ABSTRACT
The Austrian photographer Richard Buchta is regarded as having undertaken the earliest photographic tour of central Africa, in 1878–9. As Friedrich Ratzel notes in his brief biographical sketch, Buchta seems to have travelled to Egypt around 1870 and set himself up in Cairo as a professional photographer. So extensive was the contemporary use of Buchta's work that it can be said to have influenced the way Equatoria was visually represented for an entire generation during a period when its place in the European consciousness was at its peak. The circumstances of Buchta's decision in mid-1878 to undertake a photographic tour south into Equatoria are not known, but it was possibly discussed with Gessi at the time of his departure for Bahr el Ghazal. The final, most significant nineteenth-century publication of Buchta's Equatorian photographs is Ratzel's The History of Mankind, which includes a wide variety of illustrations based on Buchta's photographs and his drawings.
