This book is a crucial source for those interested in the history of photography in Africa. Giulia Paoletti completed three years of archival research in Europe and Senegal, along with interviews with Wolof-speaking Senegalese in Saint Louis, Dakar and Touba. Paoletti is most compelling when she uses this information to write like a journalist. Her Wolof interlocutors come to life as they converse with her about the photographs, and we see through them how photography illuminates a global modernity that always casts light on the local. Fifty-five images add remarkable visual heft to the story Paoletti tells. But this fascinating story is occasionally overburdened with the relentless politicizing that typifies art history in the current ‘decolonial’ moment. Here, the frame threatens to overwhelm the picture.
Paoletti’s history begins with Saint Louis’ first daguerreotype – a portrayal of the central square of that island entrepot in 1842 with a few ghostly figures visible among the buildings. The image’s architecture, according to Paoletti, ‘bears witness to France’s unfolding imperialist project’, while the ghostly figures ‘subvert the possibility of a reassuring … eternal fixed position’ and so ‘evade the imperial’ (p. 37). Whether the real inhabitants of Saint Louis cared one way or the other about empire, central to Saint Louis’ commercial power were the signares – African women married to Frenchmen who provided the capital and European goods that facilitated the signares’ trading with Africans in the interior. The metis offspring of such unions (who in turn intermarried with Muslim Wolof speakers, usually remaining faithful to Sufi Islam) came to call themselves originaires. By the late nineteenth century, photographic portraits had become quintessential décor in the households of these Saint Louis elites.
Meanwhile, among Mouride merchants in Touba and the peanut-growing region surrounding it, another local appropriation of the photograph was taking place. Reverse-glass painters traced ethnological photographs of Sufi saints and inserted those portraits into colourful backgrounds of Islamic imagery, including mosques, exotic birds and floral motifs. This newly invented art form allowed the members of the local elite to bring the baraka of the saints into their domestic spaces. Quickly, innovators in glass painting used the motifs associated with such religious imagery to make elaborate frames for the personal portraits of wealthy locals, and these too become a common feature in Muslim households, signalling, at once, piety and prominence.
By the 1930s, photographs were everywhere in Senegal (much as was the case in virtually the whole world) as paper prints from negatives made images cheap and infinitely reproducible, and as people with cameras, the right kind of eye and entrepreneurial skills set up portrait studios. Because cameras were also increasingly available, some members of the urban upper middle class also took snapshots of family members to display in their bedrooms and living rooms.
This emerging ubiquity of photography is the topic of the two most compelling chapters in the book. One introduces us to a talented amateur, Macky Kane, an originaire in Saint Louis. A cache of Kane’s negatives was recently discovered and is now widely displayed in today’s art world. His photograph of his wife in her bridal suite on her wedding day graces the book’s cover. It is beautiful in part because of her beauty and the beauty of her Wolof patterned dress, but also because she is posed against a wall tiled in floral patterns and festooned with photographs, all portraits, mainly of women. As Paoletti explains, the photographs are brought to the wedding by the kin of the bridal couple. They reveal, as it were, their pedigree – their place in originaire high society. The photos within the photo, not to mention the juxtapositions of patterns jostling with patterns, look very much like contemporary art today. So do many of Kane’s street snapshots, with their angled buildings, cars and trains serving as modernist backgrounds for his wife posing in ‘traditional’ Wolof dress.
The other chapter compares the aesthetics of two studio photographers: Mama Casset, another originaire; and Oumar Ka, from the Touba region. Casset’s clientele came from the urbanites of Saint Louis and later Dakar, while Ka, who was ‘self-trained’, plied his trade among labourers and farmers in the rural hinterlands. Since the early 1990s, Casset has been an important figure in curatorial efforts to claim a special place for African photography in the wider history of photography as an art form that interrogates modernity. His images show African women and girls revealing (and revelling in) their wealth or modernity. Two girls in identical hairstyles gaze at the viewer as they pose in the studio – one holding a prop telephone receiver to her ear, the other showing off a wristwatch. In another studio portrait, a Wolof woman ‘of generous size’ displays gold earrings, necklaces and bracelets. The woman’s eyes are the focus. These eyes, as the Wolof term has it, seem about to lampsal – to open wide and close in a seductive way – a gesture (as Paoletti interprets it) that ‘figures forth her ability to attract and conquer the reality she desires’ (p. 143).
By contrast, Paoletti emphasizes that Ka’s work ‘has yet to receive global attention’ (p. 133). She makes a case for that attention by noting that Ka’s images convey an aesthetic that is the opposite of the ‘shine’ of Casset’s. They are almost ethnological in that the people appear as types, yet they are also clearly portraits in that they often show the standard tools of the studio – a cloth backdrop, for example – as part of the photographic vignette. In the current art world, to call attention to the artifice of image making is very cutting edge, and so is the label ‘self-taught’, which allows curators to reinscribe outsiders as artistic pioneers. Indeed, a perhaps unconscious subtext of Paoletti’s book is how photography that has historically required curators to do the work of interpellation defines the current moment as Africa claims its place in the global art world.
