Une séquence photographique de la mission Dakar-Djibouti : les funérailles d’Ayaléo

Abstract

The French Dakar-Djibouti mission took pictures of “Ayaléo’s burial” from start to finish, a “sequence” of about thirty photographs with a unity of subject, time and place. This set presents the funeral of the mission’s mule-driver, held near the city of Gondar in northern Ethiopia in October 1932. Owing both to the efforts to photograph the full event and to the treatment of these images, this series provides an outstanding account of the course of a funeral in this area in the early 1930s. To understand these pictures, we must refer to the texts written in parallel: captions, file cards and Michel Leiris’s diary. This set of photographs was done for the media coverage, but reflects also the adoption of methods that were applied to using photography as a tool for ethnological research under Marcel Griaule’s supervision.

Keywords

• Ethiopia
• photography
• ethnology
• funerals
• Dakar-Djibouti mission