THREE INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS
YOU SHOULD PROBABLY BE FOLLOWING
CASIMIR ZAGOURSKI
The Photographer
I
n the years between the two world wars, no photographer
in central Africa visually articulated popular ideas about
the peoples in this region more eloquently than Casimir
Zagourski (1883-1944). His oeuvre consists of hundreds of
black-and-white prints, exquisite in technical and aesthetic
execution.Zagourski was born Kazimierz Zagórski in what is
today Ukraine to the family of a Polish nobleman. (In 1883
Poland was under Russian occupation, and the family had
moved to Russia.) Zagourski served in the czarist air force,
and following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 he returned
to a now-independent Poland, but he found it difficult to
make a living. In 1924 he settled in Léopoldville, the capital
of the Belgian Congo, and opened a photographic studio.
Zagourski became an accomplished photographer
specializing in portraiture. He soon received commissions
from the colonial government to cover official events, and he
photographed colonial buildings and establishments.
H
is great passion, however, was to document the peoples of central Africa. Like his contempo-
raries, he believed that central African cultures were on the verge of extinction and that
photography could preserve those aspects that were bound to disappear. Between 1929 and 1937,
he set out on several expeditions to French Equatorial Africa (A.E.F.), Rwanda, Kenya and
Tanganyika. With superb technique and great sensitivity he created portraits of Africans that--
although taken in the tradition of anthropological photography--evoke a sense of closeness and
empathy.