Good form: visual and textual notes on an archive activation

ABSTRACT

How can artistic interventions inform these photographs while both literally and proverbially ‘reframing’ them in an attempt to contribute to decolonial thinking? This journal contribution provides insight into a methodology of artistic research, based on Jacques Rancière's positioning of artistic practice, used to investigate a collection of photographs produced by a researcher collecting data in Sierra Leone in 1934. The photographs were produced in an unequal power relationship facilitated by colonial conditions. The historical pictures are reframed by expanding the individual photographic frame within the historical collection of photographs, and with present day stakeholders in Sierra Leone.

KEYWORDS:

• Photography
• artistic research
• collective making
• Sierra Leone

Disclosure statement

All historical images reproduced and intervened in with permission of the Nederlands Fotomuseum and consent of those involved in the production of photographs in Sierra Leone. I am not aware of conflicts of interest.

Notes

1  Relevant information and substantiation of claims made will, however, be provided in the footnotes that beyond referencing also have an associative and performative function. The three letter-code PJU is derived from the name Paul Julien (1901–2001). As a staunch Roman Catholic son of French migrants with a PhD in physics who most of his life worked primarily as a chemistry teacher, he conducted serological research in various regions in ‘Equatorial Africa’ between 1932 and 1962 in a bid to contribute to the understanding of the origin and distribution of humans through comparison of blood- and later rhesus types of so-called isolates. In addition, he collected data in the form of finger- and palm prints for J. Dankmeijer who, as a result, wrote an article titled ‘Finger prints of African pygmies’ without having set foot in Africa. In the article Dr. P.F.J.A. Julien is simply positioned as ‘the well-known researcher of Africa’. A selection of the photographs that were also produced, or perhaps I should say ‘collected’ by Julien, and the narratives they accompanied were reached mass audiences in the Netherlands and, to some extent, western Europe through (announcements of) radio causeries, books and illustrated lectures. Despite his ambitions to contribute to science, these stories and photographs would soon be what Julien was, and to some extent still is known for. For more on the research project and the struggle to (re)position Julien in it please visit project website PJU.bridginghumanities.com, last accessed 30 November 2022.

2  I build here on the positioning of the photograph as encounter by Ariella Azoulay (2010).

3  The notion of the affordances is taken on from the interesting and related ‘Museum Affordances’ project, initiated by Paul Basu, see https://re-entanglements.net/category/museum-affordances/, last accessed 28 November 2022. For more on my longer standing practice and research, particularly in Uganda, see my 2018 doctoral thesis Ebifananyi: a study of photographs in Uganda in and through an artistic practice. https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/67951.

4  As e.g. discussed in several of the contributions to Peffer and Cameron (2013).

5  The book is Paul Julien’s first of four, titled Kampvuren langs de evenaaar / Campfires along the equator. The book contains edited versions of radio causeries that were delivered during the 1930s and was published at the end of 1940, in the wake of WWII. It was translated into all Scandinavian language, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese. An English translation was made but a publisher was never found, even though attempts to this effect were made at the time and again during the 1990s when Cor Adolfse, as self-appointed literary agent, caused a Paul Julien revival by getting the three best sellers republished with largely unaltered textual content and expanded selections of photographs. The other printed media include newspaper and magazine articles.

6  There are numerous announcements of this lecture for the 1940s, 50s and 60s among the documents in the PJU collection. From then onward these lectures became rarer, but there are also announcements for the 1970s and the 1990s ‘revival’.

7  My translations. Spelling of names unaltered.

8  Various editions of Campfires Along the Equator include different selections of photographs. The negatives of some of the photographs published in at least some of these editions are no longer available. Documents in the collection make clear that the lithographer of the books worked from the negatives. Apart from these missing negatives, all connected to the first of the four books, the collection of negatives appears to be complete. I therefore assume that they went missing after being provided for lithography.

9  This has proven to be a valuable way of crowdsourcing information not only used by me. See, for instance, the Nigeria Nostalgia Project (both on social media and their own website). For this part of the Reframing PJU project the sharing was done in a group and page related to the work of anthropologist Paul Basu in Sierra Leone both named Sierra Leone Heritage, and a group set up by Sierra Leonean in the diaspora named Sierra Leone Nostalgia Experience.

10  The film footage is not part of the PJU collection. It was in a parallel gesture placed in the care of Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Digitized versions of this film footage were made available to me by Cor Adolfse.

11  Some of these traditions were challenged by missionaries and the colonial government in the 19th and 20th century. They are still placed at odds in relation to by strict uses of supposed Christian dogmas. Currently the use of masquerades in the Freetown area is prohibited by the central government after their use by supporters of the opposition.

12  The notion of correspondence is used in line with anthropologist Tim Ingold as ‘a joining with [that is] not additive by contrapuntal’ (Ingold 2017).

13  These ‘good forms’ not only denaturalize the availability of visibility, but also the medium specific modes of presentation. The PJU project website mentioned in the first footnote being one of them, this journal contribution another. The main ‘good form’ on the website is time-based. In animations that I think of as Breathing Photographs the singularity of the photographic frame is expanded in different ways at the pace of the of the breathing of a human body at ease. The Breathing Photographs afford an unstable, literally constantly changing presence. A still from this ‘good form’ is not necessarily an appropriate translation of the animation to printed media because it is, once again, a stable naturalization of photographic presence. I therefore started to weave still images together in ‘lamellographs’ as an equally ambivalent presence. I am developing additional ‘good forms’ towards the exhibitions scheduled for the Nederlands Fotomuseum (March–July 2024) and the National Museum of Sierra Leone (end of 2023), and an accompanying book.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Stultiens

After having studied photography (BFA 1998, MFA 2001, MA 2012), Dutch artist Andrea Stultiens (1974) developed an artistic research practice and was awarded a PhD from Leiden University for a dissertation which consisted of a thesis, eight artist books and accompanying exhibitions, and is titled Ebifananyi, a study of photographs in Uganda in and through an artistic practice. She develops ways of collective making that inform the contexts in which photographs are produced and used, particularly on the African continent. Stultiens always works collectively with people who share interests in particular historical photographs in efforts to inform them and their contexts. She tries to bring the same attitude of non-hierarchical making and learning into her role as an educator in the institutional settings of the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen. The outcomes of Stultiens’ practice are made public on various platforms for general audiences and, occasionally, in academic publications.