Richard Buchta

Austrian photographer, writer and explorer (1845–1894

Richard Buchta (Austrian German pronunciation: [ˈrɪçart ˈbuxtɐ], 19 January 1845 – 29 July 1894) was an Austrian explorer in East Africa, travel writer, painter and photographer. Born in Radlow, Galicia, Austrian Empire, he traveled widely, first to Germany, France, the Balkans, and Turkey, Egypt and the Sudan. Upon his return to Germany and later to Austria, he published several books on the geography, ethnic groups and political conditions of the historic Sudan in the 1870s and 1880s. His historical photographs, taken mainly in southern Sudan, are regarded as the earliest photographs of ethnic people living along the White Nile and beyond. 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 obern Nilländer: Volkstypen und Landschaften. (in English: The Lands of the Upper Nile: Ethnic people and Landscapes). In 1885, he undertook another voyage through Egypt and the desert to Fayum. He was also a collaborator on the first volume of Wilhelm Junker's work Travels in Africa: During the years 1875 1878.

Many of his photographs have been used for anthropological studies and are kept in different collections such as in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK, as well as in the collections of the Museum of Ethnology, in Vienna. Even though his photographs were frequently reproduced by travel writers of the time, his work was largely forgotten in the 20th century. In the context of studies on the history of photography in Africa, however, the importance of Buchta's visual records and their influence on late 19th century anthropological studies on Africa have gained new attention. On the occasion of an exhibition of his photographs in 2015, the Pitt Rivers Museum wrote: "His journey into Equatoria Province (now parts of South Sudan and northern Uganda) shaped the visual representation of its peoples in European literature for a generation, being celebrated and reproduced, mostly in engraved form, by all the major explorer writers of central Africa in the period."