Alex Agbaglo Acolatse

Several scholarly works, publications about African art and exhibitions have explored the life and contributions of Acolatse to 20th-century photography in Togo: • A monograph by Philippe David, published in Togo in 1993, titled Alex A. Acolatse: Hommage à l’un des Premiers Photographes Togolais presented an in-depth look at Acolatse's life and work, based on detailed research conducted in Lomé, Togo. • "Africa by Herself: African Photography from 1840 to the Present". This 1998 exhibition included Acolatse's full-length portraits, emphasizing the cosmopolitan nature of African studio photography and its role in self-representation. • Acolatse's work was mentioned in the 1999 book Revue Noire: Africa by Africans: a Photographic View, published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. • In 2015 an exhibition and accompanying publication titled In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa was shown by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, featuring two of Acolatse's self-portraits alongside other West African photographers. • In her 2018 book Postcards from Africa: Photographers of the Colonial Era cultural anthropologist Christraud M. Geary described a picture postcard by Acolatse. This image, taken in the 1920s, shows Lawson, the king of Anécho in French Togo. In this studio portrait, the royal sitter was dressed in expensive clothes before a European backdrop of a painted garden. According to Geary, this staged portrait would "declare his rank and aim at elevating him in the eyes of the locals as well as the French." Geary further noted that Victorian-style elements show that Africans were connected with the outside world of cosmopolitan cities, where "African elites seamlessly appropriated and integrated foreign elements into their own cultural practices." • Two early photographs by Acolatse were included in the 2022 exhibition "The Future is Blinking. Early Studio Photography from West and Central Africa" at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich, Switzerland. Further, the French specialized publisher Revue Noire has published Acolatse's work along with other notable photographers in several magazines and photo books, noting that "Many artists from Africa are now considered as artists, rather than "African artists".