Richard Buchta

Richard Buchta (born in Radłów, 1845 – died in Vienna, 1894) was an Austrian explorer, travel writer and photographer whose pictures are among the earliest known images of peoples living along the White Nile. His interest in ethnology led him to record East Africa at a time when few Europeans did so with a camera.

Before he was twenty-five he had travelled through Germany, France and the Balkans, and he later spent time in Turkey and Egypt, a year in Istanbul and three in Cairo. In 1877 he reached Khartoum, where Governor-General Charles George Gordon helped him continue toward the Upper Nile. From 1878 he travelled through southern Sudan and northern Uganda, photographing groups such as the Acholi, Azande, Bari, Dinka and Shilluk.

Back in Europe he published Die oberen Nilländer: Volkstypen und Landschaften (1881), which included 160 mounted albumen prints, along with several books on the geography and political conditions of Sudan. His photographs were widely reproduced by travel writers of the period, but his work was largely forgotten in the twentieth century.

Today his images are valued for anthropological and historical research on late nineteenth-century Africa. Part of his work is held by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna.