![]() The Portuguese colonial context, similar to other colonial contexts, reveals the banal-ization of the practice of white men photographing black colonized women. The pervasiveness of images of black women's unclothed bodies in the Portu-guese colonial visual archive from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s-in photographic postcards, propaganda leaflets, colonial exhibition ephemera or as illustrations in newspapers-demonstrates that the gendered and racialized body of (unnamed) women was a powerful trope of colonial hegemony. Drawing on multi-sited research, I present a biographical account of Keene which analyses the ambivalent gender politics in her photographs as well as her uncritical adoption of colonial categories of race. Despite her pioneering status, she has been overlooked in the existing literature on South African photography, and, although she has received limited attention in Euro-American histories of photography, much remains unknown about her life and work, especially in relation to her time in Cape Town. Through these interventions, she made a substantial contribution to popular visual culture at the Cape and was celebrated by local and international audiences. Keene actively circulated reproductions of her photographs as self-published postcards and in popular publications. She was quick to recognise opportunities to translate her photographic success into financial profit and was one of very few women to operate a photographic studio in early-twentieth century South Africa. Her photographs of South African subject matter were shown at exhibitions across the world. Whilst at the Cape (1903-1913), she achieved international acclaim as a pictorialist photographer. Born in Germany in 1861, Minna Keene lived in Cape Town during a prolific phase of her photographic career. ![]()
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