Confronting the colonial archive

British colonial anthropologist Northcote Thomas took thousands of photographs and sound recordings of men, women and children in west Africa between 1909 and 1915. Some of these works, which reflect the reprehensible colonial mindset, feature in short Faces|Voices – winner of this year’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Best Research Film of the Year Award – in which Londoners respond to the faces of these people.