Francis W. Joaque

Francis Wilberforce Joaque ( – 1 November 1895) was a Sierra Leonean photographer. A descendant of liberated Africans, he is known as one of the earliest professional photographers of African descent. His work has contributed notably to the visual history of Central and West Africa during the late 19th century.

Prints of Joaque's historical photographs have been collected as examples of 19th-century African photography by the British Museum, the Netherlands Photo Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Rietberg Museum.

Biography Joaque was born around 1845 in Freetown, British Sierra Leone, to Krio-speaking parents. His father, Richard Vincent Joaque, was described as "a prominent member of the offspring of Liberated Africans" and being of matrilineal Ijesha Yoruba descent. Joaque's grandfather had been taken from his native home in the Popo area of Dahomey by Spanish slavers, who put him to work as a sailor on a slave ship before he was liberated by the West Africa Squadron following the vessel's capture. After settling in Sierra Leone, Joaque's grandfather ran an auctioneering business, which was passed onto Richard. Between 1865 and 1890, he temporarily closed his photographic studio in Freetown and opened a new studio in Fernando Pó, an island in Equatorial Guinea, now called Bioko. In the 1870s, he was commissioned by Spanish governor Diego Santisteban to produce a series of fourteen photographs of Santa Isabel, the former capital of Fernando Pó. During these years, he also worked in Libreville, Gabon. Afterwards, he returned to Freetown and established his new studio in 1890. Some years later, Joaque died in Freetown on 1 November 1895.

Joaque's photographs were published as engravings in 19th-century illustrated magazines such as La Ilustración Española y Americana in Spain and Über Land und Meer in Germany, as well as in missionary reports and travelogues. In his study "Circulating West-African Photographs in the Atlantic Visualscape", Schneider discussed the wider circulation of early photography in the region, noting Joaque's work across various regions of West and Central Africa "along the paths of a huge and dynamic network knitted and knotted by the movements of people and photographs."

Joaque's photographs in private and public collections According to Christraud M. Geary, about 200 of Joaque's images still exist in European collections. A portrait of him with a stereoscopic camera on a tripod is kept in the National Library of Spain in Madrid. Cartes de visite and albumen prints of his work are held in several public collections, including the British Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and the Rietberg Museum in Zurich. Further, two of his photographs were included in the 2022 exhibition "The Future is Blinking. Early Studio Photography from West and Central Africa" at the Rietberg Museum.

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