Special Exhibit: Laplander Studies by Roland Bonaparte
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A relation of the French Emperor Napoleon, Prince Roland Bonaparte (1858-1924) took a nineteenth-century gentleman's interest in the sciences and in particular, during the earlier part of his life, in the study of anthropology. Like others of the period, he looked on photography as a scientific tool for preserving data from his expeditions, and used it to document the Amerindians, Surinames, Hottentots and other unusual peoples brought to European exhibitions.
In 1884 Bonaparte organized an ethnographic expedition to Lapland, an arctic region in northern Europe, described by F. Escard in an 1886 monograph Le Prince Roland Bonaparte in Laponie. (Available online here.)
A portfolio of collotypes Lapons (Laplanders) was also issued from the negatives taken during the trip by "the Prince's usual photographer" (Escard 1886, viii). The collotype plates, which are quite uncommon, document each sitter in paired frontal / profile views reminiscent of modern criminal mugshots. The images measure 6 x 4.5 inches (15x12 cm), printed on sheets 12 x 17 inches (30x44 cm).
Bonaparte's work is grounded in the anthropology of his time, which focussed on the documentation of physical characteristics, and in particular on shape and dimensions of the skull as a means of establishing relations between the human races. This tack had been given to European anthropology by its pioneers earlier in the century, notably Paul Broca, whose thinking was informed by the discovery of the first fragments of early man and whose standard field guide for anthropologists involved a complex series of physical measurements. The hard scientific results of Bonaparte's expedition were thus conclusions of the sort that Laplanders were "brachycephalic," had little facial hair, and possessed a "mean nasal index of 74.59 for the men, 73.64 for the women" (Escard 1886, xiii). This attitude is clear in Bonaparte's images, yet paradoxically the sitters role as human specimens, accentuated further by the numbered cards held next to each on a short stick, allows them a status and often a dignity which would be lacking in more commonplace photography.
Images and text copyright © 2006 by Christopher Wahren Fine Photographs
Click here to view the Exhibition Images 
...or here to view Roland Bonaparte images offered in the Sales Galleries
Works Cited & Recommended Reading:
Escard, F., Le Prince Roland Bonaparte in Laponie: Episodes et Tableaux. Paris, G. Chamerot, 1886. (Full work available online here.)
Sobieszek, Robert A., Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000. Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MIT Press, 1999. ISBN 0-262-19425-2 / 0-262-69228-7.
Links:
Roland Bonaparte on French Wikipedia (French Language)
Roland Bonaparte at the Corsica Museum of Anthropology (French Language)
About the Sami People (Laplanders) (Norwegian Language with English)
The Sami (Wikipedia)
