Against the 'African' Archive paradigm (original) (raw)
Related papers
'Introduction' in The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies
The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies, 2015
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. Reviews “This exciting collection treats photographic images and archives as messages offered to an unknown future. Traces of past events become revelatory in the hands of these stellar contributors. This is a book that should be read by everyone interested in the potential of new practices of visual history.” – Christopher Pinney, Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London, UK “This is a timely and ground-breaking collection of essays that focusses on the construction of the African photographic archive as a contested, critical site of collection, reflection and re-invention. In eleven distinctive and finely-honed studies, the archive is stretched and extended – both geographically and theoretically – so that it ranges from the vernacular to the official, the ephemeral to the artistic, while opening up to question the very terms that it puts into place.” – Tamar Garb, Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London, UK
Social Dynamics, 2014
The digital revolution has fundamentally changed our relationship to archives, by accelerating their "dusting off" and their re-appropriation, particularly in the art world. This article will show the ways in which some contemporary visual artists use new digital technologies to provide new ways of storing, reading and retrieving contemporary African history. Such artists do so by revisiting diverse forms of archives that are mainly photographic, and which were produced during the colonial and independence eras.
Photography as Absence: Implicit Histories (Africa, Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries)
Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies, 2023
Photographic material can sometimes pose an overwhelming and distorting presence, especially when it comes to the writing of history. Some of the first visual recordings of African social worlds via photography would long serve as a model for images of the continent. This phenomenon has only been reinforced by recirculations of images from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intended as a counterpoint, this article will contemplate a paradoxical history of photography by considering it based not on its presence but on its very absence. A work of history supported by photographic and written sources from the years 1870 to 1910, this contribution focuses on photography as absence, as disappearance, and as erasure. This implicit history focuses on various essential phenomena that characterize the (non)production of photographic images of African social worlds in the age of colonial expansion. It first deals with the key question of the material destruction of old photographs of Africa. For a variety of reasons, an entire part of what was photographed is now either lost or in the process of becoming lost. One of the long-standing major effects of this has been a double erasure of African photography pioneers, who are poorly represented or underrepresented in institutional archives and have been deprived of historiographical attention; in many cases, their history remains to be written. The article then raises the question of refusals to pose and potential refusals to take photographs. We will see several scattered traces of such evasions of photography. The problem of self-censorship and the very restricted circulation of certain images, particularly those threatening the stability of colonial narratives, will also be studied at this juncture. Finally, the article will take a closer look at the photographs taken by Alex J. Braham. This individual, a district agent in Ogugu (southern Nigeria) for the Royal Niger Company at the turn of the twentieth century, was an eager photographer. His personal album contains several shots of a secret ceremony that he took without the participants’ knowledge, having hidden with his camera in a tent. This example of concealment (not of the image but of the photographic act itself) is also one of the possible manifestations of the invisibilities that have played a major part in forming and deforming photographic imagery of Africa.