François-Edmond Fortier
1900-1912
West Africa, young Wolof girls [Afrique Occidentale, Jeunes Filles Ouolof]

Postcard, photomechanical
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Visual Resource Archive, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, Accession Number: VRA.2014.8.022
 
Included in the "In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (31 August 2015-3 January 2016).
 
Curatorial description (Accessed: 8 October 2015)
Fortier worked across West Africa between 1900 and 1912. He produced at least three thousand negatives, many of which he printed as postcards that he continued to reissue until the early 1920s. Active during the colonial era, Fortier privileged an ethnographic approach, creating images that appealed almost exclusively to the foreign communities residing in Africa and his compatriots in Europe. Some of his postcards can even be found in the collection of Pablo Picasso, who is known to have drawn inspiration from them.
 
LL/61686