L’atlante e lo scrapbook. Rapporti scientifici, relazioni coloniali e identità di genere in due album fotografici della fine del XIX secolo

Focusing on the photographic album as a cultural object, this article discusses two albums belonging to different typologies: a collection of ethnographic and colonial photographs and a ‘sentiment album’. Both were compiled by Margaret Brooke – the wife of the second White Rajah of Sarawak (Borneo) – and offered to the Florentine botanist Odoardo Beccari in 1897. The combined analysis of these albums reveals their stratified, discursive, and negotiated nature, which intersects scientific intentions, colonial relations, and gender strategies.