Abstract

Missionary history is a recent topic of scholarly interest although foreign mission photographs have not been afforded the same attention. The lack of scholarship on missionary photography as a category (although arguably a subset of colonial and ethnographic photographies) means that little can be said definitively about the role of photography in overseas missions. This thesis looks at a late-nineteenth century photograph album compiled by Miss Amanda Jefferson (1860-1947)--a Canadian missionary to Western India. Jefferson's album serves as a case study in unpacking the meaning of photographs generated by foreign missionaries. As her 1892 letter indicates, Jefferson intended to send the album home to her friends and Christian community in New York so they could see something of the mission field and her new surroundings. Through an analysis of Jefferson's selection, organization and captioning of the album's fifty-one photographs, this thesis examines the use of photography for this single woman missionary: how photography itself was missionized and used as a tool for visualizing the harsh realities and everyday experiences of mission work, the missionaries's goals and biases, and the contradictions and ambiguities of this kind of cultural imperialism. This thesis considers both the pubic and private functions of this album as well as Jefferson's desire for the album to speak for itself despite the cultural and physical distance that divided the viewers from Jefferson and the people and places pictured.