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Let’s talk about Alice

Alice Seeley Harris, adopted Daughter of Frome, campaigned to stop atrocity and bring down a King … with her camera. History’s first human rights photographer.

In 1898, twenty-seven-year-old Alice Seeley Harris sailed for King Leopold II’s Congo Free State with her husband, John Harris.

Over the next eight years, her photographs of forced rubber labour, mutilated workers, and a father named Nsala mourning his murdered daughter on the veranda of her mission station shocked the world.

They became the visual evidence behind what historians now recognise as the first photographic human-rights campaign – predating the better-known American documentary work on child labour in New York by Lewis Hine by several years.

A young man and woman with severed arms. Mola's hands, seated, were destroyed by gangrene after being tied too tightly by soldiers. Yoka's hand, standing, was cut off by soldiers wanting to claim him as killed. The Belgian Congo under King Leopold II employed mass forced labour of the indigenous population to extract rubber from the jungle. As the demand for rubber grew King Leopold's private army of 16,000 mercenaries were given leave to use any method to coerce the population into meeting quotas, including random killing, mutilation, village burning, starvation and hostage taking. This photograph forms part of the Harris lantern slide collection. Alice Seeley Harris and her husband John Harris were missionaries in the Congo in the early 1900s. They produced a collection of images documenting the horrific abuses of the indigenous people of the Congo by King Leopold II's regime. Their photographs formed part of what was probably the first orchestrated multimedia campaign against widespread human rights abuses.
Mola & Yoka © Panos Pictures / Anti-Slavery International

Alice’s images, projected in lantern-slide lectures across Britain and the United States, helped force Leopold to cede the Congo in 1908.

Then Alice was largely written out of her own story. Even Mark Twain, who shared her most famous photograph in his 1905 satirical pamphlet King Leopold’s Soliloquy, did not write her name.

Photo|Frome and Frome Museum bring Alice’s work home. The exhibition runs from 30 June to 22 August, Tuesday-Saturday. We will also be open on Frome Independent market day, Sunday 5 July and Sunday 2 August. North Parade, Frome, BA11 1AT.

We explore the role of missionaries, photography and the recognition of women – and we ask what Alice’s work still demands of us.

The exhibition is built with care for visitors of all ages: the outer ring tells the details of Alice’s story; the photographic evidence of human rights abuse waits inside the ring, for those who choose to see it.

“What I admire most in the life of Lady Alice Seeley Harris is the forethought she gave the subjects of her photography.

She was not on a mission to get the most dramatic photo for her personal gain. Alice’s subjects never remained anonymous. She named them. She gave the details of their sufferings and did not mean for them to remain our unidentified brothers and sisters in a far off land where indignities fell upon the benighted. Her photos were meant to wrap their grisly truths around even the most stubborn of British and European hearts.

Alice Seeley Harris showed the world what it meant to stumble into a horrific truth and focus her lens on a colonizing government that was there for monetary gain no matter what the cost in human suffering.

Although her husband, Sir John Hobbis Harris, gets the largest share of the credit, without Alice’s keen eye and observancy they would simply be photographs. In my opinion, Alice introduced the world to the concept of human rights photography”.

Judy Pollard Smith, 2026. Author of “Don’t Call Me Lady – The Journey of Lady Alice Seeley Harris.”

Blue Plaque at Merchants Barton, placed by Frome Society for Local Study and Frome and District Civic Society. October 2017,