There are neither many books on the history of photography in Mozambique nor those that narrate Mozambican history through photography. Drew Thompson's Filtering Histories fills this gap by bringing these two perspectives together. From one side, the book narrates the history of photography in Mozambique chronologically from the 1960s until the post-socialist period of the 1990s. On the other, Thompson narrates Mozambican history through images, most of which have never been analyzed historically by Mozambican historians. Thompson unites the two strands via the concepts of ‘filter’ and ‘photographic bureaucracy’. He argues photography was part of both the colonial and postcolonial political projects and was therefore always associated with power. ‘Filters’ and ‘filtering’ are more than just camera flashes, lighting, or chemical solutions, they are also based on a particular regime of truth that establishes hierarchies of image credibility, and in that sense they become ultimately ‘visual tools for governance’ (5).
The second concept, ‘photographic bureaucracy’, builds on filtering by focusing on the mechanism of censorship mechanisms. For the author, bureaucratic regulations and procedures enact the politics of photographic (in)visibility. He focuses on two institutions — the colonial Gabinete de Negócios Políticos (Cabinet of Political Affairs) and the postcolonial Ministério de Informação (Ministry of Information) — as sites of the photographic bureaucracy. Both were central in the production, distribution, and circulation of propaganda photography, but, as Thompson argues, there were also limits to what the photographic bureaucracy was able to achieve and control. Photography and photographers were still able to disrupt the state's bureaucracy and developed new ways of seeing that challenged the colonial as well Frelimo's (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) regime of truth.
The book has five chapters. The first addresses how the Portuguese colonial state used photography both in Mozambique and Portugal. The chapter ends with the downfall of the colonial state and the first steps towards Frelimo's state rule. Here, Thompson focuses on the agents of the photographic bureaucracy, as well as how photographic images were produced, distributed, and circulated. As in all the book's chapters, this one evolves around the creation of state mechanisms for censorship, whether those of the colonial state, or Frelimo's initial efforts to use photography to cement its hegemonic project. The next chapter considers what Thompson describes as ‘paper diplomacy’, during the national liberation struggle. Here we see how Frelimo's administrative, diplomatic, and military arms used both photography and written documents to produce its international profile and to ensure global recognition of its war. Internally, their first agent was the ‘soldier-photographer’, who found themselves in a dilemma of to click or to shoot, to ‘continuing photographing or drop the camera for the gun’ (94). Thompson brings here an interesting discussion on the tensions and ambiguities that this hyphenated identity produced. As he argues, in the heat of the battle photography was not a priority for Frelimo, but at the same time, their officials felt the need to create a photographic bureaucracy to produce a visual narrative of the liberation struggle.
Chapter Three delves into Mozambique's socialist period. It is the most interesting part of the book. In this chapter, Thompson best develops his concept of photographic bureaucracy. He argues that in the wake of Frelimo's nationalization efforts the Ministério da Informação took control of the media and regulated how photographers were able to photograph the state. The state tried to regulate photography through bureaucratic procedures (designing laws, decrees, public meetings, etc.) that focused on giving the guidelines for image making, selection, and use, as well as in developing monitoring and censorship mechanisms. Photographers responded differently to these state enactments. Although all of them internalized Frelimo's hegemonic project of building socialism in Mozambique, the responses were different. Some blindly followed the state directives, others began to develop new aesthetics and ‘new ways of seeing’ (146) like José Cabral's apolitical image of a childbirth. Others, like photographer Ricardo Rangel, became slowly disillusioned with the growth of state censorship in the media.
While Chapter Three focused on photography in general, considering both propaganda and photojournalism, Chapter Four — entitled ‘ID'ing the Past’ — is more about, to use a Foucauldian term, the ‘biopower’ exerted by official headshots, especially those found in identity documents. The colonial state left the majority of the Black population without identity cards and passports. Although during the liberation struggle headshots were not a necessity (Frelimo's member card did not feature photographs, for example), in the postindependence period Frelimo promoted identification documents as symbols of its metamorphosis into a political party. The chapter discusses, for instance, forms of state identification and surveillance, like the guias de marcha, cartão de residente, and cartão de trabalho, and, much later, biometric forms of identification.
The last chapter deals with the civil war period. It takes the international newsroom (AIM, Agência da Informação de Moçambique), created by the Ministry of Information, as a way to examine how, in a time of crisis, the state's photographic bureaucracies were shaped by the geopolitical context of southern African and international media. The ruling power used photography both to intensify the ideological boundaries between the good ‘popular armed forces’ and the ‘armed bandits’ of Renamo (Resistência Nacional de Moçambique). In this political gamble, AIM's photography became in Thompson's view ‘dead photography’ as they were seen by the foreign news agencies as the tool of state propaganda, and locally, not being fully recognized in their photographic work. For instance, Frelimo prohibited photographers from travelling to Renamo-occupied areas, as a way to control how the war could be narrated visually. Thompson also argues that through photography Frelimo sought to mask their own failures in developing the country with South Africa's destabilization project. But photographers were caught in another dead end. For instance, their recognition of the discrepancy between the rhetoric of South Africa as the enemy and the realities of a civil war where photographs showed only ‘Mozambicans killing other Mozambicans’(197).
For all of its chronological range, Thompson's intervention is quite narrow and the book is more suitable for readers who are already familiar with the ins and outs of Mozambican history. And although Thompson's focus certainly is unique within Mozambican historiography, the rather dry prose occasionally made it difficult to fully appreciate his intervention. Furthermore, the book missed opportunities to consider the photographic bureaucracy in other state structures — in the university, for example. In a context of one-party rule, the production of knowledge within the state universities was shaped by the dictates of the existing photographic bureaucracies and Frelimo's highly subjective regime of truth. Researchers have had to pause and think carefully and politically about what images to use in their reports, journals, historical magazines, or books. In the early 1980s, for example, there was a conflict between the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA) at Eduardo Mondlane University and the government over the publication of a CEA report, the cover image of which depicted several children picking cotton in Frelimo's state farms. The state intervened, arguing that the photograph could tarnish Mozambique's reputation as a country committed to the social revolution to improve people's conditions. According to a former CEA researcher, Bridget O'Laughlin, the center was advised to remove the image from the study. For all of its twists, turns, and limitations, the photography bureaucracy remained a force with which people had to reckon.
