The panel attempts to explore and expand the still only little fathomed range and scope of photographs as tools and sources of research in African Studies. From different theoretical and methodological perspectives it addresses – and questions – aspects like photograph’s indexical and representational qualities as well as their materiality and mobility.
Photography is the dominant imaging process of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is therefore astonishing that this medium has received so little attention within the expanse of social sciences and humanities research. Our panel attempts to contribute to a broader and deeper understanding of photographs as tools and sources of research in African Studies. From different theoretical and methodological perspectives it aims to investigate and question four aspects. First, it looks at the various ways in which photography served European anthropology as a medium for the registration, documentation and classification of foreign peoples and individuals. Secondly, the nature of photographs’ mobility and materiality are examined with regards to their placement in an expanding communal visual repertoire and image-world. Thirdly, the panel takes a closer look at photographs’ performance and representations. It explores the various ways in which photographs, after they have been ”taken from the world”, are re-inserted into people’s lives or a society’s history. Last but not least, methodological approaches are addressed as well. Scholars, for instance, will use photographs in interviews and question Africans about their own photographs or about photographs others took as well as about historical or contemporary photographs. To read back local knowledge and collective memory by means of photographs can serve to various tasks ranging from the retrieval of the knowledge of a single person to the retrieval of associations by means of focus interviews or general contexts by means of narrative interviews.
How do Ghanaian viewers interpret and shape historical memory implicated in their venerable photographic legacy? As photographic images are the site of complex staging, reinvention, and adjustment, we can examine how they are used locally as documents. Because such objects are constantly readjusted by photographers, artists, viewers, and owners, the exposure of sun on film is merely a starting point.
Close analysis of E. E. Evans-Pritchard's extensive field photographs from Southern Sudan reveals many of the non-discursive historical contexts, social and spatial involvements, and indigenous biographies, that underpin his seminal ethnographic literature, captured in a photographic 'visual notebook' that was to become a source of future reference in his later writings.
The today wide dissemination of identical photographs predating 1900 from the West African coast in European and African archives calls for a closer look at the producers and consumers of such photographic images as well as the photograph’s ways of distribution, conditions of administration, organisation and exploitation.
This methodological contribution tries to evaluate the significance of qualitative interviews for research in visual anthropology and media studies. Materially it is founded upon focus interviews in which Senegal citizens were asked to comment on a photo album about the local press and to retell the stories they see represented in the photographs.
The paper focuses on photographs by the explorers of the Congo, unprofessional photographers. These documents enable to assess how they visually reacted to the geographical and human world confronting them, what were their expectations on, and the constraints of this new medium, and how these explorers consciously built-up “a” Congo, instantly achieving a considerable role in the then emerging Western colonial image.
The paper discusses the role of the photographs realized by the 1906 exploration of the Rwenzori led by the Duke of Abruzzi, in the construction of a Eeuropean imagery of inner Africa on one side, and on the local perception of the territory on the other.
Contrary to some British colonies (Rhodesia) or early missionary experiments (Belgium Congo), the people from Guinea were exposed to motion pictures only at a late date and only partially. This paper analyzes the reception and perception of the first movies distributed in an exclusively urban setting in the 1950s.