Pierre Edouard Leopold Verger, born on 4 November 1902 in Paris, was a photographer and self-taught ethnographer who devoted most of his life to the study of the African diaspora, the slave trade, African religions in the New World and the resulting cultural and economic flows to and from Africa. At the age of 30, after losing his family, Pierre Verger embarked on a career as a photojournalist. For the next 15 years, he travelled the four continents, documenting many civilisations that would soon be erased by progress. His destinations included Tahiti (1933); the United States, Japan and China (1934 and 1937); Italy, Spain, Sudan (now Mali), Niger, Upper Volta, Togo and Dahomey (now Benin, 1935); the West Indies (1936); Mexico (1937, 1939 and 1957); Philippines and Indochina (now Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, 1938); Guatemala and Ecuador (1939); Senegal (as a conscript, 1940); Argentina (1941), Peru and Bolivia (1942 and 1946); and finally Brazil (1946).
Veger's contributions to ethnography are embodied in dozens of conference papers, journal articles and books and were recognised by the Sorbonne University, which awarded him a doctorate in 1966, a feat for someone who dropped out of high school at the age of 17. Verger continued to study and document his chosen subject until his death in Salvador at the age of 94.
