Mr Casement goes to Washington: The Politics of the Putumayo Photographs

Abstract

It is well-known that when Roger Casement left the Putumayo in November 1910, he took with him several Barbadian men, two Huitoto youths and a bundle of depositions documenting in extraordinary detail the atrocities committed by the Peruvian Amazon Company. What is far less known (and we have to thank Angus Mitchell for directing our attention to it in his publications) is that he also had with him a camera and several rolls of film waiting to be developed. Unfortunately only a handful of the photographs Casement had developed have survived. They lie in a box in the National Photographic Archive in Dublin, dormant and seemingly historically inert. Thankfully, the historicity of these images can be reconstructed, for in March 1912, when it looked asthough the American government was backsliding in its promise of putting political pressure on the Peruvian government to protect the Indians and to stop the brutal labour regime in the rubber lands of the Putumayo, Casement posted copies of a number of these photographs to George Young at the British Embassy in Washington to shock the American administration into action. All of these photographs (which are in the National Archives in Washington, DC) were personally annotated by Casement, in the manner of an atrocity narrative, and provide a rare insight into the political possibilities of the visual image.