Richard Buchta

His historical photographs, taken mainly in southern Sudan, have been regarded as the earliest photographs of ethnic people living along the White Nile and beyond.

The recorded working language is German. The field of work recorded is travel book, photography and ethnology. Places of work recorded in the authority are Vienna, Munich and Cairo. Work by Richard Buchta is recorded in the collections of National Museum of World Cultures, Netherlands Photo Museum and Wereldmuseum Rotterdam.

• Birthplace — Radlow, Austrian Empire • Place of death — Vienna, Austrian Empire • Years Active — 1870s–1890s • Known for — Travelogues and photographs of 19th-century Sudan

In 1877, Buchta arrived at Khartoum, where Charles George Gordon, then Governor-General of the Turkish-Egyptian Sudan, facilitated his onward journey to Emin Pasha at Ladó, on the Upper Nile. There, he traveled with Italian explorer Romolo Gessi further along the towards the sources of the White Nile as far as to today's northern Uganda. He took some of the earliest existing photographs of ethnic people in these regions, such as the Acholi, Bari, Baka, Zande, Shilluk or Dinka. Upon his return to Germany in 1881, he published his impressions along with 160 mounted albumen prints in the book Die oberen Nilländer: Volkstypen und Landschaften. (The Lands of the Upper Nile: Ethnic people and Landscapes). In 1885, Buchta undertook another voyage through Egypt and the desert to Fayum. During his later years, he was collaborated on the first volume of Wilhelm Junker's work Travels in Africa: During the years 1875-1878. Buchta died in Vienna on 29 July 1894, at age 49.

• Die oberen Nilländer, Volkstypen und Landschaften, with 160 photographic views (1881) • Der Sudan und der Mahdi. Das Land, die Bewohner und der Aufstand (1884) • Der Sudan unter ägyptischer Herrschaft (1888)