The African Photographic Archive

Research and Curatorial Strategies

Christopher Morton, Darren Newbury, Christopher Morton, Darren Newbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

African photography has emerged as a significant focus of research and scholarship over the last twenty years, the result of a growing interest in postcolonial societies and cultures and a turn towards visual evidence across the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, many rich and fascinating photographic collections have come to light. This volume explores the complex theoretical and practical issues involved in the study of African photographic archives, based on case studies drawn from across the continent dating from the 19th century to the present day. Chapters consider what constitutes an archive, from the familiar mission and state archives to more local, vernacular and personal accumulations of photographs; the importance of a critical and reflexive engagement with photographic collections; and the question of where and what is 'Africa', as constructed in the photographic archive. Essential reading for all researchers working with photographic archives, this book consolidates current thinking on the topic and sets the agenda for future research in this field.

1 INTRODUCTION: RELOCATING THE AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE

Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury

African photography has emerged as a significant focus of research and scholarship over the last 30 years. From the frequent use of photographs as illustrations for historical and cultural narratives and the turn towards visual evidence across the humanities and social sciences to in-depth studies of specific collections, photography has become an essential medium for those seeking to understand African societies and cultures of the colonial and postcolonial periods.

As they have delved deeper into the photographic archive and as historical photographs have become ever more important to the stories they want to tell, researchers from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds have begun to craft sophisticated ways of understanding and working with photographic images. Ideas around photography as a means of communication and as an artistic medium have merged with insights from anthropology and material culture studies to produce a complex and relational appreciation of the photograph as image-object. As Peffer reminds us, '[w]hat was called a "photo" was not entirely the same material thing in Africa as it was in Europe' (2013: 12). Added to an awareness of the image form as material culture is a greater attention to the biographical shifts that photographs are subject to in the course of their 'lives' and how their inherent social and cultural meaning is thereby patterned and communicated.

Photographs are the subjects of complex narratives. As images they are copied, remembered and imagined, as well as reproduced in various places and points in time; as objects they are touched, exchanged and marked. Just occasionally they are deposited in institutional archives. More often, and not least in Africa, they remain outside of official collections, subject to deterioration and loss. Each social encounter, each shift in the photograph's status, adds another layer of meaning, and the excavation and critical examination of such layers is the core methodology of the contributions to this volume. But this archaeological metaphor has its limitations; researchers are also creating new meanings as they intervene in the lives of photographs and set them on new paths of circulation. We need to extend our analysis beyond the individual photographic image, so often at the centre of aesthetic discourse, to consider the different forms in which photographs accumulate and the contexts in which they reside, including the archival situations in which researchers find them. Outside of art collections, it is rare to come across a photograph in isolation; they will often be found as official or ad hoc collections in piles, boxes and exhibitions, accompanied by other documents, visual and textual. African photographic collections have complex stories to tell; it is by paying attention to their textured historical patterning that a new range of meanings around photography and Africa is beginning to emerge.

Despite the increased attention paid to African photographic archives, the critical and methodological literature is still emergent. It is easy to forget how recently serious academic research on African photography got under way Early publications on South African photography (Bensusan 1966; Bull and Denfield 1970), Richard Buchtas photography in Uganda (Thomas 1960) and photography in Cote d'lvoire (Forlacroix 1970) were the result of individual forays into a vast resource that most historians simply did not recognize as worthy of serious attention. By the 1980s, however, photographs were beginning to attract interest, appreciated as both authored documents as well as sites of cultural encounter and intersecting histories (Killingray and Roberts 1989). The growth of interest in this period in colonial history and its visual deposits was allied to interest from scholars of African art history who saw colonial photography as evidence of indigenous cultural and artistic traditions (Soulillou 1982; Collart and Celis 1984; Geary and Njoya 1985). This phase of research also revealed the way in which the mass production, dissemination and collection of postcard imagery contributed to the propagation of Western stereotypes of the continent (Alloula 1986; David 1978, 1982; Geary 1986; Geary and Webb 1998).

Although some scholars have responded to the need for a more detailed understanding of the work of early indigenous photographers, such as Viditz-ward (1985; 1987) on Sierra Leonean Creole photography and Sprague (1979) on Yoruba portraiture in Nigeria, research in this area is still relatively undeveloped. Important exceptions include contributions to Revue Noire's anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography (1999) and scholars such as Nimis on Bamako studio photography (1998), Chapuis on photography in St Louis, Senegal (1999), Wendl and Behrend (1998) and Haneys necessarily wide-sweeping survey (2010) as well as her research on the Lutterodt family studio from the Gold Coast (2013). Most of these studies have focused on the nascent professional studio tradition in Africa, giving particular weight to the genre of portraiture. Studio portraiture, especially that dating from the period of decolonization, was the focus of considerable interest in the art world of the 1990s and early 2000s, where it became almost synonymous with African photography, often viewed as a site of rediscovery of the agency of the postcolonial subject (Oguibe 2001: 117). Yet this emphasis requires critical interrogation. As Peffer argues, the dominance of research on portraiture has been significantly influenced by wider art historical expectations around African photography (Peffer and Cameron 2013: 7). Inevitably, portrait photographs feature here, though what emerges is a nuanced understanding of the genre, its multiplicity and the rich embeddedness [of portraits] in their own worlds' (Hayes, this volume). One reason for the relative lack of research on indigenous photographic archives has been the scarcity of easily accessible archival sources with which to write a more nuanced and balanced visual history of the continent. Many collections of indigenous photography remain outside of institutional collections, and patterns of collecting and archival deposit have inevitably shaped research agendas. As Haney and Schneider note, much of the continent's photographic past' remains inaccessible and unrecognized, and in comparison with those in Europe or the United States, indigenous collections often struggle to garner support for preservation or conservation (2014: 312-13).

Important studies on the colonial photographic archive (Edwards 1992; Ryan 1997; Landau and Kaspin 2002) demonstrate a continuing intellectual interest in photographs as complex historical documents with which to critically re-examine colonial and disciplinary cultures. Alongside this has been the growth of visual and historical anthropology studies on African photography, including recent publications surveying ethnographic approaches to public and private collections (Vokes 2012a) and new methodological approaches to anthropological archives (Morton and Edwards 2009). Studies from anthropology are complimented by innovative artistic and historical projects of recovery that have expanded our conception of the archive (Stultiens, Peffer, this volume).

Against this background, this book signals three important methodological moves. First, going beyond consideration of the single photograph and the individual image-audience encounter, to think at the level of the collection and the archive and how institutional and collections histories can be understood to have informed readings of African imagery. Second, rethinking the category of 'the archive to embrace the expanded range of collections that should come within the purview of research, from the familiar mission and state archives to more local and personal accumulations of photographs. Third, a critical and reflexive engagement with photographic collections, which acknowledges researchers', artists' and curators' own practices as lying within the history of the archive, and not analytically separated. Each contribution to the volume confronts the methodological challenges of the photographic archive through the study of a specific collection. Taken together, the range of case studies addresses a further important question: where and what is 'Africa' as it is constituted in the archive to paraphrase Achille Mbembe, what is Africa the idea of?¹ Since it is through images and archives that the politics of representation is so often performed and activated, it is important to bring a critical perspective to Africa's location in the archive and to reimagining and relocating the African photographic archive in the present.

The idea of African photography

One might begin by asking whether it is possible to meaningfully discuss 'African photography' as a cohesive theoretical or curatorial entity Any attempt to define or locate African photography in terms of the cultural background of the photographer, the geographical location of the photographic encounter or its subsequent archival location faces numerous challenges. As a putative theoretical entity, the 'African photograph' is at best a highly distributed object, with endless micro-histories and a vast number of custodians, archivists, curators, consumers and re-producers. It exists in archives, private collections and domestic settings in Africa and in a bewildering array of similar settings across the globe. One way of conceiving of 'African photography' is to atomize and dematerialize it and see it as a vast, nebulous and yet interrelated collection of 'images scattered across collections on several continents' (Peffer 2013: 11), which requires the resourcefulness of the researcher to track down and weave into a meaningful narrative. The problem with this approach is that seeing archival situations and micro-histories as incidental to the liberation of images - images that need to be rendered up for the scrutiny of commentators on the basis of their content alone - overlooks the way in which '[a]rchives themselves play host to numerous small dramas of contestation' (Edwards and Morton 2009: 10). Indeed, archival practices are especially significant, since it is through the selective publication, exhibition and mediation of collections and archives that 'African photography' is created and recreated over time.

What constitutes the African image archive is not a stable or single phenomenon. Whereas in the pre-digital era the archive may have implied an institutional context and a formal process of curatorial decision-making, in the last 20 years the notion of the archive has expanded to include the vast global circulation of audiovisual media shared and stored via the internet. For archives which have put their collections online, the last ten years or so has seen the extensive reappropriation (or repurposing) of such imagery by African and non-African websites and social media (Morton 2014) in pursuit of a bewildering variety of political, cultural and social agendas. For example, the Anyuak Mini Museum website reuses nearly 100 historical images from the Pitt Rivers Museum's Southern Sudan website to recover a sense of cultural history disturbed by civil war and displacement.² Increasingly, ethnographers of online sociality understand online collections, not as virtual objects - the abstract representation of 'real' things in archival collections - but as achieving first-class object status' (Fischer et al. 2008: 525). Online providers of African photography, be they museums, archives, private collectors or photographers, must be understood therefore as the creators, rather than mediators, of a global African image archive. Modern-day digital salvage projects also give pause for thought. One recent project sponsored by the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme involved a collection of some 40,000 studio negatives in Cameroon, digital copies of which were deposited in London and Yaounde while the originals remained with the photographer.³ Although the rationale for such digital salvage projects seems obvious - giving a fragile resource threatened by the uncertainties of future ownership and environmental conditions a stable institutional future for the benefit of researchers - it remains unclear exactly what local benefits might accrue as a result of such activity.

Locating Africa in the archive

If the idea of African photography presents a number of conceptual and methodological dilemmas, the relationship between the continent and its archives is no less complex. To discuss 'African' photographic archives is to approach a set of photographs with a sense that they somehow belong to the geographical and cultural continent. But as soon as we begin to discuss photographs relating to either African diasporic experiences, or the porous cultural boundaries of what we might mean by Africa, our sense of coherence inevitably recedes. And indeed many African photographs in Western archives and collections have spent very little time in Africa itself, beyond an often brief sojourn within the continent, and of course the all important moment of exposure onto a negative (or now digital camera memory card). For these objects, their 'Africanness' somehow lies in their subject matter, at the level of the image, and yet also on remarkably resilient Western ideas of the representation of the continent. Recognition of this double dislocation, of sometimes long African 'archival lives' in non-African locations, is vital to furthering our understanding of the overlapping histories and hybrid cultural identities of image-making on the continent. As Haney notes, '"Africanness" registers in relation to one's residence, and to one's momentum' (2010: 8). Although much of the continent's visual history has been physically located (and thereby disseminated and controlled) in the West, an increasing amount of research has shown how soon after its invention photography was taken up by African photographers. A greater critical awareness that photography has never simply been a Western technology exploring the rest of world, but a significant feature of many cultural histories, has resulted in some of the most fascinating recent additions to the literature (Pinney and Peterson 2005; Morris 2009; Strassler 2010).

Besides the vast array of Western collections, the work of African (and non-African) photographers has also been retained in collections in Africa itself, notably in South Africa in such places as the Mayibuye Archives, whose photographic collection owes its existence to the international anti-apartheid movement. The complex story of this archive involves the coming together in exile of extant collections of historical photographs alongside an accumulation of images, which for reasons of security were sent unattributed in small packets from South Africa to London to be distributed to the international media. The collection was relocated to South Africa in 1990 at the very beginning of the transition to democracy to be held by the Robben Island Museum-Mayibuye Archives. The political commitment encoded in the physical return of the archive to Africa was as important as that which first secured the transport of African photographs to London. In South Africa, however, as elsewhere on the continent, one should note the anxiety that surrounds the archiving of photography, with an air of uncertainty hanging over even the most important collections.

Another vital question is the inclusion of the historical African diaspora in the larger concept of the African photographic archive. Although important initiatives by cultural organizations such as the London-based Autograph ABP have addressed themselves to issues of photography and diasporic identities, to date there have been few detailed photographic histories of people of African descent outside of Africa. Recent work, such as that of Tina Campt (2012) on private collections, that document African diaspora experiences in twentieth-century Europe represent pioneering studies, set to radically destabilize our assumptions about the historical construction of African identity through photography.

Although the essays in this volume range widely across the continent, a proper consideration of archives relating to the geographical and cultural north of Africa is beyond its scope. This is partly a result of patterns of research and curation in Anglophone academia, which in turn have frequently followed research pathways opened up in the wake of former colonial ties to the continent and archives produced during the colonial period. There are nevertheless notable exceptions in the essays here by Zeitlyn writing about Francophone Cameroon, Hayes writing about Namibia and Haney and Bajorek's wide-ranging survey, which pays particular attention to archives in Francophone West Africa. Instead of attempting to be encyclopaedic, our aim is to bring together key themes for understanding African photographic archives: cultural encounter, political opposition, identity and notions of self. Another volume, taking account of research at another point in time and with different case studies, might highlight a quite distinct set of social and cultural relations to the archive.

A further intention is to situate the photography of Africa in a global context. Essays by Morton and Rippe not only examine how European expectations around photography shaped the colonial photographic encounter but also how its subsequent publication and dissemination is just as important, since it is in these contexts that such photographs gained their widest social activation. In similar vein, the contribution by Newbury considers a collection shaped by its travels from Africa to Europe and reflects on the implications of its return. Interpreting the African photographic archive requires an appreciation of the global networks, both now and in the past, through which it has taken shape and which have enabled certain possibilities and constrained others. The future African image archive is being forged today in the interplay between Africa-centred contributions to the global image of the continent, contributions produced by outsiders looking in and by the visual exploration of African diasporic identities. As Haney and Bajorek discuss, current archival projects on the continent are unevenly supported at state and institutional level, and so local and community initiatives to archive imagery have emerged in the digital age - a democratization of the concept of the archive that may signal a new direction for the African photographic archive in the future.

Excavating the archive

While some commentators have sought to emphasize the decentring of the archive from collections and institutions as a result of postcolonial patterns of transnationalism and diaspora, others have sought to refigure the archive within the concept of a 'global image ecology' (Enwezor 2006). Individual images are understood within visual systems, in which they gain their meaning in relation to other images. As visual systems in their own right, archives are also subject to such an analysis, establishing networks of relationships between image-objects over time that have directly affected the way in which we understand Africa's visual history. What is needed is the 'excavation' of African archives and collections, a more detailed understanding of the layers of meaning laid down in the historical record. It is essential, however, that we understand the pursuit of context as already a first level of historical interpretation. As Ankersmit (1983) argues, narratives are not inherent in past events, but are formed into historical order by the historian's own narrative structure, a product of the present rather than the past.

Another emerging area of research is the importance of orality both within and surrounding the archive. Can we understand photography in isolation from the social situations in which it is embedded and activated? And by extension, can the visual be analytically separated from a consideration of photogra...