Visual Diplomacy: Projections of Power from the Field in Ethiopia

Between the fall of 1926 and late spring of 1927, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in conjunction with the Chicago Daily News mounted an expedition to Ethiopia. What appealed to the Field Museum and the Chicago Daily News about Ethiopia was that it was relatively unexplored scientifically at the time. The Field Museum hoped to rectify this, and the Daily News planned on making the expedition into a major media event by running frequent updates on the status of the journey in its pages. This essay focuses on one of the museum’s records of the expedition: the film Abyssinian Expedition, which was produced by expedition member Suydam Cutting. What is of interest in the film is that it documents the regent and heir to the throne of Ethiopia, Ras Tafari Mekonnen, during a period of growing international exposure. The film shows his attempts to use the expedition’s media coverage as a channel of visual diplomacy through which he intended to project an image of a modernizing Ethiopia to the world.