In Light on Darkness, T. Jack Thompson, a well-established scholar of Scottish missions to Africa, uses a series of studies to examine ‘some of the issues raised by missionary photography’ in general (p. 5). Thompson's intent, as he puts it, was to look at ‘how European missionaries saw and interpreted Africa photographically in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ (p. 5). It follows other writing in mission history, including a 2002 special issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, which details both the cataloguing and analysis of the photographs now resident in mission archives in the West. The volume also follows, though to a lesser extent, other work detailing colonial photography projects like Anne Maxwell's Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the Native and the Making of European Identities (2000), which Thompson cites. This is a potentially important volume, but unfortunately does not live up to its promise.

The book consists of an introduction and seven chapters, the last of which is on critical exposition on photographs and photography. In the introduction, Thompson observes, importantly, that the revolution in mission historiography, which has occupied the last two decades, has not generally carried over into the deconstruction of mission photography. Despite the intense scrutiny to which mission textual sources have been subject, mission photographs – which number, in continental and Anglo-American archives, in the hundreds of thousands – are often still used as ancillary and easily interpretable sources. This is not unlike the use to which such photographs were put at their inception, used by foreign missionary societies to ram home (their intentions were not subtle) the utter degradation of many of the Africans whom they depicted, all the better to elicit funding from well-intentioned and well-heeled mission supporters in the West. Later in the book, Thompson quotes James Stewart, eminent Scottish missionary, in support of the purpose and impact of such images: ‘Photographs, however, generally tell their story with brutal fidelity.’ (p. 181) Thompson follows the introduction with a very useful discussion of early photography and photographic technique, in Africa.

In Chapter Five, ‘The Camera and the Congo’, Thompson looks at how photographs taken by missionaries exposed King Leopold's rubber-fuelled atrocities in Belgian Congo to a wider public. In the early twentieth century, the Congo Reform Association used magic lantern slide shows to publicise the amputation of hands and feet, which were a common response to villagers who failed to produce enough rubber. Missionaries and their audiences accepted the graphic proof offered by such images uncritically. This, together with Chapter Six on the use of the magic lantern more generally, and Chapter Four on black South African missionaries to Malawi, is the better part of the book.

Thompson's explanation for the writing of the book, and the title of the book, indicate a relatively tight focus on an immensely important subject: however, they also set the book up for what, in my opinion, is the book's central weakness. This manifests in two ways. Firstly, photographs get remarkably short shrift in this volume, as the various chapters continually wander more to individual missionaries than their photographs. This is particularly clear in the two chapters on Livingstone. In Chapter Two, Thompson discusses the role photography played in Livingstone's 1858 Zambezi expedition. However, the chapter is really about tensions between members of the expedition party, as well as Thomas Baines's role as expedition artist. Indeed, there is a lot more on Thomas Baines and the use to which his sketches were put, than of the rather meagre photography produced by Charles Livingstone, brother of the eminent missionary. Chapter Three, about Stanley's journey to find Livingstone, ends with Thompson's own observation that there was no photographic equipment on the expedition (p. 133). This is a rather odd inclusion for a book on missionary photography.

Secondly, it's unclear how Thompson constitutes the oeuvre of mission photography. He uses the figure of the missionary as a point around which to organise his argument about what does and does not constitute missionary photograph. Thompson does allude to what might constitute missionary photography in the final chapter, but this discussion is a bit late for what precedes it. Is a baobab tree part of the genre of mission photography? This is problematic. Overall, this volume is more a collection of essays that feels as if photography has been retrospectively added, rather than a tight collection of pieces that consider what is meant by missionary photography, and the role that that photography plays.