François-Edmond Fortier

François-Edmond Fortier was a French photographer, publisher of postcards and visual ethnographer. In his more than 3,300 images and postcards of French West Africa, he documented landscapes, African and colonial buildings, the urban developments in Dakar, everyday life in the countryside, as well as political and economic leaders. His postcards encompass both ethnographic documentation and staged portraiture, some of which showing eroticized depictions of indigenous women. Photographs and reprints of his work have since been reproduced as documents of visual culture of life in French West Africa.