production to use. The subject of this paper is the visual representations created by Marie Pauline Thorbecke and Anna Rein-Wuhrmann while in Cameroon. With their collections of images, the two women offered illustrative material about the colonial world. Thorbecke and Rein-Wuhrmann were among the women who worked and produced photographic material in Cameroon during the German colonial period. It is not only the colonial objects themselves that are important, but also the gender-specific colonial collections created by women. The aim is to show that Marie Pauline Thorbecke and Anna Rein-Wuhrmann created photographic visibilities in an imperially structured context and offered different patterns of meaning and order.