Picturing and Counter-Picturing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Colonial Greenland

One of the most striking aspects of the governorship of H. J. Rink in mid-nineteenth-century Greenland was an expansion of Greenlandic culture and its dissemination in the form of publications and, particularly, the circulation of visual images. In this essay, I offer an overview of the role of pictures and picturing in this tension between the colonial and the indigenous, or between benevolence and exploitation. Rather than thinking in terms of a Manichean division between good and bad colonialism, or, as more recent scholars have done in Foucauldian analyses, the 'governmentality' of Danish colonial rule, I suggest that Danish colonialism in Greenland is best thought of dialectically: as a dialectical movement synthesizing destruction and preservation, benevolence and exploitation, picturing and counter-picturing.