John Parkes Decker

Photography, which spread and evolved through local and transnational networks of practitioners, was quickly appreciated by African patrons and businessmen. Photographers, clients and images moved along the major coastal cities, often crossing national and ethnic boundaries. The first studios were frequently temporary, set up by professional photographers who worked on the move from one urban center to the next. Photographers often reproduced and sold portraits originally made for private clients as cartes de visite also in commercial forms such as picture postcards, with or without the permission of the clients. Commenting on the technical challenges of photography in 19th-century Africa, a study about the emergence of photography in Sierra Leone stated:

For her 2011 research paper about the beginnings of photography in West Africa, Vera Viditz-Ward had chosen Freetown because of its extended history of shared everyday life between Africans and Europeans. Her research was based on ten years of investigating early photographs taken by Sierra Leonean photographers such as John Parkes Decker, Francis W. Joaque and Alphonso Lisk-Carew. In doing so, she used various methods of field research, including discussions of family portraits and photographic albums with people from Freetown. Further, she looked up contemporary photographers throughout Sierra Leone and studied colonial archives in England to find photographs dating back to colonial rule. Based on her research, she stated that "early photographs show how non-Western peoples created new forms of artistic expression by adapting European technology and visual idioms for their own purposes." She further posited that "a community of African photographers has worked in the city of Freetown since the inception of photography." In particular, Viditz-Ward wrote about Decker and his documentary photographs for the Colonial Office: Apart from publishing three of his images of Freetown urban scenes, she called Decker's "skill and technical control [...] consistently apparent in his architectural photographs" and his skill as a visual artist "reflected in his composition and vantage points." The 2023 scholarly article "Representing Freetown: Photographs, maps and postcards in the urban cartography of colonial Sierra Leone" related photographic history to the history of cartography. It argued that these two forms of representation, often viewed as separate, were frequently intertwined in the production of geographic knowledge. Only a few decades after its invention, photography had become a tool for European travellers, scientists and anthropologists across the empire. Research into the early photography of West Africa has shown that African photographers in the 19th century such as Decker played an important role in producing a spatial imaginary of place. In this way, photographs served similar purposes as did maps. Further, the article described photography and mapping as both having reduced the world to two dimensions, making the vast spaces of empire legible and knowable." In her 2018 book Postcards from Africa: Photographers of the Colonial Era cultural anthropologist Christraud M. Geary described a picture postcard attributed to Parker. This image, taken before 1872, shows Prince Archibong II, the head of Duke Town, in what is now Calabar in Cross River State, Nigeria. In this studio portrait, the royal sitter was placed on an armchair, wearing an expensive necklace and clothes and a European-inspired crown. According to Geary, this kind of staged portrait with Victorian-style elements shows 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." In 2022, three of his photographs were included in the exhibition "The Future is Blinking. Early Studio Photography from West and Central Africa" at the Rietberg Museum, Zurich.