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My book “The Violence of Colonial Photography” publ. by @ManchesterUP is out . It is, in many ways, an extensive caption for the photo reproduced on its cover. A thread on this image, and the book. This print is held by Marguerite Durand library (Paris). 
1/It was shot in the early 1890s in the French Sudan (Mali) by Raymonde Bonnetain who liked to experiment with the camera. She traveled with Paul Bonnetain, her husband, a colonial administrator. The girl in the picture is her daughter Renée, in her early teens.
2/Renée is wearing an immaculate white dress, a human skull on her lap, 12 others are placed around her. This bizarre image makes no sense on its own, in isolation. Its visual contents say nothing about what is going on here. It is even impossible to locate it at first glance.
