108 million people are displaced by conflict, compared to 33 million in the 1990s.
In 2022, about 30 million were displaced by climate events, with the World Bank estimating that 200 million could be forced to migrate by 2050, fuelling immigration concerns.
Let’s Talk About Alice, a joint exhibition by Photo|Frome and Frome Museum opening on Tuesday 30 June 2026, tells her story.
An adopted daughter of Frome. Alice Seeley moved to Frome at twelve, when her father became manager of the Silk Mill. She lived at 3 Merchants Barton from 1882 to 1888, now marked by a blue plaque unveiled by the Frome Society for Local Study and the Frome and District Civic Society.
After retirement Alice returned to Frome with her husband John.
108 million people are displaced by conflict, compared to 33 million in the 1990s.
In 2022, about 30 million were displaced by climate events, with the World Bank estimating that 200 million could be forced to migrate by 2050, fuelling immigration concerns.
In 1898, a twenty-seven-year-old woman sailed with her husband John on her honeymoon for King Leopold II’s ‘Congo Free State’. She carried a camera.
Over the next seven years, her photographs of forced rubber labour, mutilated workers, and a man named Nsala mourning his murdered daughter Boali on the veranda of her mission station shocked the world.
They became the visual evidence behind what many historians now regard as the first photographic human rights campaign, predating the better-known American work of Lewis Hine by several years.
108 million people are displaced by conflict, compared to 33 million in the 1990s.
In 2022, about 30 million were displaced by climate events, with the World Bank estimating that 200 million could be forced to migrate by 2050, fuelling immigration concerns.
Alice Seeley Harris’s images, projected in lantern-slide lectures across Britain and the United States, helped force Leopold to cede the Congo in November 1908.
Then Alice was largely written out of her own story.
Mark Twain reproduced her most famous photograph in his 1905 satirical pamphlet King Leopold’s Soliloquy without writing her name.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did the same in his 1909 book The Crime of the Congo. Alice appears once, as ‘Mrs. Harris’, in 130 pages. The campaigning credit mostly went to her husband John.