Photography in Africa: Introduction

Introduction Richard Vokes 1 The past twenty years have witnessed a huge burgeoning of scholarly interest in all aspects of photography in Africa.1 The origins of this growing field may be traced to a series of parallel developments in history, art theory, and anthropology, which began to converge from roughly the early 1990s onwards. In history, an emerging interest may be traced to a symposium on Photographs as Sources for African History that was organized by David Killingray and Andrew Roberts at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1988 (the collected papers of which were published by Roberts later that same year).2 Although there were other significant books and articles on photography in Africa published at around the same time,3 the collected papers of the SOAS meeting made a key contribution in defining a new programme for historical research, by providing one of the first comprehensive overviews of the history of photography on the continent, by offering important evaluations of surviving colonial, missionary, and museum/university archives,4 and by introducing a series of debates about the value of photographs as a source for African history.5 Moreover, the concerns of the conference have continued to occupy Africanist historians – and others – ever since. Thus, in the years following Killingray and Roberts’ symposium, a growing body of research has provided ever more detail on the spread of photography across the continent,6 has offered further descriptions of relevant archives,7 and has continued to engage in debate as to what sort of truth values might usefully be derived from these visual sources.8 Yet over the last two decades, it is not only historians who have developed a new concern with photography in Africa. In addition, the period has also 1 The majority of this introduction was written while I was resident as a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in Hilary 2011. I would like to thank the Warden of All Souls, Sir John Vickers, and all of the fellows and staff of the college, for having made my stay in Oxford such a pleasant and stimulating one. In addition, I would like to thank Erin Haney, Corinne Kratz, Christopher Morton, and one anonymous reviewer for James Currey, for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. Of course, any mistakes or omissions remain mine alone. 2 Killingray and Roberts’ own introduction to these collected papers was then republished, in a slightly ammended form, in History in Africa (1989). 3 Following the important early contributions of Bensusan (1966) Bull & Denfield (1970) and Sprague (1978), the second-half of the 1980s saw a growing interest in the history of photography in Africa. For example, see Alloula (1986), Fabb (1987), Monti (1987), and Geary (1988). Roberts’ bibliography to the collected papers provides an extended list (1988: 159-168), although this was later superceded by Zaccaria’s (then) comprehensive Photography and African Studies: A Bibliography (2001). 4 See also Robert’s earlier work in this area (for example, Roberts 1986), and Paul Jenkins’ previous publications on the Basel Mission Archive (for example, Jenkins & Geary 1985). (Jenkins was another of the participants in the SOAS workshop.) 5 See also Geary (1986). 6 Key contributions include Prochaska (1991), Geary (2003), Schneider (2010), Peffer (2009: 241-280), and especially Haney (2010b: 13-55). 7 For example, The Standing Conference on Library Materials on Africa (1995), see also Zaccaria (2001) and Stuehrenberg (2006). 8 See especially Mack (1991), Enwezor & Zaya (1996: 17-44), Hartmann, Silvester & Hayes (1998), Ranger (2001), Jenkins (2002), Peffer (2008) and Maxwell (2011). 1 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 1 09/04/2012 05:12 seen a growing engagement with the subject in art exhibitions, and amongst art theorists, art critics and indeed, art dealers. This interest began in the early 1990s when, as part of a broader re-engagement with ‘contemporary’ African art, a growing number of museums and galleries began to exhibit photographs taken by ‘photographers born and/or still resident’ in Africa (Haney 2010b: 8), alongside other African visual forms. The aim was to locate these photographers’ works within broader stylistic and aesthetic trends, and in so doing, to perhaps trace the contours of a distinctively ‘African photography’ (i.e. one that differed from other regional traditions). One of the first institutions to incorporate photographs in this way was New York’s Museum for African Art,9 which as part of its seminal exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (1991), included a number of images taken by a then unknown Malian photographer called Seydou Keïta.10 However, within just a few years, African photography had also become the subject of exhibitions in its own right, as in the New York Guggenheim Museum’s major exhibition, In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996).11 Equally importantly, though, during this same period the idea of a distinctively ‘African photography’ also began to be taken up within art theory. This began with the work of writers at Revue Noire, a journal on African art that was published in Paris between 1991 and 2001,12 although the concept later became particularly associated with the journal African Arts (which from the late 80s onwards, published an increasing number of articles on photography). One outcome of these various trends was a rise to prominence of certain African photographers, studios, and photographic milieux. Moreover, the profiles of some of these were simultaneously also boosted by the operation of international art markets. For example, the growing renown of a photographer such as Seydou Keïta – who by the time of his death in 2001 had already become one of the most famous names in African photography – can be seen as a combined outcome of increased exposure, of deepening scholarly interest, and of a growing commercial engagement with his work. Thus, following the inclusion of his photographs in the ‘Africa Explores’ exhibition, Keïta was ‘discovered’ by a curator called André Magnin, who later travelled to Mali – in his capacity as an agent for the French-Italian collector Jean Pigozzi – and there purchased several hundred more of the photographer’s negatives.13 9 At that time, the museum was called the Center for African Art. Born in Bamako c.1921, Keïta had learned photography from his ‘mentor’ Mountaga Kouyata, before going on to produce over 10,000 images (most of them taken between 1948 and 1962), from his studio base in the Malian capital (Jedlowski 2008: 35). The importance of the Africa Explores exhibition relates to the contribution it made, at this time, to a growing acceptance amongst art theorists, critics and dealers – and indeed, amongst the general public – that contemporary African art was indeed ‘art’. It was therefore as part of this broader trend that the engagement with African photographers such as Keïta first began. 11 An important early solo exhibition was South African photographer Santu Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album/Look at Me (Slides and Text Slides), at the Nederland Foto Insituut in Rotterdam, Holland (1998). See Mofokeng’s personal website: http://www.santumofokeng.com. 12 An anthology of Revue Noire articles was published first in French and Portugese editions (1998), and later in an English edition (1999). 13 As described by Birgham (1999: 62), the curator of the Africa Explores exhibition, Susan Vogel, included 30 of Keïta’s images in the show, which were enlargements of a series of negatives she had acquired from Keïta’s family during an earlier visit to Bamako. However, in the period between her visit to West Africa and the exhibition in New York, Vogel had lost her travel notes, in which the photographer’s name was recorded. As a result, she was forced to caption the images, in the exhibition, as photographer ‘unknown’. According to Birgham, Magnin then saw 10 2 | RI C HARD VOKE S Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 2 09/04/2012 05:12 These negatives later formed the basis of a solo exhibition of Keïta’s work at the Fondation Cartier in Paris (in 1994), which in turn resulted in an increasing number of academic publications being dedicated to his work.14 However, equally importantly, the Fondation Cartier show – and others that were to follow it – also created a growing international market for Keïta’s work (one that was to eventually see a single Keïta image being sold by a New York gallery, in 2006, for US $16,000).15 Moreover, Keïta’s is far from being an isolated case here. Thus, as McKeown observes, over the past twenty years, museum curators and art theorists have become increasingly concerned with tracing the biographies of numerous African photographers (2010), whilst Peffer sardonically notes that many of these individuals have similarly gone on to become ‘highly collectible, in part because of the curiosity factor, and in part because what can be bought for a song and sold for a mint has always aroused interest among dealers in African art’ (2009: 279). Still, the field remains a compelling area for research. Thus, although few curators, or theorists, would today defend the notion of a single, monolithic ‘African photography’ – not least because the sheer diversity of photographic practices that have been identified across the continent (and in the Diaspora) compels us to instead think in terms of multiple, overlapping ‘photographies’16 – the general concern for exploring the subjects, stylistic and aesthetic considerations, and political implications, of photographs produced by those who identify themselves as African photographers remains current.17 The past twenty years has also witnessed a growing engagement with photography in Africa within anthropology.18 Following the advent of visual anthropology as a distinctive sub-discipline from roughly the early 1970s onwards, an increasing number of scholars began to examine photography as an important subject of ethnographic enquiry.19 However, a burgeoning interest in, specifically, photography in Africa traces to the later publication of Elizabeth Edwards’ edited collection Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920 (1992). The central concern of Edwards’ collection was a reconsideration of the photographic archives of the UK’s Royal Anthropological Institute, and in pursuit of this, it developed a series of case studies about historical ethnographic photography, including a number that looked at various 13 cont. the photographs in the exhibition, and later decided to travel to Bamako himself, to identify who the photographer was, and to purchase more of his/her images. During his first vist to Mali, he was able to quickly achieve both of these goals (see also Jedlowski 2008: 36). 14 A comprehensive bibliography is provided on Keïta’s official website: http://www. seydouKeïtaphotographer.com/en/books/ See also Bigham (1999). 15 See, ‘Who Owns Seydou Keïta?’, by Michael Rips, in the New York Times (22nd January 2006). 16 See Behrend & Werner (2001: 241). The importance of thinking about all photographic histories and traditions in the plural was most strongly emphasized by Pinney & Peterson’s later collection Photography’s Other Histories (2003, to which Behrend also contributed a chapter, 2003a, see below). The collection includes ethnographic case studies from all over the world. 17 Amongst the best introductions to contemporary African photographies are Matt, Miessgang & Wien (2002), Enwezor (2006), Grantham (2009) and Simon & Vanhaecke (2010). 18 Although it should be pointed out that there is often substantial overlap between the fields of historical research, museum ethnography, and socio-cultural anthropology. For example, scholars such as Christraud Geary and Elizabeth Edwards, amongst others, have made substantial contributions to all of these areas of research. 19 Significant early contributions include Scherer (1975), Edwards & Williamson (1981) and Banta & Hinsley, with O’Donnell (1986). See also Scherer (1990) for a comprehensive overview. In addition, the two main journals, Visual Anthropology Review, and Visual Anthropology (which were established in 1970 and 1987, respectively), have both carried numerous articles on photography from the time of their creation. I NTR O DU C TIO N | 3 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 3 09/04/2012 05:12 African examples.20 Taken together, these case studies generated new ways of thinking about nineteenth-century ethnographic photography, and especially that which had been produced as part of a Victorian ‘scientific’ anthropology. In the period since its production, much of this imagery had come to be seen as deeply flawed, not least because of its overtones of scientific racism (see Maxwell 2008), but also because of its staged and artificial nature (for example, the posed portrait shots of J. W. Lindt, described by Poignant 1992: 54), and latterly, simply by its lack of relevance to the ‘modern’ anthropological project. However, by developing a series of ‘counter-readings’ of these photographs, the contributors to Edwards’ collection attempted to go beyond or behind their producers’ (presumed) intentions, and to recover the historical traces of the people depicted. In this way, one of the key contributions of the book was to show how this imagery, no matter how seemingly artificial, nevertheless recorded points in individual and collective lives in which subjects had been sutured into the anthropological project (see also Banks & Vokes 2010). Moreover, this interest in the way in which anthropological imagery might be used as a source for investigating subjects’ lives has since been extended to the study of later ethnographic archives as well (i.e. to the study of fieldwork photographs which were produced in the period after the discipline’s faith in ‘scientific photography’ had waned).21 In addition, though, in recent years a growing number of anthropologists have also begun to conduct ethnographic studies of contemporary ‘African photographies’. On the one hand, these works have attempted to locate African modes of photographic production and representation within their wider social contexts.22 On the other, they have also examined the products of African photography – i.e. the photographs themselves – as culturally-meaningful artefacts, or in other words as objects which may themselves develop a ‘social life’ of their own, as they become embedded within domestic activity, ritual practice, exchange networks, and so on.23 An interest in photography in Africa therefore began in history with a study of colonial and missionary archives, in art theory with the identification of African photographers and studios, and in anthropology with a reexamination of the discipline’s own archive (and later also included a study of the social practices of contemporary African photographies). However, in more recent years, the boundaries between these various areas of interest have become increasingly blurred, as scholars across all these disciplines (and others besides) have written ever more expansively. The result has been the emergence of a sizeable new literature that addresses many areas of common concern relating to the history, practice and sociology of photography in Africa. Indeed, so extensive has this new literature become, that it today engenders a quite vast range of issues and debates, some of which are common to all scholarship in the field, some of which are only relevant for those working on photographs from a particular period, or from a specific geographical or 20 See especially the chapters by Faris, Pankhurst, Prins and Vansina. Important studies of later ethnographic archives include Geary (2000), Comaroff & Comaroff (2007) and Morton (2009). See also various contributions in Morton & Edwards (2009). For an important contribution from outside Africa, see Young’s study of Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork photography from the Trobriand Islands (1998). 22 See especially Viditz-Ward (1987), Behrend & Wendl (1998), Behrend (2001), Behrend & Werner (2001). 23 See Rowlands (1996), Wendl & du Plessis (1998), Kratz (2002), Behrend (2003b), Mustafa (2002), Vokes (2008) and Meyer (2010). 21 4 | RI C HARD VOKE S Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 4 09/04/2012 05:12 political region, or from a given photographic milieu, or which belong to a particular genre. Nevertheless, in seeking to engage the overall field, I find it useful to identify three alternative, yet overlapping, discursive contexts that have become the major frames for organizing much of the scholarship on this subject – and within which all of the chapters in this book can also be in some way located. These are: 1) a concern with photographic technologies, practices and images in movement; 2) a concern with the nexus between photography and political power and authority; and 3) a concern with the relationship between photography and the histories and processes of social change. Photographies in movement A concern with movement stems from the earliest attempts to document the history of photography in Africa, and from the image this produced of technologies and practices being rapidly spread across the continent by all manner of roving itinerant photographers, and by European ‘explorers’, missionaries, and colonial administrators. Photographic technologies arrived in Africa shortly after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, when the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt, Pasha Mehmet Ali, was taught how to produce them by French painter Horace Vernet, who was resident in Cairo at that time (Haney 2010b: 13). In the decades following, commercial daguerrotypists (both African and European) became established in urban settlements all around the African coast, and although much of their production centred on studios, most appear to have also made extensive commercial forays into their urban hinterlands. Later, and especially following the invention of the ‘dryplate’ method in 1871, a growing number of explorers, military officers, and government surveyors began to convey the technologies even further inland (Killingray & Roberts 1989: 198-200). Finally, following the introduction of portable Kodak cameras from the late 1880s onwards, photography was quickly carried into all remaining parts of the continent, as it became a (more or less) routine part of missionary work, official activity, and colonial settler life. In these ways, then, all of the earliest photographers in Africa appear ‘to have made an art of crossing borders in an era of unprecedented momentum’ (Haney 2010b: 13). Later, into the twentieth century, as cheap handheld cameras made photography ever more accessible to more and more people in Africa, as new types of professional photographer sought to picture an ever-widening range of African subjects (including wildlife photographers, photojournalists, photographic artists, and others), and as new forms of migration resulted in the elements of African photographies also being conveyed to the Diaspora, the technologies, practices and objects of photography were transmitted into even wider social and geographical domains. However, the focus on movement relates not only to the spread of photographic technologies and practices across the continent, but also to the movement of the images themselves (i.e. those of African subjects) which from the very beginning were widely disseminated across the continent, and to all corners of the globe. As Haney again puts it, if early experiments in photography in Africa involved a ‘burden of heavy cameras and equipment, the resulting images were relatively featherweight, easily borne on steamship routes, and so exchanged and proliferated across continents and oceans’ (ibid.: 13). Recent work has highlighted that these circulations were frequently I NTR O DU C TIO N | 5 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 5 09/04/2012 05:12 shaped by pre-existing ‘visual economies’ (to use Deborah Poole’s entitling phrase, 1997), some of which were local, or regional in scope, others of which covered the entire continent, and/or extended way beyond it. Indeed, from the beginning, photographs were embedded within multiple circuits (of different historical ‘depth’, and geographical ‘scale’) at the same time. For example, it is now clear that in addition to being shaped by local and regional networks of exchange, early circulations of photographs throughout West Africa and beyond cannot be understood independently of a wider ‘Atlantic visualscape’. As described by Schneider (2010), the circuits of this visualscape were already well established by the sixteenth century, and had long shaped the circulations of multiple visual forms – including drawings, oil paintings, lithographs, and so on – as these passed between Europe, West Africa and the Americas. Not only did this visualscape determine a kind of ‘infrastructure’ of individuals and institutions through which early photographs were exchanged, but it also forged a relationship between other visual traditions and photography, one that resulted in certain tropes and even entire images being copied from one to the other. For example, in her study of the port cities of nineteenth century West Africa, including those of Cape Coast and Accra, Haney found that as a result of elite practice, emergent traditions of painted portraiture and photographic representation became mutually reinforcing (Haney, n.d. and 2010a).24 Yet so too recent work has also highlighted how the increasing flow of photographs out of the continent during the second half of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, was also driven by an ever greater demand for images of Africa amongst European and American viewing publics. A growing number of scholars have examined how during this period, images of the continent became incorporated into an ever widening range of popular visual formats, reflecting a fascination with Africa that was fuelled by an expanding tourist industry, by a growing interest in the exploits of explorers, and by the educational (and propaganda) efforts of European governments and missionary societies.25 By the early 1900s, images from central Africa were being regularly incorporated into an ever greater range of news and satirical journals, advertising imagery, packaging materials, cigarette cards, and (especially) picture postcards. Moreover, as with research on the Atlantic visualscape, much of this work on popular forms has again highlighted the importance of maintaining a conceptual distinction between the photographic image and the material elements of its production and reproduction, i.e. such factors as ‘its chemistry, the paper it is printed on, the toning’, and so on. (This distinction is today emphasized in much theoretical writing on photographic ‘materialities’; see especially Edwards & Hart 2004.) In other words, a large part of this research has also focused on those images which moved between material domains, as was then common, for example, in the practice of personal or official images being copied onto/into adverts, cigarette cards, postcards, and so forth. Indeed, in some cases, individual 24 The development of the Atlantic visualscape during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is explored from the other side of the ocean in Thompson’s case study of photography and art in Jamaica and the Bahamas, An Eye for the Tropics (2006). 25 See especially Coombes (1994), Ryan (1997), Geary (1998), Kratz & Gordon (2002), Landau (2002) and Sobania (2002 & 2007). A particularly interesting case study on early twentiethcentry images of Namibian bushmen is provided by Gordon (1997). 6 | RI C HARD VOKE S Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 6 09/04/2012 05:12 images appeared in a variety of popular formats.26 Yet by being transferred in this way, the semiotics of the images were frequently altered, in some cases radically so. For example, I have elsewhere explored one set of examples from early twentieth-century Uganda in which photographs taken from an official album were later reprinted as picture postcards, in a manner that significantly altered the way in which a viewer would likely make sense of them (2010).27 More recently, and as alluded to above, anthropologists have also begun to conduct ethnographic studies of the myriad of photographic exchanges which take place within African societies themselves, or between Africa and the Diaspora. Although a nascent field of study, this work has already begun to document the importance of those photographic exchanges which now so commonly take place as part of formal visiting, wedding rites, burial practices, and so on, in social milieux across the continent, and beyond (see above references). However, the interest in movement has also been driven, at least in part, by a general rethinking of the very idea of ‘the archive’, and by a recognition of its own shifting nature. Following the work of theorists such as Allan Sekula and John Tagg in the 1980s,28 and reflecting a wider trend within the history of photography in general (see Hamilton et. al., 2002), publications such as Edwards’ Anthropology and Photography (1992) drew attention to the fact that anthropological archives are not ‘historically neutral resting-places for individually interesting images’ (to borrow Morton and Edwards’ phrase, 2009: 8), so much as ‘living collections’ that have been ‘shaped [both] by the processes and procedures of the institutions that curate them, and [by] the researchers who use them’ (ibid.). In other words, there has been a growing recognition that as with all photographic archives, anthropological repositories are shaped by myriad flows of images, and are embedded within wider visual economies (albeit in ones of varying scale; Poole 2005: 162). As Elizabeth Edwards elsewhere puts it, this detailed ‘exploration of the structuring forms of accession, the processes of collecting and description, contexts of collecting and use, and the range of social practices associated with [archives] at an historically specific level’ reveals archives to be less an outcome of some sort of ‘universalizing desire’ so much as an ‘accumulation of micro-relationships in which objects are involved’ (2001: 7, 28-29). For example, the approach has revealed how one of the ‘great’ anthropological archives of the nineteenth century, the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) photo library, was itself embedded in a wider visual economy of photographic ‘collecting clubs’ – which had become increasingly popular in Britain, at least, from the 1860s onwards (ibid.: 29-33). Subsequent work has revealed additional examples of archives which have been shaped by other kinds of circulations besides – including, in some cases, circulations which have seen images also moving out of given archival collections.29 26 Geary (1998 & 2002). See also David (1986). In a more recent example, Kratz (2011) explores the effects of the way in which images of one particular African ethnic group, the Wodaabe of Niger, have proliferated across a vast array of visual media, in the period since the 1950s. 28 See especially Sekula (1986) and Tagg (1988). See also Derrida (1996). 29 Vokes & Banks (2010). See also Morton & Edwards (2009), and Peffer (2010). 27 INTR O DU C TI O N | 7 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 7 09/04/2012 05:12 Photography and power A concern with the nexus between photography and power again stems from the earliest attempts to document the history of photographic technologies and practices in Africa. Specifically, the very fact that these elements had been spread by (amongst others) explorers, missionaries and colonial administrators, drew immediate attention to the fact that photography had also been an integral element of ‘the European exploration, conquest, and colonization of Africa’ (Sharkey 2001: 180). In this way, as Edwards describes, it was a ‘part of Europe’s new arsenal of technological advancements during the age of empire. As such, it served both to symbolise the power differential in the colonies, and to bring it into visible order’.30 In fact, and as a great deal of research has subsequently explored, photography produced these effects in a number of different ways.31 Firstly, in colonies and protectorates throughout Africa, photography quickly became a primary means for visualizing the state itself, and for picturing its key offices, rituals, and sites. As Liam Buckley identifies, such ‘administrative photography’ – i.e. that which was ‘commissioned by the colonial governments, and consist[ed] of official state events, civic life, examples of “progress”’, and so on – has been interpreted by some scholars as constituting a distinct genre in its own right, one which was ‘firmly allied with imperial governance, serving as a “truthful witness” to the missionary work, surveillance and policing of western-style “progress”’ (2010: 147). To take my own research site of Uganda, during the early years of colonial rule in the country, a great deal of photographic practice revolved around the picturing of senior state officials (for example, the image of one particular commissioner, Sir James Hayes Sadler, became quite iconic in the early years of the twentieth century). So too, it frequently focused upon official state events (I have elsewhere documented how photographs taken at one particular event, the Kampala Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition of November 1908 played a key role in shaping visual imaginaries of the Ugandan state at that time). And it also involved the repeated picturing of certain iconic buildings (such as the succession of Anglican churches, and a cathedral, that were built on Namirembe Hill, in Kampala, between 1890 and 1919, images of which appear frequently in all remaining archives from Uganda). Later, several attempts were made to picture the new nation in a more systematic way, such as when the British Directorate of Overseas Surveys (DOS) undertook an aerial photographic survey of the country between 1954 and 1956, and when the Ugandan Land and Surveys Department undertook an extensive photomapping exercise of all of its ‘modern’ buildings and key infrastructure in the period after independence. Yet it was not only official uses of photography that engendered a power dynamic in this way. So too more ‘everyday’ forms of photography – as were produced by urban studios, and latterly by the owners of personal cameras as well – were also marked by political imbalances. On the one hand, the fact that in certain colonial contexts expatriates – be they administrators, missionaries, or settlers – had easier access to photography (given the urban 30 Edwards, cited in Peffer (2009: 242). For a broader introduction to the relationship between photography and colonialism, beyond only African contexts, see also Hight & Sampson (2004). 31 Perhaps the most wide-ranging examination of the relationship between photography and colonial power is provided by Hartmann, Silvester & Hayes’ The Colonizing Camera (1998). This collection develops an extended case study of South West Africa/Namibia. See also Hayes (1996). 8 | RI C HARD VOKE S Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 8 09/04/2012 05:12 location of the studios, and the general cost both of studio and of personal photography) resulted in Europeans being sometimes overrepresented in the resulting imagery. Certainly, this was the case across large parts of colonial East Africa.32 On the other hand, the fact that many colonialists also used photography as a means for exploring imaginaries of class mobility, served to further emphasise the social distance between them and indigenous African populations. This was especially true of photographic portraiture produced in urban studios in South Africa, which was often marked by a certain theatricality (whereby ‘members of the middle class could have themselves depicted in ways previously reserved for the aristocracy’, Peffer 2009: 242). The fact that many of these South African studios, like their European equivalents, were located near to theatres, added further impetus to this performative dimension (ibid.: with reference to Sange’s work on contemporaneous European studios). However, the most marked political effects of colonial photography related to the ways in which it pictured African populations. Certainly, African subjects did exert some degree of agency over the photographic process. For example, in her work on Central Africa, Christraud Geary finds that from the time of the first photographic tour in the region – as was undertaken by the German doctor and zoologist Julius Falkenstein to the Kingdom of Loango (in presentday Congo-Brazzaville) between 1873 and 1876 – Africans did sometimes actively shape the encounter. Indeed, the key narrative of Falkenstein’s tour was that ‘requests for portraits by Africans were so great that towards the end of his stay he was unable to handle the demand’ (2002: 81). Later, as photography spread more widely throughout the interior of the region, African kings and chiefs (and other authority figures), in particular, began to engage with photography, often entering into the same sort of theatricality that defined the urban studio experience (ibid.: 81-102; see also Geary 1988). And Haney’s work on West African portraiture has shown that an ability to shape the photographic encounter was not always restricted to only African elites (see especially 2010b: 57-89). As a result, then, it is likely that all forms of photography in Africa were always, in some sense, influenced by local understandings of exhibition, comportment and display.33 Yet as Geary’s work further highlights, even where African subjects did exert a degree of agency over the photographic encounter itself, this did not preclude the resulting images from being used in ways which still effected to classify African populations as socially inferior to European colonial society, and/or as internally differentiated amongst themselves. Thus, in the Central African context, at least, the fact that so much early photography did focus upon kings and chiefs and so on, meant that it could often be easily incorporated into wider fields of administrative photography, especially in contexts defined by indirect rule. In Rwanda, photographs (and other imagery) of King Musinga – who came to the throne in 1897, with the help of the German colonial authorities – and of the king’s royal bodyguard, the Ntore, played a central role in establishing the so-called ‘Hamitic hypothesis’. This was the idea that the king’s ethnic group, the Tutsi, formed a ‘natural’ ruling class ‘below’ the Europeans (as it were), given that they were descended from a ‘superior’ race 32 Although recent historical research has also emphasized just how variable the situation was – in terms of relative access to urban studios, and personal cameras – across the continent. For example, Haney and others have shown that in many West African urban centres, African-owned cameras outnumbered European-owned during the nineteenth century (see Haney n.d. & 2010b). 33 See Sprague (1978) and Haney (2010a & 2010b). I NTR O DU C TIO N | 9 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 9 09/04/2012 05:12 of Caucasian stock, called the Hamites (Geary 2002: 90-7). As Geary describes, images of the Ntore’s dances and high-jump competitions became particularly iconic, as a means for establishing the physical – and by implication, the intellectual – superiority of the Tutsi over Rwanda’s other ‘ethnic’ groups (the Hutu and the Twa, ibid., 92-3). Later, this classificatory urge was extended to individual subjects as well, through the mass production of personal ID or ‘passport’ photographs. As Jean-François Werner has described of colonial Côte d’Ivoire, these images, when incorporated into various forms of official documentation, soon became both a necessary prerequisite for, and therefore a key marker of, full participation in certain colonial institutions (and therefore, ultimately, in the colonial state itself, 2001:252; see also Vokes 2008). Photography as a means for visual classification was even more coercive in nature. Amongst the most troubling uses of the camera in Africa were certain sorts of anthropological photography which, influenced by Johann Kaspar Lavater’s ‘science’ of physiognomy, attempted to establish an objective visual record of the ‘average’ physical characteristics of non-western races (as a means for inferring cultural – i.e. behavioural – traits, cf. Shortland, cited in Pinney 1992: 76). The endeavour required subjects to be photographed in some state of undress, and within a formalised system of display (such as against the background of a ‘Lamprey grid’ – which was made up of a frame to which threads were tied so as to form two-inch squares).34 In so doing, this type of photography invariably served both to depersonalize and to objectify its subjects, often in the crudest of terms.35 Thus, writing about one such image taken in this ‘scientific mode’ – in this case a studio portrait of a half-naked South African boy called Tuma, who is pictured against a plain background with a ruler on it – Peffer notes that: the ruler on the wall in this photograph takes the place of the kinds of idyllic or classically composed scenes that more often made up the backdrop to commercial photographers’ images. Here the subject is not part of the creative act of depiction, but is instead merely an object for scientific rationalization, of categorization according to racial type within a colonial hierarchy of the ‘races’. (2009: 246)36 Located within regimes of ‘authoritative knowledge’ in this way, additional photographic registers frequently also cast members of certain of these African ‘races’ in infantile, exotic and even sexualized terms.37 Moreover, the reversioning of such anthropometric imagery into popular formats often served to amplify these effects.38 Thus, Peffer’s reading of Tuma’s photograph reminds us that ‘while white subjects would have been able to negotiate the terms and settings of their pictures as well as control the distribution of their images, black subjects [often] had little or no control over the process or use of their depiction’ (ibid.). And it was largely because of this history that following the emergence of ‘modern anthropology’, and the ‘fieldwork revolution’ in the period after WWI, most anthropologists chose to eschew the use of the camera 34 The grid was named after J. H. Lamprey, who first defined the method in an article in the Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1869). 35 For a wider discussion of the role of the background, or ‘backdrop’, in colonial photography, see Appadurai (1997). 36 One of the best known examples of an attempt to use visual data as a means for establishing racial classifications in this way is Seligman & Seligman’s Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan (1932). 37 See especially Azoulay (1980), Alloula (1986) and Prochaska (1991). 38 Geary (2002: 23-57). See also Landau & Kaspin (2002) and Vokes (2010). 1 0 | RI C HARD VOKES Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 10 09/04/2012 05:12 as a means for data collection (Grimshaw 2001: 3-5).39 In these ways, then, photography was used both to define, and to place in order, the life of the colony, and to visually classify its subject populations (see also Landau 2002). Yet if some forms of colonial photography did produce political effects of this sort, then so too other photographic modes engendered a degree of resistance to these. As Liam Buckley further observes, those scholars who argue that administrative photography was a distinctive genre throughout the colonial period typically also distinguish this from a second mode of ‘vernacular photography’. This second mode ‘includes images captured by photographers who specialized in studio and street portraiture. These photographs are understood to exist outside colonial governance, subverting its power in self-representation and aesthetic acts of resistance.’ In his view, ‘administrative photography serves and reinforces colonial power, following strict rules of protocol. Vernacular photography is simultaneously recognized as potentially subversive, resistant, independent and elusive to administrative strictures’ (2010: 147; cf. Ranger 2001). Haney similarly finds that there is a ‘strong undercurrent’ in much of the early writing towards a distinctively ‘African photography’ which seeks to establish that ‘most photographers “from Africa” were in some way contesting … colonial visual tropes’ (2010b: 9; see also Enwezor & Zaya 1996). In one such example, Geary compared picture postcards produced by European and African studio photographers in the period between 1895 and 1920, and found that certain racist stereotypes of the European producers’ cards appear to have been reworked into images of cultural heritage and cultural pride in the African studios’ work (1998: 16376).40 However, Geary also notes that a paucity of surviving material from the African studios with which she is concerned makes it difficult for her to draw stronger conclusions, and this is a general problem for the field as a whole.41 However, irrespective of whether African studio photography did engender a mode of subversion in this way, it is clear that other modes of photography on the continent certainly had this effect. For example, it is well documented that throughout the 1890s and early 1900s (in particular), photographs produced by missionaries and others in the Congo Free State played a key role in documenting the atrocities that were then being carried out by various state-sponsored entities. These photographs later occupied a central position in the visual propaganda efforts of reform groups such as Edmund Morel’s 39 Many non-anthropologists did, however, continue to produce photographic portraits of ‘ethnic types’ after this time, of course. Although in these later examples the visual symbols of ‘science’ (grids, rulers, and the like) are no longer present, such images are arguably no less demeaning to their photographic subjects. 40 Given how small her sample of African photographers is, Geary stresses that her tentative argument and would require further research for corroboration. Nevertheless, Geary’s argument draws our attention to the fact that what does, and does not, constitute a ‘stereotype’ is often quite contextual, and may depend, in particular, upon the positioning of the viewer. The implication is that all stereotypes (be they racist or otherwise) are in some sense unstable over time. I would like to thank Erin Haney for her clarification on this point (pers. comm. 14th July 2011). 41 The reasons why so little early photography by Africans remains are various, but include the fact that African climates are rarely conducive to the preservation of photographic objects (Geary, ibid.), and that in many African countries, colonial photographic archives have now fallen into disrepair (albeit for a variety of different reasons, Buckley 2005). Whilst a dearth of surviving early photography is an issue for all historians, it is especially problematic for those writing for African photography (or photographies) as a mode of ‘resistance’, given the obvious political imperatives of this work (cf. Haney 2010b: 9). INTR O DU C TI O N | 11 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 11 09/04/2012 05:12 Congo Reform Association.42 However, the connection between photography and resistance in Africa is today most closely associated with the various forms of ‘struggle photography’ that developed in South Africa during the apartheid years, from the 1950s onwards.43 Although struggle photography encompassed a range of different approaches and projects – for example, the photojournalistic work of contributors to Drum magazine is clearly quite different from the aesthetically more complex photography of someone like David Goldblatt44 – there is no doubt about the overall subversive intentions, and effects, of much South African photography during this time (i.e. during the period of the apartheid years). As Peffer puts it, ‘in practice, there was a wide spectrum of formal approaches deemed “appropriate” by those who hoped to chronicle and aid the struggle. This can be illustrated through a comparison of two photographic anthologies that bracketed the 1980s: South Africa: The Cordoned Heart ([Badsha] 1986), and Beyond the Barricades: Popular Resistance in South Africa ([Hill & Harris] 1989)’. Thus, while the images in the former ‘make use of oblique or wide angles of vision to give environmental context, and strategic use of shadow and tonal complexity to bring about the emotional depth of their subjects’, the latter, by contrast, ‘is less lyrical, more stridently realist, and more pointedly political’ (2009: 255). Moreover, Beyond the Barricades may be further distinguished from a later type of struggle photography that developed during the period of political transition in South Africa in the early 1990s. Focused primarily upon the urban poor, much of this later imagery was more violent in nature, and especially emphasized representations of the brutalized black body (ibid.: 258 and cf. Hayes n.d.).45 Although South African struggle photography remains the best known example of its type in Africa, one can also find other examples of photojournalism and documentary photography being used in support of social and nationalist causes elsewhere on the continent as well.46 42 See Peffer (2008) and Haney (2010b: 91-103). The tradition of photography as a tool for political subversion in South Africa is sometimes traced back to the pre-apartheid days, and in particular to the work of Leon Levson (1883-1968), who was one of the first people to use photography to document the deprivations of urban life for black South Africans (see Minkley & Rassool 2005). However, it is also recognized that this tradition especially flourished during the country’s apartheid years (1948-1994). The best introduction to South African ‘struggle photography’ is Darren Newbury’s Defiant Images (2010). See also Hayes (n.d. & 2007), Peffer (2009: 251-259), Knape & Robertson (2010) and Seippel (2010). 44 For examples of Goldblatt’s work, see Goldblatt & Gordimer (1973), Goldblatt (1975), and Goldblatt, Goldblatt & van Niekerk (1989). 45 Hayes (n.d.) argues that this shift towards more violent imagery was primarily shaped by the circulations and marketing of images from South Africa at this time, and by the desires of international media outlets to provide greater coverage of the country’s growing political tensions during this period. However, the central argument of Hayes’ article is that much of the struggle photography produced between the mid-1980s and the year of the transition (1994) conformed to a style of radical social realism that is sometimes referred to as ‘street photography’. Moreover, that precisely because of this, it was also highly gendered – in that it focused on a primarily male public space (i.e. ‘the street’). As a result, almost all of the struggle photography of these years can be further contrasted with later modes of political photography in South Africa – i.e. ones that developed in the post-apartheid era – in which women are much better represented, both as photographers and as photographic subjects (n.d., 6 & passim). 46 For example, in a particularly interesting series of studies, Bajorek has examined the complex relationship between photography and emergent forms of nationalism in colonial and post-colonial Senegal (see especially 2010a & 2010b, and also her chapter here). 43 1 2 | RI C HARD VOKES Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 12 09/04/2012 05:12 Photography and social change A concern with photography and social change in a sense developed as an extension to these studies of movement and power. In other words, it followed that if photography had been an integral part of colonial expansion, and if it had played a key role in the processes of both colonial and post-colonial state formation (and in modes of resistance to these), then so too it must surely have had significant effects upon wider processes of social change as well – including such things as changing notions of personhood, the emergence of new social imaginaries, the reworking of collective memories, and so on. For example, Werner’s work on photography in colonial Côte d’Ivoire has highlighted how ID photographs produced for primarily classificatory purposes also had a profound impact upon developing concepts of personhood in that country (see especially 2001: 262-3). Specifically, Werner shows how the key visual trope of the passport picture – i.e. its focus upon a single head or body, set against a white (or in another way plain) background – served to cast people outside of their webs of social relations, and without any reference to their lived contexts.47 In this way, it played a key role in emphasising a type of personhood that at the beginning of the colonial period was still relatively novel in Côte d’Ivoire, namely one based on a ‘modern’ notion of individual personhood (ibid.). Further research has also pointed to the ways in which family portraiture produced in some African studios has influenced changing notions of kinship. For example, it is noteworthy that when East African studios did take family portraits of African subjects, these tended to reproduce the key tropes of European family photographs in their entirety. Thus, their photographs tended to be saturated with the visual symbols of (upper-class) Victorian domesticity, with their subjects typically dressed in lounge suits and crinoline dresses, and pictured alongside vases of flowers, draped curtains, hat stands, and the like. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the studio photographers who produced these images also conveyed an image of African familial relations in which an (imagined) nuclear family was central, and in which alternate generations were both distinct and hierarchically organized – thus reproducing the European colonial ideal (the former effect was achieved through the selection of people to be included in the portrait, the latter through the symmetrical placement of adjacent generations within it).48 In Uganda, both of these factors – i.e. a reworking of personhood, and the development of new ideas about kinship – appear to have been at play. Thus, in this context, at least, if the ID picture was similarly instrumental in emphasising a notion of individual personhood, then so too family portraiture has also served to cast that individual in a particular way – as the outcome of a specified nuclear family, itself the product of a broader, and peculiarly linear, family history (Vokes 2008: 348-50). Additional work has looked at other ways in which colonial-era photographs have continued to act as sites for the construction of personal, ‘ethnic’ and national identities, from the time of their production onwards. For example, Gore shows how photographs taken of the fallen Oba (King) Ovonramwen of 47 Again, note the role of the background here, or the ‘backdrop’ as Appadurai refers to it (1997). For example, see Behrend’s work on Kenyan studios (1998: 162) and cf. Bouquet’s discussion of the symmetry of family photographs in contemporary Holland (2000). 48 INTR O DU C TI O N | 13 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 13 09/04/2012 05:12 Benin – as were produced by the British administration of Southern Nigeria following their punitive raid against Benin in 1897 (which resulted both in the Oba’s exile, and in his kingdom’s incorporation into the colonial state) – have since been used to rework collective historical memories amongst Edo-speaking ethnic groups in post-colonial Nigeria (2001). Specifically, Gore traces how several images of Ovonramwen – including one which was taken on board ship while he was en route to exile in Calabar – have since become part of ‘the ongoing processes of memory work’ in this context (Werbner, cited in Gore 2001: 328), serving as a powerful reminder – both to Edo-speakers themselves, and to ethnic ‘others’ – that the (current) Oba’s ‘legitimacy is rooted in the precolonial traditions of the Edo kingdom’ (ibid.: 321), and that he is also – partly as a result of this historical grievance – a valid traditional figure within the contemporary, post-colonial, Nigerian state. As Gore documents, this effect became particularly marked during the centenary commemorations in 1997 of the British punitive raid against Benin, in large part because of the ubiquity of these images at the time (reproduced as they were in a wide range of media – including on commemorative ‘posters, calendars, almanacs, cups and plates, as well as commemorative cloths issued by the [current Edo] royal family’, ibid.: 325). Thus, a concern with photography and social change stemmed, to a significant degree, from the study of colonial photographies and their (ongoing) effects. However, in recent years the field has expanded much further still, to also include an examination of the role of photography within a broad range of contemporary processes of social change. To focus on just three strands within this burgeoning body of work, the past decade or so has seen a growing interest in the ways in which photographic technologies, practices and products both shape, and are shaped by: a) expanding tourist markets, b) increasing urbanization, and c) the deepening of the various processes that are often collectively referred to as ‘globalization’. Certainly, connections between photography and tourism, photography and urbanization, and so on, are themselves not new. For example, it is well established that a desire to picture tourist sites was one of the key drivers for the initial growth of photography in places like Egypt.49 Elsewhere, other scholars have long demonstrated connections between photographic and emergent urban imaginaries, in locations across Africa,50 and additional examples could also be cited. Nevertheless, the period since 2000 has seen an expanding interest in the variety of ways in which African photographies (in particular) are implicated in each of these three trends (all of which have themselves accelerated in recent times, of course, as a result of a variety of factors, including the expansion of international air travel, and the advent of new media such as mobile phones and the internet). To cite just a few examples of this new research, Bruner has looked at the intrinsic role played by photographic encounters in mediating the relationship between tourists and Maasai workers at a present-day ‘tribal’ safari lodge 49 Although, as Haney cautions, this appears to have been particular to only a specific number of places. Thus, tourism may not have played as important a role in the general spread of photography across the continent as a whole as is sometimes supposed (2010b: 15-23). 50 In addition to Peffer’s work (above), see also Kallaway & Pearson’s Johannesburg: Images and Contunities (1986), and Norwich’s A Johannesburg Album (1986). See also Plissart & de Boeck (2005) which, amongst other things, examines the ways in which photography might be used to capture aspects of the urban experience in contemporary Kinshasa. 1 4 | RI C HARD VOKES Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 14 09/04/2012 05:12 in Kenya (2004).51 Hersant has explored the complex interactions between itinerant photographers and various categories of residents in Lome, Togo, showing how the former’s practices differentially shape the latter’s experience of their urban locales (2001). Meanwhile, in a series of seminal studies, Behrend (2000 and 2003a) has looked at the ways in which techniques of photo-collage enable Kenyan subjects to picture themselves undertaking imaginary ‘world tours’ which act out, photographically, movements which are not possible for them in reality (given their prevailing socio-economic circumstances). In this way, photography enables these people to creatively engage with the processes of globalization from which they are otherwise excluded.53 Finally, it is worth noting that a number of scholars looking at photography and broader histories and processes of social change have again found it useful to carefully consider the multiple relationships between the photographic image and the photographic object. In other words, some theorists have drawn attention to the fact that in attempting to understand the connections between photography and changing notions of personhood, developing ideas of kin relations, and so on, it is crucial to look not only at modes of ‘photographic representation and self-fashioning’ (i.e at the semiotics of the images), but also at the way in which the photographic image-objects themselves are circulated, reproduced and displayed (cf. Kratz chapter here). For example, several studies have shown how emergent notions of individualism are not only an outcome of photographic representation, but are equally shaped by the practices involved in creating personal photograph albums (which may also develop a narrative of the self).54 Other works have looked at how changing notions of familial relations are an outcome both of image construction, and of practices of display – such as the way in which studio photographs are displayed within domestic spaces such as ‘parlors’ (see especially Rowlands 1996).55 Meanwhile, work such as Gore’s (above), highlights how photographs’ effects upon historical consciousness, and their affective power as mnemonics, may have less to do with any qualities of the images themselves, so much as with the way in which they are subsequently reproduced and circulated. 51 Bruner’s work here expands upon some of his earlier studies with Kirshenblat-Gimblett (see for example Bruner and Kirshenblat-Gimblett 1994: 444 & passim). For a comparison with a South African example, see Finlay (2009). 52 One of the most common ways in which the Likoni photographer construct these imaginary tours is by placing their subjects in front of backdrops depicting various symbols of international tourism: aeroplanes, global landmarks, and the like. Yet by using the backdrop in this way, they are also subverting the disciplinary function of the colonial-era backdrop (in addition to the discussion above, see especially Appadurai 1997). For another example of an African photographer using backdrops as a means for exploring the imaginary, see Zeitlyn (2010). 53 See also Behrend’s work on Ugandan studio photographers Ronnie Okocha Kauma and Afandaduula Sadala (2001). In addition, the work of South African-born photographer Pieter Hugo provides a particularly interesting visual study of the marginalization of Africa within certain contemporary processes of globalization. See especially his book Permanent Error (2011). 54 See for example, Mustafa’s work on Nigeria (2002), Buckley’s work on the Gambia (2006), or my own work on Uganda (2008). 55 Domestic interiors have also become a major concern within much contemporary African photography. For example, South African Zwelethu Mthethwa has become particularly well known for his images of domestic interiors in Cape Flats settlements (outside of Cape Town). As with the academic research to which I refer here, Mthethwa’s pictures are particularly concerned with the relationship between personhood and display in these slum dwellings. (For introductions to Mthethwa’s work, see Enwezor 2010 and Wu 2010.) INTR O DU C TI O N | 15 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 15 09/04/2012 05:12 The volume If these are the three discursive contexts that have become the major frames for organizing scholarship on photography in Africa, therefore, the contributions to the present volume – which are based on empirically rich historical and ethnographic cases studies, drawn from across the continent – attempt to extend each of these frames in a number of different ways. Thus, the first section of the book, Photography and the Ethnographic Encounter, makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the anthropological archive, by developing a chronological narrative of the way in which ethnographic fieldworkers in Africa have employed photography from the mid-1920s onwards – a subject that is approached through a detailed examination of the photographic engagements of four prominent Africanist anthropologists: Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman, Paul Baxter and Wendy James. All of the chapters in this section take seriously the notion that archives must be interrogated as ‘accumulation[s] of micro-relationships’ (above), as each attempts to reconstruct the ‘biography’ of one particular fieldwork archive, and to uncover the specific relationships through which this was brought into being. The endeavour reveals a number of insights, beginning with an emphasis upon the key fact that photography apparently did remain a central element in the ethnographic encounter, even in the period after most professional anthropologists had begun to eshew the use of photography as a means for data collection (in reaction to the racist overtones of the earlier ‘scientific’ anthropological photography, described above). In other words, all of the chapters in this section emphasize – as have other recent works on twentieth-century fieldwork photography56 – that anthropologists did continue to take pictures, and the camera did continue to be a key mediator between the anthropologist and his/her respondents, even when relatively few of them regarded photographs as a form of scientific ‘data’.57 The reasons why photography remained so central to the ethnographic encounter after this time are complex, but relate in particular to the utility of photographs as a means for engaging with certain sorts of fieldwork situations, and for recording certain kinds of research information. These points emerge most clearly in the chapters by Morton and Wingfield, both of which explore how, in the context of certain public rituals and events, for example a Zande initiation ritual, or an official ceremony to open a new bridge, both EvansPritchard and Gluckman (respectively) appear to have been confronted with moments of action in which it was simply more convenient to take a quick photograph of what was going on, than to attempt to record it in writing (although both ethnographers did also make written notes about the events after they had finished, of course). Moreover, in Gluckman’s case, he appears to have later used some of these photos as an aide memoire when producing his later written account of the event (in what became his famous article on ‘The Bridge’). Indeed, Wingfield’s analysis even suggests that Gluckman may have found his photographs of the event more useful than his written fieldnotes, when 56 See, for example, Geary (2000), Comaroff & Comaroff (2007), Morton (2009) and Morton & Edwards (2009). 57 Although throughout the early twentieth century, at least, anthropologists did continue to include photographs in their publications as a form of illustration. This trend continued until around WWII, after which the costs of reproduction increased significantly. I would like to thank Christopher Morton for his clarification on this point (pers. comm. 15th June 2011). 1 6 | RI C HARD VOKES Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 16 09/04/2012 05:12 preparing that article. However, perhaps this should not really surprise us. After all, much of the work on ‘photo elicitation’ has highlighted the ways in which photographs can act as powerful mnemonics for ethnographic respondents (see for example, Collier & Collier 1986), from which it follows that they may also do so for ethnographers as well. For example, it is apparently quite common that anthropologists will browse through their fieldwork photographs – in a general, non-specific way – in order to get themselves ‘in the mood’ when preparing to write. However, such is the emphasis that is now placed on fieldnotes within the discipline – indeed, to the point that written notes have become, in some contexts, almost fetishized as the only valid means for recording ethnographic information (see the discussions in Sanjek 1990) – that it is in fact a revelation for us to discover that Gluckman may have acted in this way. Yet, the reasons why anthropologists continued to use photography in the field were not only instrumental in nature. In addition, ethnographers’ use of photography appears to have also had a performative dimension, such that the very act of taking a photograph became itself a means for the researcher either to participate in the public ritual, or even just to engage in a dyadic relationship. Thus, just as a contemporary ‘western’ wedding guest’s photographic practices may become a key means for him/her to join in the nuptial ceremony, so Evans-Pritchard’s use of photography in the Zande initiation rites appears to have become a central means for ‘bringing him into’ those proceedings (in which he had a stake, in the form of his servant Kamanga, who was one of the initiands. See Morton’s chapter.) Indeed, for this reason, Morton has elsewhere defined Evans-Pritchard’s role – albeit in relation to his later engagement in another ritual, the Nuer rite of gorot – as that of a ‘participant-photographer’ (2009). Moreover, the chapters collected in this volume demonstrate the various ways in which that epithet may also be applied to other ethnographers as well. For example, Baxter also used photography in a performative way, in his case employing it as a means for generating new research engagements during otherwise ‘quiet periods’ in his fieldwork (Carrier & Quaintance). Meanwhile, in perhaps the most dramatic example, James’ use of photography at one point made her a key mediator in an international network of communication between members of a displaced refugee community, giving her a vital role in allowing people to know which of their family members had even survived the flight from their homeland. However, as Morton reminds us, in order to develop a truly ‘relational’ analysis of these fieldwork archives, it is necessary to move beyond just a focus on the ethnographers’ intentions, to also look at the way in which respondents’ agency may have further shaped the images as well. Certainly, the central argument of Morton’s chapter here is that discernible changes of composition, form, etc. across Evans-Pritchard’s entire oeuvre of research photos (from multiple periods of fieldwork he conducted among the Ingessena/ Gamk, Zande and Nuer between 1926 and 1936), are probably best explained with reference to the way in which his various respondents influenced his photographic practice. Yet the effect of indigenous agency is no less evident in the other chapters presented here as well. Thus, for example, Carrier and Quaintance’s description of Baxter’s photographic practice highlights the way in which his Borana respondents might sometimes refuse to have their pictures taken, whilst Wendy James’ account reveals that her respondents exerted an influence over both who was to be photographed – and how they should INTR O DU C TI O N | 17 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 17 09/04/2012 05:12 appear in those images (as exemplified by her anecodote of a refugee family living in a camp in Ethiopia who insisted on changing into their ‘Sunday best’ for a photograph to be sent to their relatives abroad) – and over how those photographs were to be subsequently used (i.e. to whom they should be sent in the US, or wherever). Indeed, so marked is the role of indigenous agency across all of these chapters, that its effects may even be understood as one of the key characteristics distinguishing the photography of these post-1920s anthropologists (all of whom were engaged in long-term fieldwork) from the – clearly more coercive practices – of those earlier anthropologists who worked in the ‘scientific’ mode. In these ways, then, the chapters in Part I also begin to speak to a concern with photography and power. However, the second section of the book, Picturing the Nation: Photography, Memory and Resistance, engages debates in this field even more directly. Specifically, several of the chapters here develop upon Liam Buckley’s claim that fine-grained historical and ethnographic analysis reveals how in certain colonial and post-colonial contexts, the distinction between ‘administrative photography’ and a second, vernacular mode which was/is subversive of this, may not, in fact, be as clear-cut as previously imagined. The central thrust of Buckley’s argument is that ‘the contexts of these two modes … [were] often closer in practice than is usually supposed’. Thus, for example, his own work on the Gambia Colony shows how colonial administrators frequently hired local photographers to provide a ‘vernacular window’ on government policies, and how they questioned the relevance of colonial media produced in London for addressing everyday problems in the Gambia (they instead favoured visual media that were specifically tailored to local interests and needs). According to Buckley, these considerations resulted in a series of ‘administrative experiments’ based around the recruitment of local photographers. Moreover, these photographers’ ‘aesthetic practices inaugurated a political consciousness of colonial devolution within the administrative hierarchy’ (2010: 147-148). In a similar vein, Bajorek’s chapter here is also concerned with tracing the overlapping contexts of state bureaucracy and ‘popular’ photography in late-colonial Senegal. In the first of her two examples, she explores how the illustrated magazine Bingo (which was published in Dakar from 1953 onwards) had significant links to officialdom – for example, it was founded by a politician, Ousmane Socé, it published the photographs of a range of senior government figures, and its readership was largely made up of educated civil servants – yet also became a key site for the dissemination of ‘popular’ photography across the Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF). Thus, although the journal did publish images produced by the colonial information service and various state-sponsored photographic studios (in its early days, at least), it became the norm for the magazine to publish its readers’ own photographs (and their commentaries on these), usually presenting several of these images at once, in a ‘collage’ layout. Yet in these ways, the magazine also became a key medium for the dissemination of various new collective identities, some of which were ultimately subversive of state agendas, amongst them emergent imaginaries relating to pan-Africanism, feminism, and class consciousness. Bajorek’s second case study concerns the career of one independence-era photographer in Saint-Louis, Doudou Diop. This example again involves links to 1 8 | RI C HARD VOKES Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 18 09/04/2012 05:12 the state, in that both Diop himself, and many of his clients, were government employees (Diop was an accountant in the French army), and that the ‘rhythms’ of his photographic practice were in large measure dictated by the demands of both his and his clients’ professional (i.e. official) duties. As a result, it became typical for Diop’s studio – which was located in his family home – to be opened only in the evening, at the end of the working day. Yet the fact that Diop’s photography was disciplined by bureaucratic regimes in this way did not stop either him, or his clients, from using the medium as a means for experimenting with (then) emergent social imaginaries, including some that could be classified as ‘political’. However, once again here, Bajorek does not reduce these effects to an aggregate of individual photographic intentions, or individual acts of resistance, but instead sees them – as with the Bingo example – as an outcome of the context in which these photographs were collectively exchanged and displayed. Thus, she argues that it was precisely because Diop’s studio was only open after work that it generated a particularly intense form of sociality and camaraderie around photographic objects, one that was especially conducive to the use of the medium as a means for forging new, shared identities. Haney’s chapter is similarly concerned with complicating our understanding of the relationship between official and vernacular modes of photography. Her primary concern here is to try to recover a more extensive archive of early photography from (what became) Accra than that which is contained in only official institutional archives (such as the Ghanaian national archives, European museum collections, and so on). She attempts this through a detailed examination of the photographic practices of the Lutterodts, an elite family of West African merchants, who, from the 1870s onwards, patronized a network of studios and intinerant photographers that eventually stretched from Freetown (in present day Sierra Leone) to Luanda (Angola). Consideration of this network’s photography reveals not only that the emergence of certain forms of African (i.e. vernacular) photography in fact pre-dates the establishment of colonial rule in some parts of coastal West Africa, but that throughout the colonial period, the output of these African-controlled studios was in some locations greater than that of state-sponsored operations. In these ways, then, Haney’s chapter challenges previously assumptions about the privileged status of official photography during the colonial period (above), by suggesting not only that colonial expansions were in fact only one of the sets of circuits through which photography was disseminated across this part of the continent (at least), but also that in some places administrative photography did not dominate the field in quite the way that is often imagined. In addition, given that the vernacular modes with which she is concerned here in some locations pre-dated colonialism, it becomes difficult to reduce these to simply a mode of resistance to the European presence. Moreover, Haney further suggests that surviving Lutterodt photographs may today continue to develop even more complex meanings still. This is because as (primarily) family holdings, surviving Lutterodt photographs can today continue to be copied, exchanged, and displayed in ways that historic photographs held in institutional archives cannot (and they can therefore be used to forge and sustain a much wider range of shared memories relating to different sorts of private and public memories and histories). Yet if these family archives do make such an important contribution to our understanding of the West African photographic archive, then why have INTR O DU C TI O N | 19 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 19 09/04/2012 05:12 they been for so long overlooked? A large part of the answer here lies in the simple fact that so few of their individual images have survived. This is partly an outcome of environment, but is also – in the Lutterodts’ case, at least – a result of a majority of their images having been destroyed, or else lost, or exchanged. For example, it appears to have been quite common for Lutterodt photographers to scrub pictures, in order to reuse their glass plates, or to dump boxes of photographs in order to make room for further storage. In addition, much of what does remain is now widely dispersed. Nevertheless, for Haney, the fact that so many of these images have not survived, or are now dispersed, does not in itself preclude them from scholarly consideration. Instead, it simply requires different methods, whereby analysis of these photographs is approached through a reconstuction of their traces, rather than through a direct engagement with the physical image-objects themselves, and through fieldwork, rather than institutional research. Amongst other things, Haney’s argument also reminds us that it is not only forms of photographic production that produce political effects, but also acts and processes of photographic erasure (and in her most dramatic example, she records how, following its rise to power in a coup of 1966, the government of Kofi Busia conducted a great act of iconoclasm, whereby its officers attempted to burn all archive photographs – and all other archival materials – associated with the former presidency of Kwame Nkrumah). Moreover, McKeown’s chapter is similarly concerned with the political effects of photographic erasures (albeit ones of a quite different order). Thus, in her case study from Mozambique, she argues that political motivations, and outcomes, may be evidenced not only by what is pictured in photographs but also, and sometimes more importantly, by what is intentionally left out of them. Specifically, she shows how images of the iconic Gorongosa National Park have been reworked through three distinct phases of Mozambique’s history, often in ways which erase any visible symbols of the landscape’s former uses. Thus, she traces how at first, the Portugese colonialists erased all signs of human presence (as a means for representing the park as a quintessential ‘African Eden’). Later, during the country’s postindependence civil war, the opposition guerrilla force, the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), erased all evidence of the state’s former presence in the park (as part of their own attempts to image Gorongosa as the ‘Capital of Free Mozambique’). Finally, following the end of that civil war, in 1992, the new government of Mozambique once again tried to photograph a landscape free of human intervention (as a means for imaging a ‘paradise regained’), in an attempt to rejuvenate the country’s then flagging tourism industry. The subject of photographic erasures emerges in other chapters presented here as well, including in Pype’s work on Congolese President Joseph Kabila’s political propaganda in present-day urban Kinshasa. Again drawing a distinction between the photographic image and object, Pype shows how the effectiveness of Kabila’s propaganda is as much an outcome of the ways in which he displays his image – and, more importantly, of the ways in which he limits the ability of his rivals to display their portraits – as it is of any inherent quality of the image itself. Moreover, given this context, acts of iconoclasm targeting Kabila’s image become marked here as especially potent acts of subversion. This is demonstrated most vividly in the anecdote relating to the parade of supporters of Kabila’s (then) main political rival Jean-Pierre Bemba, who, out of sight of the television cameras, systematically 20 | RI C HARD VOKES Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 20 09/04/2012 05:12 stamp upon and burn every picture of the president along one of Kinshasa’s main thoroughfares, the Boulevard Lumumba. Yet Pype’s chapter also extends our understanding of the relationship between photography and power in other ways besides. In particular, in her analysis of Kabila’s La Visibilité des 5 Chantiers (‘the visibility of the 5 construction sites’) campaign, Pype shows how governments may employ photography not only as a means for ‘placing in order’ existing political domains, but also as a means for engendering and projecting their future political aspirations. Thus, in this example, although none of President Kabila’s 5 projects are actually yet finished, by picturing himself at work on the projects, on billboards across Kinshasa, he is able to begin to take credit for the benefits that these projects are anticipated to generate. Several of these themes and issues are further explored in Part III of this book, ‘The Social Life of Photographs’. Thus, my own chapter – which traces the history and sociology of a vernacular mode that emerged in South-western Uganda from the late-1950s onwards – is also concerned with complicating our previous understandings of the relationship between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ forms of photography. However, I attempt to do so less by challenging the idea that administrative photography was a distinctive genre in this particular place and time, but by suggesting that what makes the vernacular mode different from this cannot be reduced to issues of ‘self-representation and aesthetic acts of resistance’ (see p. 11, above). Instead, by drawing upon recent work on photographic materialities, I argue that in South-western Uganda, the vernacular mode also became marked by an entirely different set of orientations toward the photograph, whereby the physical image-object itself came to be perceived as, quite literally, an extension of its subject’s body. As a result, photographs produced in this mode were (and are) frequently circulated both as a means for maintaining fundamental social ties, and as a way to extend the most meaningful social networks. In this way, the profound impact that photography has had on shifting notions of personhood, kinship, and so on, in South-western Uganda may be seen as less an outcome of representation and self-fashioning (although these are not unimportant), so much as a reflection of the effects that photographic image-objects have had upon existing circuits of exchange, and the possibilities they have afforded for the creation of new types of networks. Also informed by recent discussions of photographic materialities, the subject of photographic exchanges emerges in both of the other chapters of this section as well. In her examination of the place of photography within changes that have occurred in wedding ceremonies along the Kenyan coast, Behrend finds that from the 1950s onwards, it has become standard practice for hired photographers to picture all aspects of these ceremonies, but especially certain standard elements within them (including the point at which the bride is presented to the groom, and the point at which – towards the end of the festivities – she mingles on stage with her female kin, affines, and associates). However, even more important than these acts of photographic commission are the distributions of photographs that are now made throughout these events, both to relatives and to guests. In this way, it has become common practice for elite families, in particular, to not only hire photographers to cover their events, but to also pay these cameramen to develop the pictures ‘on the go’, in order that these can then be given out during the ceremony INTR O DU C TI O N | 21 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 21 09/04/2012 05:12 itself. Their reasons for doing so reflect the wider context here, in which social rank and status have for long been associated with an ability to stage public events of conspicous consumption. In this setting, then, the scale of the photographic distributions that are made at a wedding has itself come to symbolize the social standing of the host family. In addition, though, the subsequent circulations and consumption of these same photographs – it being generally anticipated that they will be widely exchanged, both along the coast, and to the Diaspora – also now serves as an ongoing reminder of the same. Moreover, this subject of photographic exchanges also emerges in Kratz’ chapter. In a quite different example – concerning a former predominantly hunter-gatherer people, the Okiek, who live on the other side of Kenya – she shows how in a context in which photography is not yet easily accessible or affordable, borrowing photographs from affinal kin constitutes one of the key means through which young people (in particular) may attempt to bolster their collections. In many instances, their reasons for doing so reflect attempts to gather enough photographs to mount meaningful displays in their new family sitting-rooms (an architectural feature that has become increasingly popular among Kipchornwonek and Kaplelach Okiek since the 1980s). Yet if Behrend traces the way in which photographic exchanges have become part of typical wedding ceremonies on the Kenyan coast, then the main focus of her chapter are those Muslim women who, as acts of piety, have begun to eschew having their photographs taken, both as part of their own weddings, and when attending other people’s functions (as either relatives or guests). Behrend argues that this refusal to be pictured is best understood as an attempt by these women to instantiate the Islamic interdiction of all forms of photography. In addition though, and of particular interest for my discussion here, it is also driven by a more specific fear that precisely because wedding pictures are circulated so widely (above), were one of these women to be photographed in this context, then this would almost certainly result in her image being later passed on to people outside of her own kinship group (thereby violating her personal sense of purdah). For both of these reasons, then, these women sometimes also engage in acts of inconoclasm (for example, when one of their pictures is taken accidentally, as part of a wedding crowd). Moreover, other types of photographic ‘avoidance’ are examined in both of the other chapters in this section as well. Thus, my own chapter explores the attempts by some Ugandan young people, in particular, to conceal certain sorts of photographic exchanges, whilst Kratz looks at which images Okiek chose not to display on their new sitting-room walls (such as pictures of certain categories of kin). Interestingly, in both cases, the logics informing these practices are explicable not only in terms of how people relate to the photographic image-objects, but also in terms of how the different photographs relate to others with which they are placed in sequence (either in albums, or in sitting-room displays. In this way, then, both of these chapters – as others in this volume as well – also begin to explore questions of photographic relationality (cf. Vokes 2008). However, the main focus of Kratz’ chapter is the practices of display themselves, and what these might also reveal about changing notions of personhood, social relations, identity and the life course. Thus, she argues that the very fact that sitting-room displays did emerge amongst the Okiek from the 1980s onwards is itself revealing of broader socio-economic transformations 22 | RI C HARD VOKES Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 22 09/04/2012 05:12 that were impacting their lives during this period (as indeed are other, earlier, shifts in modes of photographic diplay in this setting). In addition, though, they also reflect the changing ways in which Okiek relate to their domestic spaces as ‘affectively textured settings’, or in other words, as spaces which may evoke various feelings of, for example, history, identity, and belonging. In other words, they also index shifting modes of experience. This is explored by Kratz in her discussion of how for some Okiek the new sitting-room displays have become a key site in which ‘to see’ (-suee) certain types of relationships. Significantly, though, the concept of ‘seeing’ here captures more than just a visual action, but also refers to a form of embodied experience. Moreover, in this way, Kratz’ chapter also makes an important contribution to a recent turn in visual anthropology in general, which has seen increasing attention being paid to the ‘affective’ force, or power, of all visual forms, including photographs (see also Pype’s discussion of ‘haptic’, or ‘tactile visuality’ in her chapter on Congolese political imagery).58 In summary, then, the contributions to the present volume not only contribute to each of the three discursive frames identified above, but they also extend these in a number of important ways. Firstly, by interrogating anthropology’s own photographic archive from Africa as an ‘accumulation of micro-relationships’ (above), the volume raises new questions about the relationship between photographic representation and practice in the history of ethnographic research, about the relationship between private and public anthropological archives (and shifts that have occurred between the two), and about the role of indigenous agency in shaping ethnographic photography. Secondly, by developing detailed historical and ethnographic studies of the relationship between photography and statecraft, it also develops new problematics concerning the relationship between ‘official’ uses of photography and the emergence of ‘popular’ modes, concerning how various sorts of photographic ‘erasures’ also produce political effects, and about how photographs may also help to project political aspirations. Finally, by examining the various ways in which photography may be implicated in broader processes of social change, the volume also develops new ways of thinking about how engagements with the photographic image-object may also be implicated in changing notions of personhood, about how photographic exchanges may also shape emergent marriage practices, and about how modes of display might also affect shifting modes of memory and experience. Yet in all of these ways, this book also develops a number of broader insights into how additional histories might be extracted from all photographic archives in and on Africa, into the possibilities and limits of photography as a tool in all forms of political action, and into the complex political and social contexts of all African photographies. In so doing, the volume also points to important future directions for research on photography in Africa. Thus, with so many new archival projects currently underway across the continent – including many that are explictly concerned with recovering and/or preserving various types of ‘non-institutional’ collections (see Haney’s chapter), and many others that are engaged in various forms of photographic ‘repatriation’ (see Carrier & Quaintance) – it is certain that many more alternative, and complex, histories of photographic practice, representation, and circulation will emerge in the years ahead. As they do so, our current narratives about the emergence 58 For more on photography and affect, see Smith & Vokes (2008). INTR O DU C TI O N | 23 Vokes_AfricanPhotography_01.indd 23 09/04/2012 05:12 and spread of photography in Africa – and about the ongoing place of historical photographies in various types of ‘memory work’ – will doubtless become significantly more refined. In addition, further ethnographic studies will probably continue to complicate our understanding of the relationship between photography and political agency. Some of this future work may well continue to explore questions of photography and statecraft, for example by looking at recent attempts to use photography in processes of voter registration,59 at additional examples of state-sponsored iconoclasm, or at the place of photography in political advertizing more generally. However, it is also likely that in coming years, new research will increasingly also focus upon uses of photography by various non-state political actors. Thus, although some work has already begun to look at the photographic practices of armed insurgent groups,60 of domestic opposition parties (see Pype’s chapter), and of civil society organizations,61 much more remains to be done in each of these areas. Finally, additional ethnographic studies – employing an ever-widening range of visual research methodologies62 – will doubtless also continue to extend our understanding of the ways in which African photographies are embedded within wider social processes, whilst providing an ever-growing range of comparative examples concerning the place of photography within different sorts of: ancestor rituals, diasporic communications (see Aston & James), divination practices, exchange relations, funerary rites, homemaking projects (see Kratz’s chapter), new religious movements (Vokes 2009, Meyer 2010), urban cultures and wedding ceremonies (to name just a few). Moreover, given the particular interest of this field upon the photographic object, it will be intriguing to see how all of these aspects are further effected by the growing availability of digital photographic technologies. For instance, it is interesting to note that in relation to my own field site of South-western Uganda, although digital technologies have only become available in significant numbers since 2009, they have already begun to generate keen discussion, across a wide variety of social contexts. Thus, even before any particularly marked social effects have been generated by these new technologies, people are already beginning to debate such questions as what impact pre-natal scan images will have upon concepts of personhood (in a context in which practically any reference to an unborn child is generally regarded as strictly taboo), what effect digitial portraits will have upon exchange relations (in a context in which photographic image-objects play a significant part in many types of exchange relationship, see my chapter below), and what impact the advent of Facebook and other social networking sites will have upon relations between people ‘back home’ and those now living in the Diaspora. 59 For example, this was tried in Uganda in the run-up to the 2001 general elections. Although technological difficulties resulted in that experiment being abandoned, the country’s Electoral Commission has subsequently restated its desire to one day develop a photographic database of all of the country’s registered voters. 60 For example Finnstrom’s Living With Bad Surroundings (2008) points to some interesting examples of the ways in which photography has been used by Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). 61 See for example Bleiker and Kay’s work on photography and empowerment in the context of HIV/AIDS prevention and activism (2007). 62 Including, no doubt, an ever-widening range of ‘participatory’ visual methods. The best known of these remains Wang and Burris’ ‘photonovella’ method – now commonly known as ‘photovoice’ – but there are also other examples of recent innovation. 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