Human rights photographer honoured in museum exhibition

A new exhibition telling the story of history’s first human rights photographer, a former Frome resident, is on display at the town’s museum.

Alice Seeley Harris moved to Frome aged 12 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.

She went on to become a pioneering photographer documenting life in the Congo Free State under King Leopold II.

A volunteer at the museum, Michelle Hylands, said: “In 1898, a 27-year-old woman sailed with her husband John on her honeymoon to 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.

“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. Alice was later largely written out of her own story. Mark Twain reproduced her most famous photograph in his 1905 satirical pamphlet King Leopold’s Soliloquy but 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.”

After retirement, Alice returned with her husband to Stonelands, a Victorian villa added to the Somerset Local Heritage List in June 2025 for its Harris association.

Her father, husband and daughter are all buried at the Grade II listed Dissenters’ Cemetery on Vallis Road. Frome Museum was formerly located in Wine Street House, bequeathed to the town by Alice’s daughter Katherine on her death in 1974.

‘Let’s Talk About Alice’ is a joint exhibition by Photo|Frome and Frome Museum, open until Saturday 22nd August from 11am to 3pm. It is also open on Frome Independent market day on Sunday 2nd August. Frome Museum is located at North Parade, BA11 1AT.  Admission is free.

Pictured: l-r Museum Chair Michael Maggs, Rebecca Seeley Harris (Alice’s great-granddaughter) and exhibition curator Mick Yates.