Women and Photography in Africa

Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Darren Newbury, Lorena Rizzo, Kylie Thomas, Darren Newbury, Lorena Rizzo, Kylie Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350136557
• eBook ISBN: 9781000182699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This collection explores women's multifaceted historical and contemporary involvement in photography in Africa.

The book offers new ways of thinking about the history of photography, exploring through case studies the complex and historically specific articulations of gender and photography on the continent, and attending to the challenge and potential of contemporary feminist and postcolonial engagements with the medium. The volume is organised in thematic sections that present the lives and work of historically significant yet overlooked women photographers, as well as the work of acclaimed contemporary African women photographers such as Héla Ammar, Fatoumata Diabaté, Lebohang Kganye and Zanele Muholi. The book offers critical reflections on the politics of gendered knowledge production and the production of racialised and gendered identities and alternative and subaltern subjectivities. Several chapters illuminate how contemporary African women photographers, collectors and curators are engaging with colonial photographic archives to contest stereotypical forms of representation and produce powerful counter-histories.

Raising critical questions about race, gender and the history of photography, the collection provides a model for interdisciplinary feminist approaches for scholars and students of art history, visual studies and African history.

1
NEW LINES OF SIGHT

Perspectives on women and photography in Africa

Darren Newbury, Lorena Rizzo and Kylie Thomas

In December 1966, the Ghanaian edition of Drum, a popular illustrated magazine for urban African readers, published a short feature on the photographer Felicia Abban under the heading ‘Look Out Men, Because Here Come the Girls’. As the title suggests, Abban was presented as an example of a modern Ghanaian woman ‘gate-crashing’ (as the article put it) an arena that had formerly been dominated by men.¹ There can be no doubt that Abban was the equal of her male counterparts ‘in merit and purposefulness’, yet the urgency of the wake-up call to the magazine’s male readers seems somewhat ironic, if not entirely misplaced. Whilst Abban most likely appreciated the publicity value of her image appearing in Drum, she had in fact been running her own studio in Accra since 1953 after serving an apprenticeship in her father’s studio in Sekondi, where she had eventually run most aspects of the business (Bowles 2016: 50–1). And she not only worked in the studio, but also operated as a freelance photographer for Guinea Press Limited, a government press agency under President Kwame Nkrumah. This is not to dismiss the endeavour that underpinned Abban’s considerable success in the context of gendered familial and workplace relations, which in Ghana as elsewhere have often militated against women succeeding in artistic and commercial photography. Notably, she recalled an incident during her apprenticeship when, following a mistake on a rush job, her father slapped her across the face with a sheaf of wasted photographic prints. For Abban, this was one of a number of ‘hard lessons’ that fuelled her determination to succeed on her own (Bowles 2016: 50). However, the time lag between Abban establishing herself as a photographer and this public acknowledgement in Drum invites reflection on the visibility of women’s photographic practices, a theme that is central to this volume.

Despite the momentary celebration of her commercial success in the popular Ghanaian press in the 1960s, Felicia Abban was not among those photographers who garnered attention when, in the early 1990s, the international art world, and subsequently photographic scholarship, ‘discovered’ African photography.² In fact, as recently as 2019, curator Sandrine Colard was able to talk of Abban’s photography in terms of ‘discovery’, albeit she used the word tentatively (Lee 2019). Strikingly, however, this was despite the fact that in 1998 Abban had become chair of the Ghana Union of Professional Photographers, through which role she sought formal union recognition and membership for photographers (Yeboah 2019). As Colard recognised, discovery is very much a matter of perspective. Although Abban was a contemporary of Malick Sidibé, the artistic validation of her photography – first publicly exhibited in 2017, and included in the Ghana Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019 – has had to wait almost a quarter of a century longer. Even then, it is worth attending to the terms of visibility. The photographs displayed in Venice were self-portraits, a practice Abban developed to serve both aesthetic and commercial ends, exploring ‘a feminine identity that plays with the traditional and the contemporary in an artful hybridity that is urbane and transatlantic’, and providing her with ‘calling cards’ to promote the studio (Bowles 2016: 48). This places Abban as the seen photographic subject, as well as the camera operator, engaged in a performative practice of self-fashioning. At the same time, it risks obscuring her identity as an advocate of working photographers’ rights. Patricia Hayes argues that ‘the act of “making visible” can silence women further’ (2005: 521); but, as the contributors to this book demonstrate, this is not an inevitable outcome. The relationship between women’s agency and visibility in and through photography is not settled in advance and always remains open to contestation.

Following Linda Nochlin (1971) – who asked ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ – our intention here is not to accept the terms of the question or to take the absence of African women from the canon of twentieth-century photography at face value. After all, male African photographers such as Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta were only admitted in recent decades. It is true that, with very few exceptions, little is known about the lives and work of African women photographers, nor those of women photographers from elsewhere who have worked on the African continent. There is necessary and important scholarly work to be done here to bring to light the work of women photographers; to acknowledge their technical skills, networks, commercial acumen and aesthetic sophistication. And the point applies equally to those who identify as non-binary. Yet, the argument of the volume is not simply that African women and non-binary photographers have been neglected or marginalised, nor that any remedy can or should follow the pattern that saw a small number of African male photographers come to prominence a few decades ago. If international acceptance of the artistic credentials of a certain African studio aesthetic facilitated the inclusion of Felicia Abban’s portrait photographs in the Venice Biennale, it is nevertheless important to be mindful of the limits of such framing, as well as to attend to the many ways her work and career is different to her male counterparts in West Africa. In contrast, here we propose that a focus on women’s photographic practices has the capacity to deepen understandings of the medium by expanding notions of photographic production and curation and opening a dialogue with gendered photographic pasts.

From photographs of African women to women’s photographic practices in Africa

Although the study of African photography was relatively late to develop, only really cohering as a field from the 1980s onwards, there is now a body of scholarship that we have been fortunate to be able to draw on in shaping the concerns of this volume. Perhaps unsurprisingly, reflecting both the predominant methodological paradigms of the period and the visual preoccupations of material available in colonial-era archives, an early strand of scholarship on women and photography in Africa focused on representations of the female body. In the 1980s, for example, Malek Alloula analysed early twentieth-century postcards of Algerian women as a form of pictorial orientalism; as he described his project, ‘to uncover the nature and the meaning of the colonialist gaze; then to subvert the stereotype that is so tenaciously attached to the bodies of women’ (1986: 5). Significantly, Alloula conceived his project as a response to an absence, a critique presented on behalf of women who did not have access to cameras through which to document their own ways of seeing. In this vein, the sheer volume of images made on the continent and distributed across the globe during the golden age of the postcard, coinciding with the height of African colonialism, has provided a rich seam of enquiry, one that has the merit of accessibility. This has enabled the description of a gendered visual repertoire of ethnographic or racial ‘types’, missionary conversion and the pervasive exoticisation and eroticisation of African women (Geary 2008; Vokes 2010; Vicente 2017). It has also revealed instances where African women appear to have exercised a degree of agency over the ways in which they were depicted, commissioning photographs for their personal consumption (Geary 2002: 81–121; Vicente 2017: 18), even if some photographers would later exploit such images by turning them into commercial postcards and rendering their subjects as anonymous types.

Later studies have extended our understanding of how women were represented in the colonial visual archive in, among other places, Angola and Mozambique (Vicente 2017), Central Africa (Geary 2002, 2008), Uganda (Vokes 2010) and Namibia (Rizzo 2005). Lorena Rizzo shows how photographs made by Heinz Roth, a German settler, on an expedition to North-Western Namibia, exercised a ‘privileged control of the colonised body’ (2005: 694); as with the colonial relation to the land, so too African women were positioned ‘as objects of appropriation and control’ (690). And in a detailed analysis of the photographic archive of Henri Gaden, a French colonial officer in West Africa, Roy Dilley explores the careful management of African women’s visibility by comparing the published images and private albums of French colonial officers (Dilley 2019). There has been attention, too, to the continued circulation of colonial images of African women in the present. Vicente argues, for example, that these photographs perpetuate the colonial domination that shaped their initial production: a ‘male-dominated collecting market in the present reproduces the uses to which these images were subjected in the past’ (2017: 37). Yet, as Rizzo argues, returning photographs to their African subjects and making them the focus of oral narratives in the present holds out the prospect of revealing dimensions of agency largely concealed in the colonial photographic archive – ‘moments of refusal, of active resistance to the camera and the colonial gaze’ (2005: 706–7). This is a methodological point to which we shall return.

Important as work on representation has been, however, our intention here is to shift attention from the semiotic analysis and critique of dominant images of African women and instead to shine a light on the multifaceted nature of women’s photographic practices in Africa. Women have long been critical actors in collecting, preserving and curating photographs, even if their recognition as photographers has lagged behind actual practice. And attention to gender, we argue, is critical for a revised understanding of photography as an aesthetic and social practice. It is the rich field of women’s engagements with photography in Africa that we wish to foreground in this volume, encouraging a growing awareness of the importance of women in the field of photography on the African continent, elucidating histories and contemporary forms of women’s photographic practices in different localities and times, and highlighting the work of women in producing alternative historical imaginaries and envisioning other futures.

The representation of women in photographs and women’s photographic practices are not unrelated of course, and there are contexts where this has been brought into sharp focus, for example, in Southern Africa during the 1980s. The critique of images of African women under colonialism presented by Alloula had its corollary in photographic practice; and in anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles there was often a concerted effort to produce alternative visual depictions of African women. For example, illustrated pamphlets, such as Black Women in Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe Women’s Bureau 1980) and You Have Struck a Rock (IDAF 1980), circulated internationally through solidarity campaigns and offered a counter-narrative to stereotypical representations that had changed little from their colonial precursors. Significantly, women photographers and activists were central in the production of this work, which was informed by a feminist analysis and sought to represent African women’s engagement in political struggle and the economy, as well as their broader experiences under colonialism and apartheid. This was the case, for example, with Lesley Lawson’s Working Women in South Africa (1985), a project conceived as a resource for women’s trade unionism, and which precipitated Lawson becoming a full-time freelance photographer.³

A longer history of the ways in which women have challenged dominant representations of Africa is only beginning to be told, but it promises to enrich our understanding of the medium’s history on the continent. In a fascinating study, Leigh Raiford examines Eslanda Robeson’s approach to photography during her 1936 tour of South Africa, Uganda and the Belgian Congo, and the subsequent publication of her illustrated memoir African Journey (1945). Raiford outlines how as an African American woman Robeson was ashamed of the stereotyped image of ‘savage’ Africans held by most African Americans, and reinforced by some of the film roles played by her husband Paul Robeson. In response, although her photography began in an ‘ethnographic vein’, the resulting body of photographs can be interpreted as part of a political project that ‘refus[ed] exoticism and racial hierarchization’ (2017: 141) and which, following Azoulay, might be understood as the expression of a ‘diasporic civil contract’ (144). Robeson’s photographs ‘directly countered the visions of empire, which sought the primitive and the iconic, the authentic and the timeless’ (143). She chose to photograph everyday settings such as schools and weddings, and her subjects in a mix of local and Western dress, allowing them to ‘emerge as modern individuals, navigating both precolonial histories and colonial exigencies’ (143). Importantly, this was not only about the representational outcome but was also bound up with the photographic practice she developed, which embodied ‘a modest gaze’: ‘I never bring [my camera] out unless I am sure no one will mind’ (143–4). Around the same time Robeson was embarking on her tour of the continent, the social anthropologist Ellen Hellman was beginning to use the camera to document the everyday lives of urban African families in Johannesburg, producing photographs of African women which, Marijke Du Toit (2005) argues, departed from the narrow range of stereotypes then circulating in South African visual culture. In Hellman’s case, photography was not intended ‘to establish or confirm a racial or ethnic typology nor to isolate cultural performance’, but rather to record ‘urban African cultural practice and economic survival’ (601–2). The photographs document female labour in the context of a crowded and dilapidated urban environment, rather than presenting African women as ‘idealised carriers of tribal identity’ or purveyors of immorality through sex work and beer brewing (604).

We want to caution against any simple gendered reading of the photographic gaze, however. As Patricia Hayes notes, in South Africa in the 1980s, male photographers were typically associated with political struggle and public space and women photographers with interiors and the emotions (2011: 270–2). Yet there are numerous counterexamples, and it is necessary to complicate the gender norms that are in operation, recognising that they are ‘constantly reshaped and reinvented’ (270), not least by practitioners themselves. Women who were part of the anti-apartheid photography collective Afrapix, for example, documented protests, violence, forced removals and funerals alongside their male colleagues, and their images appeared in many of the same publications. Equally, the critique of photography as a masculinist practice that was implicit in the account of Eslanda Robeson above, and which became explicit for later feminist photographic practices, must also be acknowledged. There is no doubt that important work has been done by women representing women’s experiences that were often marginalised or invisible, ‘pushing background into the foreground’, as Hayes puts it (2011: 272). But such norms can also be constraining. The ‘politics of respectability’ (Raiford 2017: 143) underlying Robeson’s depictions of women on her African tour was shaped by the expectations of her European and American audiences.⁴ Moreover, Robeson’s position as a woman photographer of women was by no means straightforward either. Despite her wish to identify as a black woman in Africa, as a privileged foreign guest she often found herself in the company of men rather than ‘relegated’ to spaces occupied by women (Raiford 2017: 143). And, of course, there is nothing inherently progressive about women’s photography in the context of colonialism, as Inês Gomes (this volume) makes clear. And as Mark Sealy argues, for Alice Seeley Harris’ photographs of the Belgian atrocities in the Congo in the first decades of the twentieth century, important as this body of work was, its underlying ideology counterposed a supposedly ‘good colonialism’ to the ‘bad colonialism’ of Leopold’s regime (Sealy 2019).

Recovering women’s photographic histories in Africa

Women photographers, and black African women photographers in particular, are largely absent from early histories of the medium. Even in South Africa, which has attracted more attention than other parts of the continent, there are few women photographers from the early and mid-twentieth century who appear in the historical record, and even fewer whose work has been collected and received serious treatment. Constance Stuart Larrabee and Anne Fischer, who both worked in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s, and Jansje Wissema, from the subsequent generation, are the only three whose names have garnered any significant recognition, and until recently only the first of these had a significant presence in the photo-historical literature (Danilowitz 2016; Newbury 2009; Elliott 2018). In recent years, however, studies have been published on Fischer (Williams 2020, and this volume) and Wissema (Thomas 2014a, 2018a), as well as Minna Keene (Corrigall 2018), who worked at the Cape for a decade during the early part of the twentieth century. Any study of women and photography in Africa has to acknowledge the relationship between race and privilege that has shaped the medium’s history. Keene, Stuart Larrabee, Fischer and Wissema were all white women who immigrated to South Africa. Keene inherited her first camera from her husband, as his interest in the medium dwindled, and began her career as an amateur. Stuart Larrabee and Fischer had both received photographic training in Germany, and Wissema was trained by Fischer. All had the mobility and access to resources to enable them to practice as photographers, albeit both Fischer and Wissema experienced periods of financial precarity.⁵ When t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• List of contributors
• 1 New lines of sight: perspectives on women and photography in Africa
• Part I Writing women into photographic histories
• Part II Photographic dialogues with the past
• Part III Gender and sexuality in photographic practice
• Part IV Feminist and postcolonial practices
• Bibliography
• Index