At the end of last week, the Guardian published a news blast about a new release of some old photos: the National Archive is putting thousands of colonial era photographs onto Flickr and is in search of caption information from the public. The idea of “crowd sourcing” captions is certainly an interesting proposition in this kind of context. I’m sure many people are excited to see what bits of information and background come out of the wood work.

On another level, this large trove of photos points to two interrelated points: the Africans are rarely named though the colonizers frequently are, and the photographs present a “sanitized” view of Africa. As @ElizaTalks points out, this sets an interesting precedent that we see time and time again in “development” photography.

Taken by colonial administrators for a colonial archive, the images inevitably give a sanitised view of empire: spotless nursing and school uniforms, bunting hung out for royal weddings and coronations, joyous reception committees greeting visiting dignitaries. One album, where the curators can spot the gulf between the image and the reality, shows happy, healthy people in the concentration camps of the Boer war, where thousands died of disease and hunger.

Steven Cable, specialist in photographic records at Kew, can find no evidence that the images were censored or weeded when they arrived back in London. “The photographers knew the type of image that was required, and that is what they supplied. The collection is permeated by an unquestioning acceptance that the empire was a good thing.”