Pablo Picasso had a collection of some 40 colonial photographic postcards made by Edmond Fortier. The visual correlations between Fortier's "studies" and Picasso's paintings of 1906-1907, culminating in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), suggest that photographic African source material helped Picasso redefine his pictorial language and was a critical factor in the development of analytic cubism.
