François-Edmond Fortier

François-Edmond Fortier (2 September 1862 – 8 February 1928) was a French photographer, publisher of postcards and visual ethnographer. In his more than 3,300 images and postcards of French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française), he documented landscapes, African and colonial buildings, the urban developments in Dakar, everyday life in the countryside, as well as political and economic leaders. His postcards encompass both ethnographic documentation and staged portraiture, some of which showing eroticized depictions of indigenous women. Photographs and reprints of his work have since been reproduced as documents of visual culture of life in French West Africa.

Prints of Fortier's historical photographs have been collected as examples of early 20th-century photography in Africa by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, UNESCO, as well as by collections in France.