Desire Charnay was a French archaeologist and 19th-century photographer who was one of the first European photographers to document Pre-Columbian sites and Indigenous peoples. His portraits of Malagasy subjects were conceived as a catalogue of ethnic types rather than individual likenesses, an approach later criticized for prioritizing classification over personal identity. Some argue that his portraits influenced an anthropological photography style in which subjects were rendered distant and positioned to be studied, operating within colonial systems of visual knowledge.