The Italian anthropologist Paolo Mangtegazza visited Norway in 1879, accompanied by his colleague Stephan Sommier, on a mission to collect “anthropological facts” about the Sami. He collected three kinds of facts: cultural artefacts, anthropometric measurements, and photos. The latter category included photos of his and Sommier’s making as well as photos he acquired on the journey. All of them were brought home to Florence, where Mantegazza was head of the anthropological museum, where they are still to be found today.
The anthropometric measurements and the photos were subsequently published in a book, Studii antropologici sui lapponi (1880). The numbers from his measurements became part of a shared pool of anthropological data, but the photos seem not really to have come into circulation in the European anthropological networks.
In this presentation I will show some of Mantegazza’s Sami portraits and discuss his idea of photography as a method of collecting anthropological data from the north.