Say it’s the 1800s, and you’re a rich sort of gent, spending the evening at your London club. In the fug of cigar smoke, you unroll a crisp new map of Africa, the “dark” continent whose uncharted interior has all of England in a frenzy. Armchair exploring is all the rage, and here, in front of you, is evidence of the latest discovery: a vast range of peaks and ridges stretching east to west across Africa’s middle – the mighty Mountains of Kong.
They first appeared on maps in 1798 and remained there until as late as 1928, changing shape and size and colour, depending on who had drawn them, and on whose account they were based. The truth was discovered in 1888, when they were shown to be utter fiction.
The story began when Scottish explorer Mungo Park reported sighting far-off peaks while on an expedition to chart the Niger. The locals mentioned something about “a kingdom called Kong”, whereupon Park’s cartographer, James Rennell, depicted a range running from the Niger to the Gulf of Guinea. No one thought to venture into the territory to verify.
Such a colossal cartographical botch proved irresistible to artist Jim Naughten. In his art he often reanimates history – previous works have included portraits of First and Second World War re-enactors and photographs of the kinds of gruesome Victorian and Edwardian zoological specimens kept in museum storerooms. In making these series, he has come to understand “that the past is malleable… subject to constant revision, depending on who you are talking to, and how it fits with the narrative of the day”.
The Mountains of Kong, says Naughten, are “an example of the way we invent and tell stories, but on a massive scale. I thought: if I could go back in time and do anything, I would have been one of the photographers who went on those expeditions and brought back pictures of the amazing things they found. So I imagined I had done just that.”
His series, which goes on show at Michael Hoppen Gallery this week, consists chiefly of photographs of dioramas, those museum presentations of the natural world in which stuffed animals and props are placed in front of a painted backdrop, to lend the illusion of distance. Naughten, 47, travelled the world to find the right subjects, photographing tatty, glass-eyed creatures in museums from Geneva to Margate. He colours the images afterwards, to evoke the fanciful nature of the imaginary mountains.
Though some are presented as single pictures, the majority have been made as stereoscopic photographs, two flat images fused in a special viewer to produce a scene in 3D. The practice, which has become extremely rare, was a Victorian fad. At its height, in the 1860s (when the Mountains of Kong still dominated maps), thousands of stereo cards were sold in London. Many were sentimental or “amusing” tableaux, but the cards came into their own when depicting foreign wonders.
In the 1800s, expeditions into Africa’s heartland were common. Many were driven by scientific inquiry, sometimes by religion or abolitionism, but the mostly aristocratic men who funded the trips were not averse to generating a bit of publicity on the side. If they succeeded in avoiding the flesh-eating ulcers, dysentery and spear wounds that were the explorer’s lot, the explorers became national heroes – Richard Burton and David Livingstone, for instance. England became quite giddy with it, devouring reports of exotic animals, thundering waterfalls and lost cities of gold.
Predictably, perhaps, expedition accounts were prone to serious embroidery. Those charting Africa’s unmapped wildernesses were red-blooded types and if they reported a lake here or a winged serpent there, brave would be the man who disputed it.
“They got carried away,” says Naughten. “The more I followed the trail, the more complicated it became. I liked that the mountains were described as pink, then blue, then something else entirely, but especially when explorers claimed they were terrifying and impassable. It doesn’t make any sense, and I’ve tried to convey that in my photographs. I hope they breathe new life into the myth.”
Mountains of Kong is at Michael Hoppen, London SW3 from Tuesday to Oct 21. michaelhoppengallery.com