There is an awkward tension in the danger of looking at secretive things. Yet at the same time, there is a considerable number of historical photographs, made by missionaries, colonial staff, ethnographers as well as African photographers showing – according to their captions – secretive phenomena like “secret societies”, “rituals” or “fetishes”. How did the photographers have access to secret sites, objects and associations? Or did they just pretend to have this access? We still lack a thorough reflection on the colonial/ethnographic/photographic encounter with African secrecy. However, recent research in the field of Visual Anthropology has shown that Africans were not merely passive beings in the processes of visualization and had much more agency within the creation of historical photographs than previously assumed. The project’s aim is to describe and analyze the production and dissemination of three different image worlds of secrecy created in colonial Central and West Africa - by which Europeans were equally both fascinated and threatened 1. The secret societies of the Cameroonian Grassland, 2. The Sande women's secret society of West Africa, 3. The Minkisi “fetishes” from the Lower Congo area. Taking photographs as its starting point, the project explores the encounter between secrecy and photography in colonial times as well as the many different “biographies” of images showing secretive phenomena. In applying the critical perspective advocated by the exponents of the writing culture debate on the photographic encounter, we assume that pictures displaying (allegedly) secretive phenomena were sometimes staged by Africans, re-enacted or misinterpreted by the photographers. By taking an approach that understands photography as a multi-dimensional happening, I hope to show the complexities of the photographic encounter, which exceeds the simple dichotomy adopted by postcolonial studies. In addition, the critical examination of the intersection of secrecy and photography offers a completely new perspective on the relationship between power and knowledge in colonial Africa.