M’Hali’s becomingsThe photographic studio and four small customized men

Abstract

This paper aims to critically address some photographs that compose an essay produced in 1872 by the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company. We propose that the image of Ndugu M’Hali, a seven years old boy, incorporates a common visual trope (Zarzycka 2016) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: children in photographic studios. This trope, enunciated by Walter Benjamin in Berlin Childhood around 1900, raises questions about visual, cultural and social memories. Through an approach conceived from the methodology proposed by Aby Warburg, it is intended to delineate different temporalities of the image in order to, on the one hand, insert it into a visual tradition, and, on the other hand, to suggest its potential as a historical-anthropological object. In this sense, the idea of pharmakon (Pinney 2008, 2012) presents itself as a possibility for a counter-gaze against that colonial and bourgeois one: photography, in its duality — both “cure” and “poison” — virtually establishes a new subject: what can become M’Hali after his death at the age of twelve?