EDITOR'S DESK Sharing African Photographic Archives in the Digital Era: Exploring Their Material and Affective Dimensions

As Blouin and Rosenberg wrote, photo archives function “as complex structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at the critical point of intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, politics, and technologies” (Blouin & Rosenberg, 2007, p. vii). Indeed, since the “discovery” of photography in Africa (Schneider, 2015, p. 178; Werner, 2000, p. 138, 2005–2017, pp. 66–70) some 25 years ago, they have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars, art dealers, artists, and curators, who also act as resource persons and main intermediaries between the archives and the public.

From the early 1990s on, various individuals from the North have been ploughing the African continent, mainly focusing on photo studios, in search of historical photographs and archives. Researchers working in and with photo collections of professional studio photographers, state press agencies, para state institutions, and families have created from these sources an impressive corpus of scholarly work that touches on a great variety of topics such as biographies of early and contemporary African photographers or the various forms of photographic practices on the continent. Photo exhibitions and festivals in the North and South, organized by a rather exclusive group of curators, have mushroomed in recent years, and so have exhibition catalogues and monographs. Not least, the last 10 years have seen a number of digitization (and, to a lesser extent, material preservation) projects revolving around photo collections in sub-Saharan Africa with the common goal of conserving the visual heritage of the continent and making it accessible to a wider public. All this has had and still has a deep impact on the circulation, accessibility, perception, and use of historical photographs from Africa. Likewise, all these activities have profoundly changed our understanding of photographs’ materiality, the ways it is perceived, dealt with, and addressed as well as the cultural and economic value that are attributed to them.

Not only was the photograph as the material or, after its digitization, immaterial carrier of visual information of the past affected by these activities, but also the archive itself. Answering to changing societal processes and discourses, market logics, and explicit or implicit policies with regard to access, reproduction, and preservation, photo archives are more than ever exposed to dynamics of reconfiguration and profound transformations both on local and global levels. New technological resources—the Internet and the huge number of data collections and databases it contains—have placed the materiality of photo archives in the crossfire of debates that go beyond the tangible, in the sense of their physical presence or absence and, metaphorically speaking, in a discourse that touches on emotional (re)attachments. As a consequence, the archive increasingly circulates “in global systems of loan, exchanges and markets” (Hall 2002, p. 337). Furthermore, such technologies challenge the boundaries between form and content as there is in the realm of the visual an evident relationship between order and meaning (Gombrich, 1979, p. 2). On the ground, photo archives, too often, remain caught in a struggle for control over their ownership, inclusion, exclusion, circulation, and access of and to the materials they hold. This somehow paralyzing dynamics could partly explain why so many archives, not just photo archives, are neglected on the African continent and also why digitization projects are initiated mainly from various parties based in the North.

Contributors to this special issue of Critical Interventions on photography and archives in Africa were invited to rethink the issues addressed above, based on the notions of sources (the photographic archive itself in all its forms) and resources (encompassing all the persons, means, and technological tools involved in the valorization of photographic archives), in order to offer new readings of these two key notions in this specific field of research.

In the footsteps of other researchers (Bajorek, 2013; Buckley, 2005, 2008; Haney & Schneider, 2014; Morton & Newbury, 2015; Schneider, 2018), two articles in this issue place their inquiries on the photographic archive itself, focusing on the “archive-as-subject” rather than “archive-as-source” (Stoler, 2002, p. 93). The Afterlife of a Colonial Photographic Archive: The Subjective Legacy of InforCongo by Sandrine Colard and Collectivizing (Re)sources: The Photographic Estate of Ulli Beier, jointly written by Katharina Greven, Lena Naumann, Siegrun Salmanian, and Nadine Siegert—all attached to the Iwalewahaus art and research center at the University of Bayreuth—especially deal with their diverse social lives, during and after their constitutions.

Colard’s article revolves around the InforCongo archive, created in 1950 by the colonial authorities in Belgian Congo. Her article is a significant contribution to the study of press agencies in the colonial or postcolonial Africa era, a field that, to this day, has much less attracted the attention of scholars working on photography in Africa—their interest, running along that by the art market, having been concentrated to large a extent on photo studios (Schneider, 2018). Again, accessibility is key: private photo studio archives are far more easily reachable than public ones (such as press agencies) for research, a point that Colard also evokes in her article. After exploring how the InforCongo archive concretely unfolded—“its frenzy for comprehensiveness and totalizing organization” and “obsessive visual ordering [which] was embedded into the larger and earlier development of the so-called Belgian ‘colonial sciences’”—Colard explores, through the negotiations it sparked after independence, a colonial nostalgia that still permeates the society of contemporary Belgium.

“Affective investment of […] photographs” (our emphasis), to take up an expression by Colard in her article, but also in photographs and collections could thus be seen as a red thread running through this issue. Her article closes on the premise that, for Belgium, “the loss of colonial pictures and the power contests over the Inforcongo archive ownership entail more than the disappearance of ‘just some old photographs.’” Indeed, she argues that, on the side of the formal colonial power, letting it go, including perhaps toward its own disappearance (Bajorek, 2013; Buckley, 2005) would represent “the dread of a second—and maybe the veritable?—taking of independence, of a second ‘separation,’ since it is in the photographic realm that the colonial experience first resided.” Interestingly, this aspect is also evoked by the pool of the Iwalewahaus researchers who anticipate that, despite much enthusiasm about the utopia of a shared archive becoming tangible, one that would address forms of asymmetric power relations and knowledge production, “the transfer of the physical documents to Nigeria might create a sense of loss” within their institution. This tackles a critical point that certainly deserves more attention in debates related to collections’ ownership, so that one may legitimately interrogate what part affective involvement with objects does play in decisions to retain them or let them go.

Interestingly, the idea of a shared archive, already central in Colard’s article in colonial and post-colonial Brussels and Léopoldville/Kinshasa, re-emerges here, though differently, as it does in most of the articles gathered for this issue, thus constituting another angle to approach their consistency, along that of the diverse figures of images’ keepers who, from different positions and locations, appear in each of the articles, lovingly taking care of archives even in the most extreme situations, as in Hargeysa, present-day Somaliland, or Kinshasa, in the DRC.

Indeed, the Bayreuth group’s research centers on the photographic archive that scholar, writer, and editor Ulli Beier (1922–2011) produced over his career in Nigeria (where he resided between 1950–1966 and 1971–1974), Germany, and Australia. Today in the last steps of a digitization process started in 2012 by Iwalewahaus, the (Nigerian) material archive will soon be relocated to the Centre of Black Culture and International Understanding (CBCIU) in Oshogbo (southwestern Nigeria), after Beier sold it to the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2007. Rich with “60,000 pieces, including paper photographs, negatives and slides, scans, copies, publications, flyers, posters, letters, handwritten notes, and further documents,” it constitutes a primal source to a variety of field studies, particularly around the history of Nigerian Modernism.

Intense repatriation debates (see Lowry, 2017) have been given new momentum since French president Emmanuel Macron stated in his “Ouagadougou speech” (November 28, 2017) that “African heritage cannot exist only in private collections and European museums. It must be promoted in Paris, but also in Dakar, Lagos, and Cotonou.” In this regard, the relocation of Beier’s estate, following his vision and will, does constitute a pioneering project, even though, having been sold, it does not match restitution issues evoked above. Yet when photo-repatriations’ projects did take place in the past, it was most of the times copies that were returned to the places where the photographs were originally taken (Bell, 2010; but as a counter-example, Halvaksz, 2010). To put it in the authors’ own words, this project does represent “an utopia of collective ownership for the twenty-first century.” By sharing copyrights and the digital estate, this innovative project aims at producing collective knowledge, through collaborative endeavors by the two institutions and through artists’ interventions, thus intersecting work methods and tools all round between researchers and artists, plus in North-South directions and vice versa. “In spite of the fascination for the original and its aura (Benjamin, 1935),” write the authors, “making archives accessible is one of the biggest steps that need to be taken in the process of decolonizing Western institutions.” This should also enable reversing current research workflows as “in most cases African researchers [still] have to travel to the North to visit relevant archives and collections.”

Affects surrounding handling “old photographs” is a topic that also highly permeates, though through different perspectives, the articles by O’Connell, Nur Goni, and Nimis, where overlooked and sometimes lost documents serve as agents for rewriting entangled, complex, and grievous histories in new and own terms. In the cases explored by O’Connell and Nur Goni, these histories particularly deal with the injuries caused by apartheid or civil war and migration. And in both cases, the authors evoke the “healing” processes that exhuming the “other” histories these photographs contain might effect. Indeed, what happens when public or private photo archives are dispersed, no longer exist, be it partly or totally? What does that produce socially, culturally, and politically? How does that affect the possibility of writing and transmitting history? Furthermore, how does this impact, on a more intimate level, the ability to redefine one’s identity within larger communities that have experienced trauma?

O’Connell’s article explores in her article the archive of the Movie Snaps Photographic Studio, which, no longer operational today, is dispersed across family collections in Cape Town and whose production she positions in the long shadow of a painful history that starts back in 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck “set up a refreshment station for passing ships” on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. Adding to an ever-growing scholarly work on photo studios in Africa, she notes that Movie Snaps, which was popular and active “from the late 1930s to the early 1980, produced hundreds of thousands of photographs, and trained scores of ‘Black’ and ‘coloured’ photographers” who, nonetheless, did not own the cameras they used. Having met and interviewed a number of people who still carefully preserve photographs taken by those street photographers, O’Connell observed the multilayered narratives that were connected to these images. As the conversations went on “usually erudite men and women who moments earlier had regaled [her] about their lives, recognize[ed] that what these images revealed too, was a moment that spoke about being deemed less-than-human, of unmitigated loss and an inability to settle after their lives were torn apart by eviction notices and bulldozers.” The men and women she interviewed “seemed unable to reconcile that which Movie Snaps depicted—photographs that showed lives of imaginings and defiance, manifested in commanding gazes, an inordinate amount of care in dress and presentation (…) but shadowed by a series of ‘posts,’ a post of loss, of injury and debilitating incomprehensibility, and seemingly no avenues to attend to these at all.” In the footsteps of other researchers, she advocates then for the “archives of the ordinary,” which contest more traditional understandings of (state) archives in relation to the power structures that informed them. They do so by giving tangible, though fragile, glimpses to “flashes of freedom in times of un-freedom,” and which speak simultaneously of patterns of remembering and forgetting, something that photographer Santu Mofokeng also pointed to in his seminal work “The Black Photo Album: Look at Me (1890–1950)” (1994–1999).¹

Furthermore, O’Connell’s engagement with the Movie Snaps photographs and the questions they spark is twofold. First, these photographs firmly embed her scholarly work in her personal, affective experience. Second, through a re-enactment work she has been conducting in the very places where the Movie Snaps photographs were taken in Cape Town, thus constructing multilayered images that refer to different times at once.

Nur Goni’s article revolves around photographic ubiquities that settle in the new opportunities of the Internet and social media. Her article Repairing (With) the Archive? Re-collecting Dispersed Somali Photographs opens with an exploration of the singular trajectory of some images taken by Prince Roland Bonaparte during an ethnographic exhibition of Somalis in Paris in 1890, which reappeared in 2013 in a blog designed in the Somali diaspora to promote the history and culture of Somalia (thanks to the digitalization projects of the institutions holding them in the North). Here, we concretely see how the same object, from material to immaterial form, also transforms itself from a source to a resource, to perform “something else” than what it was initially conceived for. This first, uncanny encounter, which raised many questions about the flux of images, the reattachments and meanings that these new reconfigurations produce—then led the author to an analysis of how, in the digital era, a young, connected generation from the Somali diaspora is now reclaiming its voice, raising questions about who can speak for their country’s experiences and how. While these discourses and positions are elaborated in different domains of knowledge production (in academia and in literature, for instance), they are also reworked through the re-collections and re-assemblages of scattered, pre–civil war images, and the memories and histories attached to them across different generations of Somalis living today all over the world. If these projects that attempt to establish an alternative Somali photographic archive might partly be read against the backdrop of how the international press has depicted Somalia since its collapse in the 1990s—thus constituting powerful tools for counter-narratives—they are also political because they relate and, in a way, contribute to recreate (imagined) communities, yesterday and today. This particularly emerges in the transcription of excerpts from a conversation with Abdirahman, the man behind the Vintage Somalia blog project, in the last part of the essay. Here, too, the issue of nostalgia comes up: it needs to be carefully examined in a context, like Somalia, where so many public and private archives have been lost or violently destroyed. What is left, especially in contexts of traumatic events, is then highly emotionally charged. In the footsteps of Walter Benjamin and Mathias Danbolt, Nur Goni ultimately defends a “performative historiography [paying] attention to the processes of cultural recall—process where objects from the past become ‘historical matter’ in the present, and thereby material that matters to history” (Danbolt, 2011, p. 1984).

The partial disappearance of a studio archive in Mali frames Érika Nimis’s recount of her collaboration with photographer Félix Diallo (1931–1997), who worked between the mid-1950s and 1980s in Kita, in rural southwestern Mali, thus shedding light into the relationship between researchers or curators and photographers (and their family) that generally remain in the shadow. Entrusted by the photographer and his family of 895 negatives that remained of his activity after his studio was destroyed by a storm in 1988, she evokes the different stages of the constitution of this today almost-vanished archive and her attempts to valorize it, against the backdrop of the “the ways in which the history of Malian photography has been, for the past 25 years, primarily centered on the art market’s perspective and interests. As a result, much of the history remains nearly invisible.”

Nimis’s recollections and questionings powerfully resonate with some of the topics explored by Akram Zaatari in the interview conducted by Anthony Downey in 2014 and here reproduced thanks to the courtesy of the authors and of the Ibraaz platform (Downey, 2014). While this interview does not specifically focus on African photographic archives or collecting and preserving strategies in Africa, we thought republishing it in this issue would help create bridges between practices and fields, which, despite efforts, still hinder knowledge production around different area studies. A renowned artist and co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), a nonprofit organization established in Beirut in 1997, Zaatari, among many other issues, questions “the glorification of every picture as an object, as a sacred object that needs to be preserved in a specific and generic way in a clinical environment, almost for eternity.” Hence he assigns much significance to the preservation of photographic material through their use as “elements in our live”: “[b]y damaging something photographic in a picture, one might be preserving something else; a non-photographic element maybe in the realm of emotions” (our emphasis). Furthermore, Zaatari draws our attention to a phenomenon, the way original photographs change their meaning when they are removed from the “original set-up in which they existed,” which resonates in all contributions of this special issue. Replying to Anthony Downey’s questions, he rightly says:

taking Hashem el-Madani [Editors’ note: A Lebanese photographer who owned a studio, Shehrazade, in the surrounding urban area of Saida, between 1953 and the 1970s] as an example, had the studio been an active studio today, had the economy of photography still been active today, Madani would not let me take one negative out of his archive. I can only lead my excavation or my study of his study because his economy has died. So the death of his economy made my project possible.

Through the “repatriation exhibition” of Diallo’s photographs promoted by Erika Nimis in March 2018—which was rendered possible through digitization conducted under the auspices of the Archive of Malian Photography project—that collection was given new life and meaning as a visual resource through the memories it sparked once back in the streets of Kita. At the same time, by publicly displaying the images, the names of those depicted on their surfaces could be recovered. As Nimis writes: “Identifying and inscribing the names of the people in the photographs was an idea suggested by the organizers. This made the work a collective and interactive event that lasted as long as the exhibit. Everyone in the exhibition was identified, except for an infant because, as a visitor mentioned, it is quite difficult to identify a baby.” This small-scale project, produced with modest means, appears as a counter-strategy to ways West African commercial portrait photography from the 20th century is being exhibited in the North since the 1990s. Nimis’s project highlights, as other similar examples in this issue, sustainable moments in a process of shared (and transformed) memories, sources, and resources.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jürg Schneider

Jürg Schneider is an affiliated researcher at the Centre for African Studies, University of Basel. Numerous publications and exhibitions on African photography and photo archives. Co-founder of African Photography Initiatives, an organization that works in and with photo archives in Africa (www.african-photography-initiatives.org) and www.africaphotography.org, a platform for historical African photography.

Marian Nur Goni

Marian Nur Goni is an art historian whose work focuses principally on artistic and activist practices that rework collections of historical objects and photographs in and from East Africa, raising questions about how memories, histories, and heritages are transmitted and written about. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. Together with Érika Nimis, she runs a blog devoted to photography histories in Africa: fotota.hypotheses.org.

Érika Nimis

Erika Nimis is a photographer, historian of Africa, and associate professor in the art history department at Université du Québec à Montréal. She is the author of three books on the history of photography in West Africa (including one drawn from her doctoral dissertation: Photographes d’Afrique de l’Ouest. L’expérience yoruba [Nimis 2005]). She contributes to a number of magazines and founded, with Marian Nur Goni, a blog devoted to photography in Africa: fotota.hypotheses.org.

Notes

1 The Black Photo Album: Look at Me (1890–1950) was published as a book by Steidl in 2013.