Photography and Africa

Social Dynamics, 2014

2001

Preface This bibliography contains books, articles, parts of edited volumes, catalogs of exhibi tions and theses on the topic of photography and African Studies. It is directed mainly to people concerned with the history of Africa, although I hope others will find it of some use. This bibliography covers the entire continent, systematic searching ended on Septem ber 2001. Over the last twenty years a growing interest has been manifested in the use of photog raphy as source for African Studies. The theme was widely discussed for the first time at a workshop organised in London by Andrew Roberts of the School of Oriental and African Studies*. The proceedings of that workshop contain the first attempt to organise a bibliography on the subject2. The SOAS's workshop was followed by other initiatives that added new contributions to the literature which Prof. A. Roberts since then has steadily monitored. His efforts led to the publishing of two other bibliographical es says3. The last attempt in order to offer a bibliographical overview of the subject dates 1996, and appeared in African Research and Documentation, jointly edited by Judith Kisor, John Mcllwaine and Andrew Roberts4. ■ See serial number 46 2 See serial number 46, pp. 159-168, "bibliography". 3 See serial numbers 73-74. 4 See serial number 72, the work lists 246 citations. 51 am reffering to the work ofBasil Davidson and Paul Strand Ghana an African portrait, Millertone, Aperture, 1976, 159 p.

Social Dynamics, 2014

This piece argues for the importance of critical engagements with photographs in order to explore and rethink the past, to reflect on the present and to imagine the future. It provides a brief overview of the articles that constitute the first part of the Social Dynamics special issue on photography in Africa, a collection that contributes to the growing body of scholarship that deepens our understandings of the significance of photography on the continent.

Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies, 2023

Photographic material can sometimes pose an overwhelming and distorting presence, especially when it comes to the writing of history. Some of the first visual recordings of African social worlds via photography would long serve as a model for images of the continent. This phenomenon has only been reinforced by recirculations of images from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intended as a counterpoint, this article will contemplate a paradoxical history of photography by considering it based not on its presence but on its very absence. A work of history supported by photographic and written sources from the years 1870 to 1910, this contribution focuses on photography as absence, as disappearance, and as erasure. This implicit history focuses on various essential phenomena that characterize the (non)production of photographic images of African social worlds in the age of colonial expansion. It first deals with the key question of the material destruction of old photographs of Africa. For a variety of reasons, an entire part of what was photographed is now either lost or in the process of becoming lost. One of the long-standing major effects of this has been a double erasure of African photography pioneers, who are poorly represented or underrepresented in institutional archives and have been deprived of historiographical attention; in many cases, their history remains to be written. The article then raises the question of refusals to pose and potential refusals to take photographs. We will see several scattered traces of such evasions of photography. The problem of self-censorship and the very restricted circulation of certain images, particularly those threatening the stability of colonial narratives, will also be studied at this juncture. Finally, the article will take a closer look at the photographs taken by Alex J. Braham. This individual, a district agent in Ogugu (southern Nigeria) for the Royal Niger Company at the turn of the twentieth century, was an eager photographer. His personal album contains several shots of a secret ceremony that he took without the participants’ knowledge, having hidden with his camera in a tent. This example of concealment (not of the image but of the photographic act itself) is also one of the possible manifestations of the invisibilities that have played a major part in forming and deforming photographic imagery of Africa.

African Studies Review, 2004

2020

This collection explores women's multifaceted historical and contemporary involvement in photography in Africa. The book offers new ways of thinking about the history of photography, exploring through case studies the complex and historically specific articulations of gender and photography on the continent, and attending to the challenge and potential of contemporary feminist and postcolonial engagements with the medium. The volume is organised in thematic sections that present the lives and work of historically significant yet overlooked women photographers, as well as the work of acclaimed contemporary African women and non-binary photographers such as Héla Ammar, Fatoumata Diabaté, Lebohang Kganye and Zanele Muholi. The book offers critical reflections on the politics of gendered knowledge production and the production of racialised and gendered identities and alternative and subaltern subjectivities. Several chapters illuminate how contemporary African women and non-binary photographers, collectors and curators are engaging with colonial photographic archives to contest stereotypical forms of representation and produce powerful counter-histories. Raising critical questions about race, gender and the history of photography, the collection provides a model for interdisciplinary feminist approaches for scholars and students of art history, visual studies and African history.