Research in African photography has come a long way since scholars such as Besusan (1966), Forlacroix (1970), Sprague (1978), Vidiz-Ward (1985; 1987) and Geary (1985; 1986; 1988) aimed to move photographs from a far periphery to the centre of scholarly interest. A still growing body of work has since dealt with the transnational and global dimensions of African photography, its physical, temporal and contextual mobility, as well as focusing on photographs’ qualities as stages of and experimental sites for social experiences and practices, and, increasingly, on the production and practices of African photographers. Similarly, over the last twenty years, archives and other preservatory forms have widely become subjects of investigation in their own right. Hence, it was simply a matter of time until the three terms – African, photography and archive – were merged. However, what coexists harmoniously and meaningfully in the title of the present volume does not necessarily do so in the book itself, in particular in its introduction, which attempts to set the theoretical and methodological frame for the following eleven chapters. There is a quite consistent but rather confusing toggling between the concept of the ‘African archive’, ‘African photography’ and the ‘African photographic archive’ that does not help in tackling the complexity of the subject matter, and, basically, its ‘Africanness’. The editors evade the question of what ‘African photography’ is by simply stating that it is ‘at best a highly distributed object, with endless micro-histories and a vast number of custodians, archivists, curators, consumers and re-producers [which] exists in archives, private collections and domestic settings in Africa and in a bewildering array of similar settings across the globe’ (p. 4). Readers are confronted with the same difficulties in locating ‘Africa’ in the ‘archive’. Going through the introduction, there is the impression that its flaws are due to an attempt to retrospectively construct a framework for a collection of papers given at a one-day workshop at the Pitt Rivers Museum in 2011, which were subsequently revised for publication.

This definitional fuzziness notwithstanding, and despite its limitation to Anglophone scholars and a neglect of nineteenth-century photographs and photographers, the volume presents a selection of case studies that build on emergent scholarship on African photography and the archive and that are certainly worth reading. The book's core methodology is ‘the excavation and critical examination’ of the various layers of meaning a photograph adds to its biography (p. 2), and its contributions ‘signal three important methodological moves’ (p. 3), namely to think at the level of the collection and the archive, to rethink the category of the ‘archive’, and to ‘acknowledge researchers’, artists’ and curators’ own practices as lying within the history of the archive, and not analytically separated’ (p. 3). These methodological premises summarize some of the key themes of current research: the materiality and biographies of collections and photographs, and a focus on archives as nodal points of complex social and political interactions and as subjects of research, as well as the impact of scholarly and curatorial interventions on the subject of research.

The book is organized in four parts and twelve chapters (including the introduction). The first part, ‘Connected histories’, deals with a collection of photographs taken by explorers and missionaries, ‘through which much of the continent's early photographic history has been written’ (p. 11). Although this is true, the statement omits the recent body of works that have contributed to rewriting this early history by focusing on the activities of individual African photographers in nineteenth-century West Africa. Christopher Morton's article on Richard Buchta's photographs from today's South Sudan and Northern Uganda and Christoph Rippe's research on mission photographs from South Africa are both based on a biographical approach to photographic collections and a strong consideration of photographs’ material form.

Part two, ‘Ethnographies’, is composed of three chapters. David Zeitlyn reflects on the ethical dimension of fieldwork centred on historical photographs that he has carried out in Cameroon in the last decades. Heike Behrend, well known for her research on photographers and photographic practices in East Africa, examines the presence and importance of photography in Christian Kenyans’ funeral practices, which eventually allow for the continued social presence of the deceased. Richard Vokes deals with a collection of photographs kept by a local council chairman in the corner of his living room in south-western Uganda. Although located in the chairman's home, Vokes considers the collection ‘an official archive of sorts’ which has been considerably shaped in the course of time by various kinds of archival procedures (p. 95).

Part three, ‘Political framings’, brings together case studies of photographic collections created in the context of political conflicts in late twentieth-century South Africa. In his piece, John Peffer deals with portraits and wedding photographs of ordinary black South Africans, which tell a complex story of negotiating the racial categories the apartheid state imposed on people's lives. Sophie Feyder recounts the ways in which a street exhibition in 2011 with images from a black South African photographer, Ronald Ngilima, dating from the 1950s and mid-1960s brought to the surface the conflicting narratives of community and place shaped by apartheid. Darren Newbury sketches the social biography of the Bryan Heseltine collection from South Africa to England and the role of artistic agency and the archive therein. Patricia Hayes’ article deals with a set of images documentary photographer John Liebenberg took in the early years of his professional career in a migrant labour compound in Namibia and how this foundational experience shaped his subsequent methodology.

The last part of the book, ‘Archival propositions’, presents a short piece, actually a photo-essay, by Andrea Stultiens about her ongoing collaborative work with Ugandan photographers, as well as Erin Haney and Jennifer Bajorek's review of the current institutional infrastructure for African photographic archives.