STAFF at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford are continuing a project to give photos back to the communities where they were taken.

Dr Chris Morton, curator of the Pitt Rivers’ photograph and manuscript collections, has been involved in the work, known as ‘visual repatriation’.

He said: “There is an inherent moral imperative for ethnographic museums to open up their collections and connect them to the communities from which they originate.”

Recent Oxford visual repatriation projects have taken photo collections to communities in Canada, the United States, Australia, Kenya, Botswana, and Cameroon, and next on the list is a community in South Sudan.

Prof David Zeitlyn has been working with Cameroonian photographer Jacques Toussele to create a digital archive of his old studio negatives.

More than 45,000 images have been scanned, and in some cases it has been possible to track down people who have featured in the photos.