Film, Charcoal, Time: Contemporaneities in Gold Coast Photographs

Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 This essay is based on a larger study of west African photography, focusing on the Gold Coast and Ghanaian photographers and collections, ‘If These Walls Could Talk! Photographs, Photographers and their Patrons in Accra and Cape Coast, Ghana, 1840–1940’, PhD thesis, University of London 2004; yet the ideas addressed here came via four years of research on another project, E. Haney, Photography and Africa, London: Reaktion Books 2010 forthcoming. This work owes much to conversations with Jennifer Bajorek, Juerg Schneider, Allyson Purpura, Julie McGee, and the comments of the issue editors. For valuable assistance I am very grateful to John Picton, John Parker, Carina Ray, Selena Axelrod Winsnes, Nils Buch-Jepsen, Naa-abia Chinery, George Hansen, Alexander P. K. Lutterodt, Augustine, Francis, and Katherine Abraham, Sammy Danquah, and Essel Blankson. In DC, I appreciate the help and kindnesses of Amy Staples, Kareen Morrison, Janet Stanley, Christine Mullen Kreamer and Franko Khoury. I have benefitted from the support of Ellen and Tony West, and especially the support, conversation and inspiration of Markus Goldstein. I gratefully acknowledge permission to publish the images in the collection of the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archive at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. This research was supported by grants from the Overseas Research Students Award Scheme 2001–2003, the University of London’s Central Research Fund 2001–2002, and Research and Postdoctoral fellowships at the National Museum of African Art 2001 and 2004–2005, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 1 – I have described aspects of this research in ‘Photographic History without Photographs’, Arts Council of the African Studies Association Triennial Conference, University of Florida, Gainesville 30 March 2007, and ‘Bringing Art Up to Date: Photographic Modernities in Time’ at the conference ‘Interrogating African Modernity: Art, Cultural Politics, and Global Identities’, co-sponsored by the Art Mbanefo Foundation and the Department of Art and Archaeology, University of California, Santa Barbara 4 May 2007. Film, Charcoal, Time: Contemporaneities in Gold Coast Photographs Erin Haney As photography was taken up in the entrepôts of nineteenth-century west Africa, among them Cape Coast and Accra, it became a primary mode of portraiture. When considered alongside colonial-era holdings in European and US archives, historical photograph collections in families in Ghana suggest that photography’s emergence cannot be separated from a range of other emerging and far-reaching creative modernisms. These portraits entail aspects of ceremonial debut spectacles, political ascendancy rites, and the visuality of decorum in larger public performances. From the medium’s inception, photographs have been held and kept as enduring objects; at the same time, they are the layered products of multiple formal, aesthetic, temporal and conceptual interventions in a range of media, only some of which are the work of a camera. Keywords: Ghana, Gold Coast, history, photography, portraiture, Gerhardt Lutterodt (active ca. 1870s), George A. G. Lutterodt (active ca. mid - 1870s), Albert Lutterodt (born 1869), Frederick Richard Christian Lutterodt (1871–1937), Frederick G. C. Lutterodt (1896–1973), Wulff-Joseph Wulff (1810–42), performance, audience, archives In Africa, photography’s particular histories suggest that from the mid-nineteenth century the medium has been profoundly shaped by its creative audiences. My research on photographs from west Africa, beginning from the frameworks of family collections of Accra and Cape Coast, Ghana, begins as photography there was taken up as a momentous form of portraiture in the mid-nineteenth century. Although historically African photographers’ works have encompassed a range of subjects, it is portraiture that is by far the most prevalent and enduring in these private and civic collections; it is in portraits that creative audiences have most often intervened. It appears that in Ghana photographic portraiture has from its inception been a technology of multiples, layered with non-photographic techniques in other media. Thus those I call photography’s ‘creative audiences’ include, among others, the generations of owners and viewers who have conserved, re-photographed, labelled, inscribed, painted, circulated, often secreted away and occasionally destroyed portraits. These interventions amount to significant formal and conceptual interventions on photographs, and they bear out new questions as to what comprises a portrait photograph.1 So, photography’s useful reproducibility is aligned with the qualities of an image’s mutability and adjustability, and only part of the time were these adjustments made by photographers. Further, I suggest that this photography in Ghana, as was probably true in many other places, has long been a performative and a socially expansive category. Performances unfolded in the setting up of a portrait, and continued as a series History of Photography, Volume 34, Number 2, May 2010 ISSN 0308-7298 # 2010 Taylor & Francis Erin Haney of viewings and interventions made by subsequent audiences and owners. Each act of making and re-making a photograph is a generation, and a photograph’s configuration entails the scope of past and presumed future audiences. Old photographs thrive and flourish. This is true whether or not we can determine where the value of a portrait resides. Are these images so treasured because of their connection to a lived presence or because of the possibilities they offer as mutable objects? All these questions suggest a reconsideration of historical photography’s conventional identifications, upsetting the presumptions of historicity and contemporaneity, notions of vintage prints and the demarcations between artists, subjects, owners and audiences. Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Photography’s Own Momentum As was the case in other west African cosmopolitan centres, portraiture was initially the prerogative of wealthy patrons. The earliest mention of photography on the Gold Coast dates to early 1840, when Boue€t, a French sea captain, made a likeness of Elmina and its trading fort at the house of a local merchant.2 Seven years later, the daguerreotypist Heer Sorin (possibly Dutch) was patronised by a number of Elmina residents while the Dutch governor observed his techniques so closely that he recorded exposure times for the skin tones of African, mixed-race, and European sitters.3 In 1857, Scottish missionary Daniel West seemed surprised at local demand. After a woman he photographed dropped the daguerreotype portrait he had given her, ‘she came to me, and said that she would give me any money if I would take another. So it appears I might do any amount of business in this line’.4 When West showed Quaccoe Attah, the King of Cape Coast, his likeness on glass, Attah declared that he would like an oil painting made from the image, which would have been better suited to display in his palace.5 A lithograph based on the daguerreotype is all that survives of Attah’s portrait. Despite growing evidence of early photographers’ intensive and wide-ranging travel, photographs in west Africa survive only rarely from the middle of the nineteenth century. Hendrik Bartel’s descendants in Ghana keep his portrait, their version probably a half-tone print that itself might have been based on an 1847 Sorin daguerreotype.6 The 1860s and 1870s portraits of other Gold Coast residents and visitors by the Sierra Leonean J. P. Decker and the Frenchman J. Lascoumettes survive in European and US archives, while very few 1870–1880s portraits by the wide-ranging Gold Coast dynasty of photographers, the Lutterodts, have yet been identified.7 If one attends only to early photographic evidence lodged in colonial-era official, missionary and personal collections in Europe and in the United States, one would be struck by the scant number of beautifully printed vintage albumen prints and cartes-de-visite by African and resident studios, yet remain unaware of the multimedia aspect of Gold Coast portrait photography (and there is growing evidence that this may be a more widespread phenomenon across west Africa). Based on my work exploring the connections between the imagery of Ghanaian family collections and of overseas archives and collections, I suggest that for the wealthiest quarters of coastal towns, and probably well beyond, photography ushered in the emergence of a culture of portrait display in elite family homes. The oldest generations of people I spoke with around Accra and Cape Coast (i.e. those born ca. 1910–1920) often vividly recalled large old photographs in homes where they were raised or visited; Cape Coast’s fine old houses were remembered as brimming with nineteenth-century photographs. My research in Ghana over several years from 1996 to 2005 involved many trips to visit old photographs, the presence of which was recalled from people’s memories of viewing them years or even decades prior. Tracing them, negotiating and then travelling to see them entailed the efforts of many people, yet they seemed less plentiful than people had described, for many reasons including some considered in this essay. An overview of thousands of photographs from family collections revealed a number of nineteenth-century vintage prints, but more commonplace were re-photographed images of which the 120 2 – L. W. Yarak, ‘Early Photography in Elmina’, Ghana Studies Council Newsletter, 8 (1995), 9–11. 3 – Ibid. 4 – Daniel West, The Life and Journals of the Rev. Daniel West, Wesleyan Minister on Deputation to the Wesleyan Mission Stations on the Gold Coast, Western Africa, London: Hamilton, Adams 1857, 193. 5 – Ibid., 214–18. Paul Jenkins, ‘The Earliest Generation of Missionary Photographers in west Africa and the Portrayal of Indigenous People and Culture’, History in Africa, 20 (1993), 89–118. 6 – Yarak, ‘Early Photography’. 7 – See Vera Viditz-Ward, ‘Studio Photography in Freetown’, in Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography, Paris: Revue Noire 1999; and Julie Crooks, ‘Photography in Freetown’, PhD thesis, University of London 2010, forthcoming. Film, Charcoal, Time initial version dated roughly to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Materially, these were radically different from the Gold Coast portraits in collections overseas, which were preserved in various albums and boxes, and had been given to the collectors as gifts, exchanged by visitors and foreign residents, and occasionally bought from local studios. Assessing the imagery of Ghanaian and overseas collections highlights the proliferation of portrait-making in the southern Gold Coast by the 1880s, and the very different practices of keeping them that shape our understanding of photography’s past and its presences. Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Offcentre 8 – A ‘family house’ is in many senses a structure involved with origins: in the nineteenth century, Accra people were buried under the floor of their houses; families return to their family houses for annual festivals like Homowo, a thanksgiving holiday that remembers Ga migration; being laid in state in the family house before burial: these events mark for many the ancestral family house as a nexus for past and present generations of family members. 9 – Ray and Buch-Jepsen graciously shared with me their interviews with Mr Leslie Wulff-Cochrane of Fredrichsminde and the photographs he allowed them to take; Ray and Buch-Jepsen, personal communication, June 2003. Selena Axelrod Winsnes also shared her extensive research and photographs; Selena Axelrod Winsnes, personal communication, 31 May and 20 June 2004; see also S. Axelrod Winsnes, A Danish Jew in west Africa: Wulff Joseph Wulff, Biography and Letters 1836–1842, Trondheim: Norwegian University of Science and Technology 2004. There were other branches of the Wulff family photographic archive of other houses that I did not visit. 10 – Axelrod Winsnes, ibid.; and Ray and Buch-Jepson, ibid. Thorkild Hansen in 1967 noted the painting flanked by engravings and photographs of his descendants; T. Hansen, Coast of Slaves, trans. Kari Dako, Accra: SubSaharan 2002, 225. 11 – This was not merely naivety or lack of knowledge of photographic processes: the Ga word mfoniri encompasses photographs and pictures, and the English term photograph glossed all kinds of old images in these collections, pointing to a larger perception of what photographs are, and how they have been locally described and categorised. 12 – A crayon portrait is a faint photographic image overtraced with charcoals and pastels; the technique was briefly popular in the USA. James M. Reilly, Care and Identification of Nineteenth Century Photographic Prints, Rochester: Eastman 1986. Some private family collections were passed down over several generations, and are kept in many houses; yet the particularities of photographic replication and the movement of these images within collections trace the outlines of photography’s local measure and, crucially, of its creative audiences. ‘Family houses’ constitute a prime kind of repository of the oldest Gold Coast photography, like that of W. Joseph Wulff, born 1810, and his descendants, whose portrait collections are contained in a number of houses around Accra.8 In 2001 I met Freddie Wulff, who was at the time the head of the Wulff family, and he showed me the portraits kept in his own house. He also told me about other family collections, such as those displayed in the hall of Fredrichsminde, the family house that his ancestor W. Joseph Wulff built in 1840. Later on, via discussions and photographs of two colleagues working at this family house, I was able to see how Freddie’s collection was distinct from, and intertwined with, the imagery of that even older collection.9 In 1836 W. Joseph Wulff sailed to Accra in the employ of the Danish trading company, and later ran a plantation and traded on his own behalf. Wulff married Sara Malm, a Gold Coast woman of Afro-Danish descent, with whom he had three children, and around 1840 he began building his large house, Fredrichsminde, near the Danish fort. The extended and multilocus family portrait collection contains several photographic prints dating from the nineteenth century, which convey aspects of the breadth of the genealogy in its many large scale (16 x 20 inch and larger) images. At Fredrichsminde, some family portraits were damaged and repaired, and others were traced and painted with charcoal and other media. Nearly all were framed, hung high on the walls, close to the ceiling of the hall, and their distance from eye level rendered them all the more impressive. By contrast, those in Freddie’s stewardship had been temporarily stowed away during renovations. Among them were numbers of mounted large prints in immaculate condition, and also those that were neither mounted nor framed, photographs on fragile paper and suffering damage from the sun and humidity. Some of these faded images had been visibly layered and traced with ink washes, charcoals and other effects, although unlike crayon portraits these additions came after the initial printing. The grand scale and immediacy of these portraits, some close to lifesized, were as impressive upon close inspection as when viewed in an old-fashioned house hall. Centrally positioned across from the entrance to Fredrichsminde’s hall is a small framed painting of W. Joseph Wulff (figure 1), painted by the Danish portraitist David Monies in 1836, just before his journey to Accra. It was reportedly this painting that was sent by his niece in Randers to his wife and children in Accra after he died in 1842, at their request, and has dominated the display of family portraits in Fredrichsminde as far back as his descendants recall.10 Another version of this painted portrait is kept in Freddie Wulff ’s collection (figure 2); and although it appears to be a portrait done in charcoal and ink wash, it is nevertheless referred to as a photograph.11 Contemporary studio advertisements offered enlargements of existing images to life-size, but this image seems to be neither a photograph nor a crayon portrait of the painted image.12 The second 121 Erin Haney Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Figure 1. David Monies, Portrait of W. Joseph Wulff, oil on canvas, 1836. Courtesy of the Wulff family and Selena Axelrod Winsnes. Figure 2. Unidentified artist, Portrait of W. Joseph Wulff, medium unknown, ca. 1890. Courtesy of the Wulff family. 122 Figure 3. Unknown photographer, Portrait of Florence Wulff, medium unknown, ca. 1890. Courtesy of the Wulff family. Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Film, Charcoal, Time 13 – Interview, 7 May 2002, with these and other members of the Abraham family, parts of which were translated by Essel Blankson. 14 – A description of the Ghanaian retouching practices was keenly portrayed in Tobias Wendl and Nancy du Plessis, Future Remembrance: Photography and Image Arts in Ghana, VHS 1998. 15 – This listing of English given and maiden name, and Fanti day name with married name, are common in obituary announcements, to account for the many names by which people have been known. version of Joseph’s portrait bears marked similarity to other photographic portraits of the 1890s, such as that of his granddaughter Florence Wulff (figure 3): they are both vignette formats, mounted on the same board and the same size, with similar sepia tonal qualities. There are no signatures, studio stamps or dates on these images, nor does anyone remember who commissioned the Joseph Wulff ‘photo’ in Freddie Wulff’s collection. So, this intriguing portrait of the ancestor W. Joseph Wulff, the original of which was painted in the (more-or-less) pre-photographic era in Europe, was painstakingly re-created in Accra as a photograph for inclusion in the iconography (if not precisely the medium) of family portrait photographs. Other portraits of the Wulff family have endured unevenly, including a mostly intact carbon print and a faded crayon portrait of Joseph Wulff’s sons from the 1880s. Across family branches, these are part of a larger Wulff collection spanning over a century. Materially, they evoke some of the problems of impermanence in photographic techniques along the coast, and more broadly they highlight the value of the medium as a local ideal for portraiture. As with other collections, these photographs record layers of creative interventions: faces outlined with charcoal, hair darkened with ink, some images left in tatters and others taped together, others overlaid with pencils that cover now invisible printed traces. This multi-locus and multi-media collection begs the question: what exactly constitutes a photograph? The images themselves, and their replication across and within collections, suggest that photographs have many centres: layered and cumulative, deteriorating, inscribed with other media, transformed by all manner of practices beyond the apparatus of a camera. In some instances it is possible to discern what happens when the owners of old photographs, these creative audiences, adjust and recreate them. Concern for the original object, the vintage print, is not at stake, or at least not in the same ways. Applying pigments to darken images to forestall a portrait’s fading is one of these processes, but it is also commonplace to find photographs have been remade also to extend or change the conceptual dimensions of the image. The formidable portrait of Effuah Nicol of Cape Coast (figure 4), born 1869, was taken around 1890, according to her eldest grandchildren of the Abraham family.13 Aspects of the presentation were pointed out by the family elders, Augustine, Francis and Katherine Abraham, who told me about all the portraits normally on display in their hall; they noted how well the image conveyed their grandmother’s singular refinement. Arranged in such a way as to display her long graceful fingers and the volumes of her cloth wrapper over a white tailored blouse (kaba); her grandchildren pointed out that, despite Effuah Nicol’s high status as a bead trader, a sense of restraint is apparent in her minimal adornment with a few strands of tiny, dark ‘coffee’ beads. The photographer – or a studio retoucher – working on a glass plate negative, embellished the portrait by subtly lightening the tone of her hands, and evening out and rounding the contours of her face.14 Although no one living knew the occasion for this portrait, it was agreed by the owners that it was a most beautiful photograph, and an important everyday vision, because it was she who built the house that shelters the family today. This portrait is visibly a photograph of a photograph, and this effect turns the viewer’s attention as much to the person portrayed as to the age of the photograph. The right edge of the initial portrait is seen here as torn, darkened and slightly crumpled; the photograph of it was made at least seventy years later, after 1961, and it includes this visible deterioration of the initial portrait within its frame. The current image turned this into a memorial portrait, its matte inscribed with the text ‘Late Gertrude Morgue Assam, alias Mrs. Effuah Nicol, died 1st August 1961. May she rest in peace’.15 No one in the family mentioned the decisions surrounding the creation of the new image. 123 Erin Haney Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Figure 4. Unidentified photographers, Portrait of Effuah Nicol, medium unknown, after 1961 based on photograph from ca. 1890. Courtesy of the Abraham family. Within the Abraham family collection, even images in relatively good condition have been reproduced, such as the two portraits of John Abraham (figures 5, 6), the eldest residents’ deceased brother. The first portrait of John Abraham was taken in Cape Coast’s Studio Okuta in 1964, marking his installation as Nana Kome 7th, Omanhen (chief) of the nearby Komenda Traditional Area. The second portrait was re-photographed, heavily filtered and retouched so as to ‘renew’ it aesthetically, completing the edges, brightening and darkening it, and printed on heavy paper in the same 16 x 20 inch size. Although the second portrait was framed for display in the hall, the older print was kept carefully in a nearby room. While it was a photographer who rendered these aesthetic treatments, a different conceptual shift was wrought by the family when they decided to create the new portrait. The older one stands as a portrait of chiefly ascent, while the newer became a memorial image of a notable relation that was created after his death. The first documented a specific moment in time and linked the individual to a royal lineage seat inherited through his maternal line, and the second became a kind of ultimate portrait that represents the person of John Abraham as part of the maternal lineage of the house. A time-bound chiefly portrait was multiplied so as to create an idealised memorial image. All of this is further activated by oral accounts of family achievement. As with the memorial portraits of Effuah Nicol and other successful family members, the 124 Film, Charcoal, Time Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Figure 5. Studio Okuta, Portrait of John Abraham as Nana Kome 7th of Komenda, medium unknown, 1964. Courtesy of the Abraham family. Figure 6. Unknown studio, Memorial Portrait of John Abraham, after 1964. Courtesy of the Abraham family. 125 Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Erin Haney work of family memory and its various narratives, projected for present and future generations in the hall, the space of the house where public visits and private family events, commingle. The iconography of Effuah Nicol’s and John Abraham’s portraits changed radically from one version to the next. The portraits’ indexicality may be important (although no one put it to me in these terms), but in this case the worthwhile connection with a person may be in visual recognition, or in the photographic iterations rather than the presence of the actual person. Here, photographs are additive media par excellence. In theory, they are infinitely enduring, suggested in the idealising motto of Frederick Richard Christian Lutterodt’s studio stamp ca. 1890s, ‘Esto perpetua’ (‘may it live forever’). Others earnestly offered in good faith the promise of long-lasting archives: ‘All negatives kept, Additional copies can always be had’.16 But for the most important photographs, local conditions and harsh climates were among many motivations for making new photographs out of old ones. What is not taken for granted about photographs, even from their earliest days, has not been the promise of durability, nor a precise negative to positive reproduction, but rather the flexibility and mutability inherent in the handling of photographic objects, and by extension, their endurance in family collections. 16 – Frederick Lutterodt’s stamp from the back of an albumen print, Ghana Album, Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, EEPA 1995-18000. Erick Lutterodt’s card mount, The Accra Studio, ca. 1920, collection of Vida and Jemima Sackey. A Cosmopolitan Art The Lutterodt family in many ways emblematises the early history of photography’s local emergence in west Africa. The Accra-born dynasty of photographers opened the first west African studio with regional branches in the 1870s, and ran several west African studios up until the 1940s.17 Gerhardt Lutterodt worked between Freetown, Sierra Leone and the island of Fernando Po from the late 1870s, George A. G. Lutterodt and his son Albert opened sister studios in Freetown and Accra while covering the whole west coast from 1876; within a few years William, Frederick and other family members set up other roving and permanent studios. Their studios were renowned for the latest styles, furnishings and techniques, and were known to have taught generations of new photographers.18 One 1891 advertisement offers an impression of local preferences: on offer were ‘portraits in cases as presents to Lovers’, portraits enlarged to life-sized, portraits at home cost extra. The Lutterodts offered the usual stock of ‘views, scenes and types’ from the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and surrounding areas, and also furnished chemicals and lessons on the photographic arts to local enthusiasts.19 The momentum of photographers like the Lutterodts, J. P. Decker, Fred Grant, Lascoumettes, F. Joaque, W. S. Johnston, N. Walwin and J. A. C. Holm, J. A. Green, and many others is embodied in their biographies.20 They carried, with cameras and backdrops, examples of their work, an assorted iconography of views, landscapes and portrayals of local and distant people. As with the west African circulation of illustrated newspapers, books and engravings before and throughout the nineteenth century, photographers’ visits comprised a fundamental circulation of photographic imagery (besides these works on paper and glass, there were the photographers’ experiences and stories), which arose well before the heyday of postcards in the 1890s.21 For these reasons, I suggest that photographers comprised an early and unevenly scattered pan-west African creative cosmopolitanism. The paths of their circulation spanned a great geography, transcending political, cultural and linguistic boundaries, and later the emerging colonial and international borders. Initially, they linked the coastal urban centres such as Saint-Louis, Monrovia, Freetown and Elmina because of their critical mass of wealthy patrons. In this way, local, foreign and resident photographers joined the mass of nineteenth-century west African seagoing migrations, where people with highly sought-after skills moved around for work, intensifying extended social and familial networks, and enjoyed the engagement with locations, people and views from a little further away. This creative modernism is fundamental to local west African visual culture. 126 17 – George Augustus Godfrey Lutterodt’s advertisement in the Gold Coast Express, 3 (5 August 1897). Interviews with Alexander P. K. Lutterodt, 23 November 2001, 3 April 2002 and 3 May 2002; NAG SCT 2/6/5. John Parker, personal communication, 7 August 2002. Tobias Wend’s 1996 interview with Nicolas Lutterodt, who in 1996 was still living in the building that housed Duala Studio on Lutterodt Street; T. Wendl, personal communication, 30 January 2003. 18 – Phillipe David, Alex A. Accolatse: Hommage à l’un des Premiers Photographes Togolais, Lome !: Editions Haho/Goethe Institute 1993. 19 – Advertisement for The Royal Photographic Gallery, Lutterodt & Son in The Trader, A Monthly Commercial Record and Trade Review, Freetown (28 February 1891). 20 – Their itinerancy makes these photographers’ oeuvres difficult to trace, especially since studio archives have mostly disappeared, but studio cardmounts, advertisements, news in the local press, trade journals and, occasionally, mention in African, European and US publications offer starting points; most descendants and live connections to these earliest photographers have now passed from living oral memory. 21 – For an extensive study of the uneven circulations of imagery around the world, termed visual economies, and some of the political implications thereof, see Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997. Film, Charcoal, Time Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 22 – Similar traditions emerged in Freetown, Conakry, Elmina, Cape Coast, Accra, Lagos and quite probably many other towns on trade routes inland. 23 – The owner of the EEPA 1995-18000 album has not been identified; similar images appear in Dutch, English, Swiss, German and Liberian personal albums and collections as well as in the occasional travel book publication. 24 – See J. A. C. Holm’s postcards of otofo girls geared toward the Nigerian market ca. 1904– 1905 and the 1908 postcards published by the Gold Cost photographer Jacob Vitta of Tarkwa in Terence Dickinson, Gold Coast Picture Postcards (1898-1957), Dronfield: west Africa Study Circle 2003; Lisk-Carew studio images of Bondu society girls in the exhibition catalogue Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies of the African Body, ed. Barbara Thompson, Hanover, NH: Hood Museum 2008; Crooks, ‘Photography in Freetown’; and for A. James portraits of celebrants in Conakry, Guinea, see Erin Haney, Photography and Africa, London: Reaktion 2010. 25 – There are many different names for these ceremonies in southern Ghana, although the practice is far from universal and has changed dramatically; see Marijke Steegstra, Dipo and the Politics of Culture in Ghana, Accra: Woeli 2005. 26 – There is also a problem of self-selection, but this concern is far too complicated to be discussed here. The elite families of the late nineteenth century tended to be churchgoing, although within this there was a significant neo-traditionalist movement in Cape Coast and Accra from the 1850s. One of these modern genres to emerge in the 1880s and 1890s in west African entrepôts was imagery of young women coming of age. Photographers elaborated continuously upon this subject, and introduced the protocols of the studio portrait into the fanfare of these ceremonial events. Two portraits from unidentified studios in Cape Coast and Lagos (figures 7, 8) encapsulate these extended social debuts into adulthood, and represent aspects of the elaborate processes of girls’ seclusion, education, and the debut of young women newly eligible for marriage. Many contain visual references that are culturally specific, but the debut phenomenon has a much broader resonance across west Africa.22 Often an extended period of separation from their families, coming of age ceremonies included young women’s education about matters of marriage, prescribed fattening diets to attain an ideal body shape, and culminated in a public reappearance that featured performances, gift-giving and sometimes marriage arrangements. The last part was usually a well-attended spectacle, and public appearances overlaid gold, jewels, beads and cloth on girls’ bodies, heightening their beauty and potential. But sitting entailed its own kind of aesthetic process involving the audiences of her family, the photographer and bystanders assessing her and staging her display. The resulting portraits were dazzling: a moment highlighting the fertility, elegance and comportment, they commemorated the ephemeral spectacles of exquisite revelation. Almost all the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century coming of age ceremony portraits from the Gold Coast I have seen come from overseas photographs and postcards. Figure 7 (top) is a Cape Coast debut portrait from the private album of an unknown English resident on the coast.23 Postcards of this genre (figure 8) emerged in the 1890s and were fairly commonplace by the first decade of the twentieth century, and appear to have been appropriated by local publishers from privately commissioned portraits.24 Such portraits, offered at local studios, appealed to visitors and expatriates for different reasons, not least among them the perception of nudity (and of course there were a number of responses to this, occasionally inscribed right on the postcard or album page). The album containing the Cape Coast portrait includes a range of named and unnamed young women’s portraits, variously noting debut portraits; it appears that some images were given as gifts by acquaintances or friends, and others bought or collected as anonymous subjects. Age and deterioration can only partly explain the absence of early debut portraits in present-day collections in southern Ghana. The oldest Ghanaians interviewed in Accra and Cape Coast diplomatically professed to know little of these portraits, or suggested that this state of dress was outmoded or done by people of other lineages and origins. What are widely referred to now as otofo portraits25 are common today, and even earlier a considerable religious and proscriptive cultural literature included portraits of the stages of each public ceremonial appearance. Thus, however widespread these earliest coming-of-age portraits might have been, and under what circumstances they have left collections, migrated overseas with owners or were discarded or damaged, their absence from local collections is striking. I suspect that as the tropes of displaying female bodies for portraiture changed, the acceptability of keeping portraits of those bodies dwindled, and other portraits deemed more modest took their place.26 There are probably many genres of photographs of which we know very little because of the disturbances and ambiguities that photographs, as evidence of obsolete or disdained cultural practices, were subjected to by owners and viewers. A Cape Coast wedding portrait, from the same collector’s album ca. 1890s, is notable for its inclusion of the bride and her groom, with their parents and attendants. This appears to be a novel formula, given how hotly contested the process of getting married was in southern Gold Coast towns of the time. In Cape Coast (as elsewhere), what quickly became referred to as ‘native custom’ for marrying involved an exchange of gifts between families, but no particular display of the couple together. So, how such ceremonies were arranged between families, whether they 127 Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Erin Haney Figure 7. Unidentified Cape Coast studio, Unidentified Debut Portrait and Unidentified Wedding Portrait, albumen prints, ca. 1890. Annotated on the album page: ‘A lady, in centre, desires to make known that she is of marriageable age, with her friends’; ‘A Wedding party group. Bride and Bridegroom sitting. The man is a ‘scholar’ (!) but a ‘‘heathen’’’. Courtesy of Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, EEPA 1995-0018-0041 and 0042, Ghana Photographic Album. 128 Film, Charcoal, Time Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Figure 8. Unidentified Lagos studio, Unidentified Debut Portrait, postcard, letterpress half-tone, publisher unknown, 1906–1908, Courtesy of Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, EEPA 1992-004-052, west Africa Postcard Album. ‘Southern Nigeria, west Africa. A girl before the fattening process. Painted with chalk’. 27 – Carl Christian Reindorf, History of the Gold Coast and Asante, Basel: 1895; and Michael Echueruo, Victorian Lagos: Aspects of Nineteenth Century Lagos Life, London: Macmillan 1977. were Christian or not, how the bride dressed, what languages were spoken if it was a church wedding, what gifts were exchanged: all were matters of intense debate in the society of fin-de-sie!cle Cape Coast – as they were in other west African cities, particularly Lagos and Freetown.27 Elements of the debut portrait resonate through this image – the bride’s coiffure appointed with gold ornaments, her layers of chains and beads, and her carefully wrapped damask cloths – all attend to the feminine spectacle of lustrous beauty. She and the groom are centre-stage, seated as the positions of honour; the mothers touch their children, and the bride’s attendant on the left is unadorned, as seems to have been common. This portrait was collected by an unidentified colonial resident, whose inscription suggests he asked the photographer about the subjects, but he seems not to have been aware of local usage: ‘A Wedding party group. Bride and bridegroom sitting. The man is a ‘‘scholar’’ (!) but a heathen’. That is to say, the groom was literate, mission-educated and possibly employed as a clerk for a trader or colonial agent, and was not Christian. As with the debut portraits, a wedding portrait with the bride dressed in this way did not appear in any family collections I surveyed. It is a sophisticated interpretation of local tradition alongside more recent west African developments like the debut portrait: it is an entirely modern image. But modern is always changing, and what was up to date is often a politically charged cultural stance. It is not surprising, then, that these kinds of portraits rarely surface in present-day family collections. People construct their family legacies through their photographic collections, and these are ongoing projects. We begin to sense the complexities of this and the antiquity of these politics by comprehensive research and by serendipitous events like this wedding portrait’s anonymous insertion into an English colonial album. 129 Erin Haney Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Figure 9. Lithograph based on daguerreotype by Daniel West, Portrait of Quaccoe Atta I, King of Cape Coast, 1858. From D. West The Life and Journals of the Rev. Daniel West, Wesleyan Minister on Deputation to the Wesleyan Mission Stations on the Gold Coast, Western Africa (London: Hamilton, Adams 1857) Performative Portraits These aspects of photography’s mutability also point to questions concerning the nature of genres as they are locally understood. For instance, there is a longstanding connection between painting and photography, and in west Africa photographic practice predates easel painting, yet little has been written on the nexus of these media. Daniel West, the portrait photographer for Quaccoe Atta I mentioned earlier, indicated the King’s stated preference for an oil painting made from the daguerreotype. Yet another kind of portrait is marked in royal public performance (figure 9). West detailed his interactions with the king, who came to sit for his portrait at Cape Coast castle accompanied by a grand procession of musicians, emblem bearers, umbrellas and courtly advisors, with crowds of attendants completing the multisensory spectacle.28 The modest image reveals scant reference to this elaborate royal procession. On the other hand, a painted portrait of J. M. Cooke (figure 10) is scaled for a public display of a royal figure, yet it remains hidden much of the time. Based on an old photograph, the painting is locked away from view in a royal family house in Cape Coast. Cooke held the royal stool from 1929 to 1962, but it was not remembered whether the painting was commissioned during his reign or after; nor was it signed. Around four by two and a half feet, the image was scaled slightly less than life-size, and the painter replicated the photograph’s 130 28 – West, The Life and Journals of the Rev. Daniel West (published posthumously by Thomas West). Film, Charcoal, Time Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Figure 10. Unidentified artist, Portrait of J. Mensah Cooke, pigment on board, date of painting unknown. Courtesy Ebiradze House. verisimilitude as much as possible, working in monochrome evoking black and white photography. Does this painting enter into the ranks of an honorary photograph? This begs a much larger set of questions. Why emulate the qualities of photography in paint? Remembering King Atta of about a century earlier, this painting supports what might have been some of the perceptions of photography’s shortcomings of durability, scale and visibility. It is possible that the iconicity – the sense of J. Mensah Cooke in the portrait – and the indexicality – the sense that the model photograph was an important physical connection to the person – are qualities that are taken up in the painted portrait, as is the case with the portraits discussed earlier. Have You Seen? The negotiation between subjects and photographer coalesce in an image that is both a portrait and a multi-authored public display (figure 11). This photograph shows the 1934 enstoolment of the chief fisherman, the wolei atse, in Accra. It was taken by Frederick G. C. Lutterodt, and his son Alexander P. K. Lutterodt recounted to me how the photograph was assembled by his father and the sitters, since he remembered the day clearly as a young boy assisting his father. It was clearly one of the younger Mr Lutterodt’s most prized images among the thousands taken by his father, and the photograph spurred an extensive set of conversations 131 Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Erin Haney Figure 11. F. G. C. Lutterodt, Record of the Installation of Wolei Atse Nii Adam Dzamlodza, silver gelatin print, 1934. Courtesy of the family of A. P. K. Lutterodt. between him and Mr Wulff, the then current wolei atse in all of its historical allusions and intricacies.29 The two men’s recollections suggested how it came to pass that a portrait of the new wolei atse entailed the performative context of its many participants. That is, the audience witnessing his ascension were themselves an integral part of the portrait, and the photographer and his subjects resolutely staged the scene for the camera’s frame. One’s eye first goes to the otsiame (linguist) staff, a showy staff of office reserved for the spokesman of the wolei atse: it divides the composition of the picture down the middle. Moving forward towards the picture plane, a man called an herbalist is visible and just out of focus. His presence and the prepared basin of water and medicinal leaves at his feet acted as a protective intervention: those who greeted the wolei atse were required to purify themselves here. Nii Adam’s family were gathered in front, including a sister, seated left, dressed in ceremonial white and presiding at a table with schnaaps for libations, the drinks poured to convey news and ask blessings from the ancestors considered to be present but no longer living. Beyond the herbalist sit a number of local dignitaries, including the important spokesman (otsiame). Near him, with his head just visible, sits Nii Adam, difficult to discern from the crowd of followers. Overhead, fisherman made a canopy of sails from their boats, and walled off the area with palm fronds, and fisherman form their own backdrop lining the back rows. Among them, one points his right finger to his right eye, a gesture that evokes the proverb ‘have you seen’? Although the precise nature of what he was referring to has been forgotten or did not bear mentioning, Mr Lutterodt and Mr Wulff suggested that the gesture sent a message to all present concerning the victorious outcome of the ascendant over another candidate. The photograph’s composition, choreographed by both subjects and photographer, encapsulates the way in which this ceremony was laid out. Lutterodt, like generations of family members before him, was a cosmopolitan photographer , working in Accra, 132 29 – Interviews with A. P. K. Lutterodt and Mr William Wulff, 3 April and 3 May 2002. Film, Charcoal, Time Fernando Po, and points in between, but this image is successful because he rendered the intricacies of the event and its extended complexities by virtue of his deep knowledge of Accra’s cultural and political institutions (of which his family was a part). Based on a resolutely local vision and a deep photographic idiom, Frederick Lutterodt’s construction of the image is a virtuoso performance because of its expansive inclusion of its other creators. Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 05:29 09 November 2017 Conclusion The foregoing research illuminates some of the qualities and contexts of ephemerality and creating Gold Coast photographs, with the full awareness that aspects of these treatments resonate well beyond west Africa. In writing of photographic and image history in Africa, there has been a flat and simplistic dualism, an identity politics which privileges certain strands of African photographic history. It has been presumed that photographs in overseas archives were the products of foreign photographers, and that it is reasonable to mark the works of African-produced depictions as essentially different. Steadily the identifications of photographers’ cartes-de-visite, postcards and mass-produced images of this area continue, adding urgency to ongoing projects that consider private and civic collections of Africa and of its diasporas. There are many places in west Africa where lives have been dramatically disrupted and things and people lost. The dissolution of African historical and photographic archives is not trivial, nor is it the whole story. Boxes of glass plates, the bulk of the one branch of a Lutterodt studio archive, were thrown into the sea years ago – and why not? There was no more demand for prints, nor were there reliable means of identifying families who might appreciate an old portrait negative. Recent markets in Europe and the USA, and certainly research efforts and exhibitions, make surreptitious sales of old family albums and collections an alarmingly common occurrence. Funds for conserving and marketing African photographic archives and collections on the continent remain exceedingly difficult to obtain. Meanwhile, living memory of the era in which the oldest photographs were made has passed on. There are many other encumbrances to researching the oldest photographic material, not least among them being the scattered and uneven local written sources about photography and its receptions. In this still new field, the best efforts synthesise images of such different archives on their own merits, rooted in their particular histories and the expanse of their global and multiple existences. Vintage albumen prints from an album in Washington, D.C., or Basel set up a number of compelling questions when considered next to layered iterations of a portrait in Elmina albums, or old images posted online and visually detached from their pages and physicality. These photographs are their own contemporaneities, for they emerge as a thickly attenuated and morphing set of creative practices, which can be understood in contradistinction to photographs as archaeological or intact layers, or serialised moments. Although it may first seem that west Africa’s deep photographic histories are troubled by a dearth of photographs, we should look to the evidence across all kinds of institutions – private family collections and civic collections together with the more acknowledged spaces of colonial archives – the intersections of all these must still be worked through. Socially composed upheaval and unrelenting renewal mark the time and the substance of this artistic modernity in this and other west African photographies. 133