These opening quotations capture the topical, conceptual, and methodological developments in the field of photographic studies as it relates to the African continent and its history. Back in 1986, scholars like Christraud Geary were concerned with writing histories of the photographic medium in Africa and with identifying archived photographic collections of and from Africa. This literature presented photographs as worthy of scholarly interrogation. What is markedly different almost thirty years later is that photography in Africa is no longer understudied (or in need of justification) and that scholars like Heike Behrend, whose work was influenced by Geary, have vastly shifted their understandings of the camera’s documentary capacities. In fact, Behrend begins from the premise of photography as a multidimensional and historically formative medium, and she challenges the assumption that the presence of the camera always translates to visibility. The evolution of photographic studies on Africa progressed in full force during the years of 2012 and 2013 with the publication of a monograph, two edited volumes, and an exhibition catalogue that all showcase a range of archival collections, the diverse photographic practices and forms of spectatorship found on the continent, and reflections on methodological approaches of study. In order to come to terms with the disciplinary expectations for photography as both a source and object of study, I will situate these recent texts within the broader field of photographic studies as they relate to Africa. Then I will highlight the intellectual projects of each work in order to appreciate their contributions and the areas of study that they advance.

Photographic studies on Africa developed, and continue to develop, at the intersection of various academic disciplines, most prominently anthropology, art history, history, and critical theory. Generally speaking, photography is a technical and technological practice that involves a range of human and nonhuman actors and that includes either the production of an actual image or the idea that a photographic image exists if a camera was present—aspects that lend themselves to interdisciplinary approaches of theorization and study.^{Footnote 1} The analytical possibilities offered by the medium’s multidimensionality are not always translatable to the conditions of image-making and -viewing that exist on and around the continent. Furthermore, scholars have grappled with the need to reconcile developments in critical theory, which are largely universalistic in tone, with local, less “visible,” and minimally documented cultures of photographic production, consumption, and circulation. Initially, scholars interested in photography in Africa traced the medium’s technological history on the continent, which became synonymous with colonization. This strategy attached a specific date to the invention and introduction of photographic technologies, and in turn overshadowed longstanding practices and notions of image viewing that were under way before the camera’s supposed arrival. As a result, more generalized questions of representation and authenticity, debates on origins and encounters, and binaries, such as African versus European, local versus imported, have framed the field of photography in Africa. As Richard Vokes notes in the volume reviewed here, further complicating such studies are the efforts of curators like Okwui Enwezor (also reviewed below). Projects like the Rise and Fall of Apartheid sometimes uncover the works of photographers and showcase them within galleries and museums. However, according to Vokes, in the process these curatorial endeavors assign commercial values to images, reinforce the idea of the photographer as the sole producer of an image, and set the tone of study in terms of genre and visual aesthetic.

One could organize this review in different ways, including by chronology, type, or photographic genres. I have elected to begin with Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester’s Rise and Fall of Apartheid, followed by an analysis of John Peffer and Elisabeth Cameron’s edited volume, Portraiture and Photography in Africa. Both books represent the polarizing effects that stylistic genres, such as social documentary and portraiture, have had on photographic scholarship in Africa, and each book reflects a type of geographic exceptionalism, meaning that most photographic surveys have focused on cultures of production and circulation within either South Africa or the region of West Africa. In terms of argument, Peffer and Cameron’s volume contests the humanist concept and curatorial efforts of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid to “explor[e] the role of photography in shaping . . . a portrait of the people of South Africa” in order to show “African subjects [as] agents of their own emancipation” (18). In the volume’s introduction, Peffer takes issue with what he calls “the underexamined features of portraiture,” and, in turn, he embraces the idea of the vernacular in order to explore what he calls “popular uses of photography,” more intimate historical forms of “handling, making, and reception” in regard to the making and seeing of images of the self (2). Building on twenty years of fieldwork, Heike Behrend’s monograph, Visibility: Photographic Practices on the East African Coast, draws our attention to East Africa, and she explores histories of studio photography practiced by both Muslims and Christians within the settings of marriage, veiling, and funeral rites—cultural practices that traditionally have had complicated relationships with the camera and the photographer’s trade. Richard Vokes’s edited work, Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives, includes essays that dissect the role of photography (as image and practice) within anthropologists’ ethnographic work, and it is this historically and ethnographically informed attention to the construction of the photographic archive on Africa that presents a new lens to consider the overlap, and even lack of distinction, between genres like “vernacular” and official, or “state,” photography. This book also attempts to introduce different contexts to evaluate both the “affect” and the “effect” of photographs within social processes.

Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, edited by Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester, is a catalogue to an exhibition held in the United States, Germany, and South Africa.^{Footnote 2} The text features numerous images by several generations of South African photographers that document the 1948 rise of the Nationalist Party (which instituted apartheid) and the antiapartheid struggles that would lead to apartheid’s dismantling and the election in 1994 of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president. There is a particular irony to the selection of images. On the one hand, the chronologically arranged images are very familiar to aficionados of South African photography, and feature recognizable names including David Goldblatt, Jürgen Schadeberg, Omar Badsha, and Paul Weinberg. On the other hand, the catalogue editors claim that this display of images disrupts more dominant representations of Africans as victims and illustrates both the normalization and contestation of apartheid within people’s everyday lives. Nevertheless, the pictures are intriguing because their varied formats invite the observer to explore the writing on walls, the printed metal signs that designated entrances and seating, and the crowds that gathered in support of, and even protested against, apartheid. The photographs, which depict whites, blacks, and sometimes whites and blacks, together create, and at the same time disrupt, a color line that the institution of apartheid policed. The catalogue format allows the reader to interrogate the faces of the pictured subjects and to follow the different paths that they traveled over the course of apartheid. In turn, seeing what happened within spaces reserved exclusively for whites and blacks fosters a type of intimacy.

However, there are several issues with the selection, arrangement, and labeling of images. First, based on when they were photographed and dated, the images are organized into ten-year increments that span 1948 to contemporary times. This grouping undermines the photographs’ abilities to disrupt our understanding of time by suggesting that all images were viewed and/or made public at the time of their taking and in such an order. There is an effort to use photographs to unearth less documented, and in part less visible, moments in apartheid’s history, but such an endeavor assumes that everyone wanted to be seen. Taking into consideration Behrend’s idea of the “aesthetics of withdrawal” (which I address below), what about instances when images were rebuffed and destroyed? What about the reality of being pictured and then having the police use captured images to identify and punish? Also intriguing, but not discussed, is the notion that all photographers were known—as denoted by the “unidentified photographer” label attached to some photos—and the possibility that other images were either not photographed or never will be exhibited because their location remains unknown. These unanswered queries suggest that there were in fact nonemancipatory aspects to the documentary, thereby raising the issue of how the prospects of and desires for invisibility shaped representations of the “everyday.” Finally, when one considers that the apartheid regime legitimized itself by waging war against its neighbors, the selection of only South African photographers appears to have been a decision of expediency. The photography on display was not specific to South Africa. In fact, apartheid-era photography flourished in and around clandestine yet transnational technical and political networks. To be “South African” was not just conceived of in isolation but in relation to events and practices of visuality happening across Southern Africa.

Interspersed throughout the catalogue are essays that address some of the questions, ironies, and contradictions displayed by the featured images. The included authors, whose work has been formative to the literature on South African photography, express a sense of uncertainty and ambivalence when it comes to thinking about what it means to display images of apartheid almost twenty years after apartheid’s official end. There is also a dissatisfaction with genres like “struggle” and “social documentary” photography, which have outlasted their utility because they cannot suitably capture the debates and quandaries that surrounded the making and circulation of photographs. In his essay, Darren Newberry interrogates the ruminations on photography that Athol Fugard portrays in his 1972 play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead in an effort to consider the following questions: “What, then, remains to be written about the history of photography in apartheid South Africa? What is the task of photographic history after apartheid (226)?” Achille Mbembe, whose essay precedes Newberry’s, explains that now that apartheid is over, a time for “erasure and effacement” has emerged, thereby displacing and not memorializing the unknown and unwanted (70). Mbembe proposes to “see” apartheid with respect to the ways that apartheid and its associated institutions and practices marked, trained, and punished the black body. Michael Godby considers the formation of the idea and image of the black native by analyzing the photographic studies of the famed Constance Stuart Larrabee and Leon Levson and the institutional affiliations that facilitated their work as photographers. For Colin Richards and Patricia Hayes, there is a normalization of certain images and their constant repetition across apartheid’s photographic archives. Richards’s contribution, which entails a revisiting of the work of Ernest Cole and Larrabee alongside photos of the late apartheid era, suggests that the notion and normalization of what is being called the “everyday” was an active choice on the part of photographers to come to terms with the professional, social, and political demands of their roles as photographers and the policing (sometimes self-imposed) that they faced. Patricia Hayes complicates this idea of normalization by addressing the subject of repetition. Hayes sorts through the internal divisions of the racially and socioeconomically diverse photography collective Afrapix, and identifies moral proclivities regarding photography’s documentary capacities that collapsed under the influence of photojournalism’s global market. The chronological ordering of events and even images of apartheid feeds into a type of repetition, but this repetition, as Hayes notes, should be understood as unseen forms of residues and secrets of violence seeking compensation for what previously could and could not be seen. Ultimately, these essays are insightful on two accounts. First, they include unpublished interviews with South African photographers and journalists. Second, they are fruitful for the ways that the authors seek to understand South Africa’s apartheid history, “then” and “now,” largely through how photographic practices developed in relation to what Rory Bester terms “photographic truth” (509) and photographers’ changing roles.

John Peffer and Elisabeth Cameron’s volume, Portraiture and Photography in Africa, includes articles that probe the premise that photographs can represent Africa and its populations not as victims but instead as agents of change. At dispute is the idea that photographed subjects see themselves in the liberatory ways in which curators exhibit and portray them. For Peffer, there is not only the need to think about who and what is depicted in photographic portrait, but also the need for scholars to interrogate their own expectations of such portraiture. The discovery of new archives and the continuation, as well as reinvention, of old image-making techniques means that there now exists a much-needed context for writing a history of portraiture in Africa. The text acknowledges that portraiture in Africa can be, and largely has been, situated as a studio practice and understood as a public expression of personhood.

This book is no different from other scholarly works on studio photography in its interest in issues of self-fashioning, which can be understood as a culturally contingent mode of representation and method for tracking historical change. The strength of this text is its effort to study a history of portraiture in Africa and the idea that photography was one part of larger processes of social imagining. The book’s first section, “Exchange,” includes a series of essays that contextualize the movement of photographers, photographs, and photographed subjects, sometimes with their cameras but mostly with their images, across West Africa in the late nineteenth century and in more recent times. Érika Nimis’s and Erin Haney’s elaborate tracking of photographers across West Africa and the studio networks that resulted, and Elisabeth Cameron’s own revelation that different modes of self-representation were at work in her own fieldwork photographs, offer great insights. Nonetheless, I cannot help returning to Peffer’s introduction and wondering how such modes of study translate to other parts of Africa, especially ones where concepts of archives and access to photographs differ greatly. There is also the possibility that practices of photography in other parts of Africa did not occur only along the geographies of the Atlantic, as was the case in Europe’s colonization of West Africa.

In the book’s second part, “Social Lives,” Christraud Geary considers the making and reuse in more contemporary times of Bamum photographs produced by African and Europeans, while Isolde Brielmaier and Liam Buckley look at studio practices in postindependent Kenya and Gambia, respectively. Z. S. Strother seeks to complicate notions of photography as a Western technology imported to Africa and to unpack the presumed fear that African populations were believed to have when they encountered Europeans with cameras. The authors explore portraiture as a space of authority and the ways that photographs allow for modes of both representation and imagination that serve as sites of social, political, and economic legitimacy. However, this line of thinking about photographic portraiture only as an untested and widely accepted expression of one’s urbanity or modernity remains, to a fault, underdeveloped. The text’s final section explores how the inclusion of photography impacted longstanding artistic traditions in Africa. One of the central essays in this part is by Til Föster, who asks what it means for populations to know information visually, which he contends complicates Western notions of borrowing, appropriation, and reproduction. He traces the representation of “social personae” from wooden ancestral statues in Côte D’Ivoire to digital photography on cell phones, and he determines that the introduction of new media does not replace different cultural practices of visual knowledge, but instead brings together the “individual and social” in complex ways (434).

In Contesting Visibility: Photographic Practices on the East African Coast, Heike Behrend, focusing on populations that practiced Islam in Mombasa and Lamu, questions the conceptual idea proposed in Peffer and Cameron’s volume that populations blindly accepted photography’s representational capacities. In fact, despite the proliferation of photography in “existing economies of representation, ritual passages (weddings and funerals), the culture of festivities, ways of remembrance, and subjectivities,” she contends that over time studied populations formed negative relationships to the camera and image, in the process producing “new opacities” (25). To demonstrate the flip side of photography’s proliferation—what Behrend calls its “shunning and defacement”—she locates her study within the theoretical idea of “ethnographic practices of photography,” an attempt by anthropologists to decenter Westernized understandings of the photographic medium by connecting it to “pre-existing media, aesthetics, and practices” (13, 18). For the author, photography is a “performative act, image, and object,” located at the intersection of the “state, the photo studio, and the mosque” (23). She analyzes photographs not just in terms of their visual content and aesthetic, but also in terms of what she refers to as their “visual precedents,” how they compare to prior forms (and standards) of visualization and picturing of self. Surveying examples from colonial to modern times, Behrend opens the possibility that photographers and their subjects actively tricked the photographic medium in order to disrupt its documentary capabilities. In the process, she introduces an innovative line of questioning to the field of photographic studies on Africa, which requires repeating: “How can visual media such as photography that privilege the act of making visible cope with secrets and concealment? How can concealment be recorded or reproduced by photography? How can non-representational rituals that attempt to transform the intimate be mediated through visual technical media?” (23).

Behrend’s evidence and arguments persuasively propose a rethinking of the visual in relation to the act of rejecting the camera and images. Those familiar with Behrend’s work will notice that the book’s first chapters replicate her previous writings on studio photography and self-fashioning. What is new is the historical contextualization of this work within more recent technological and political events such as the invention of digital photography and both regional and global terrorist attacks. Behrend’s most compelling proposition is the idea of the “aesthetic of withdrawal” that surrounded acts of veiling, weddings, and funerals (20). There is a rich tradition of the making of textiles along the Swahili coast of Tanzania and Kenya, and these objects contain intricate patterns with their own historical and material significance. Mainstream thought has suggested that the camera exposed these traditions to public spheres and that images of textiles offer insight into social hierarchies and displays of wealth. However, Behrend’s study of veiling demonstrates that the act of covering one’s face and shielding it from the camera became a way to assert one’s social status while also preserving one’s photographic (re-)presentation.

Behrend draws connections between veiling and the colonial government’s introduction of the ID photograph, which became a way of penetrating, or unveiling, the social and political barriers constructed by some African populations in response to photography’s practice. Another aspect of this “aesthetic of withdrawal” relates to weddings, the intricacies and ceremonies of which Behrend documents. She claims that as the camera’s flash produces flickers of light, which connect with the dazzle of the setting and the glitter on the bride’s dress, it creates a distance between photographer and subject, despite their close proximity. On the one hand, this produced invisibility protects the bride from “evil eyes” (196). On the other hand, it is this perceived loss of spirituality and self in the wake of excess that leads studied groups to nurture different relationships among spirit, body, and image. But for Behrend such a realization introduces an analytical space to explore this loss and its recovery in the wake of death and other spirit possession ceremonies.

The book concludes with a discussion of digital photography, a feature not widely addressed in the other texts, and the revelation of a new anxiety among the studied populations of being photographed without consent and without the creation of negatives. The monograph’s major insights include the line of questioning that it presents and the idea that truth is not based on the image but instead on visual perception. Behrend warns that withdrawal from the camera’s gaze does not equal disempowerment, and that with this loss new modes for conceptualizing visuality emerge.

One of the underutilized and understudied topics in the Rise and Fall of Apartheid is bureaucracy; that is, the ways that the apartheid state conceptualized and implemented its power through the production and policing of photographic images of itself and the antiapartheid struggle. The “everyday” is often theorized in opposition to the apartheid state, but that leaves little room to consider the inevitable overlaps and interdependencies between the technical and professional networks in which the apartheid state and antiapartheid movement each created photographic images of itself and contested those of the other. While much of the literature on South African photography promotes this idea of struggle and documentary photography, the authors included in Richard Vokes’s Photography in Africa demonstrate that photography was, in fact, a part of other state-crafting and nationalist struggles happening across the continent, mainly in the postindependence periods. In order to understand the ways in which the production and circulation of images serviced these efforts, it is helpful to begin with how Vokes’s volume complicates interpretations of genres and the modes of social change orchestrated by photography.

Vokes states that scholars, to a fault, often rely on genre to designate practices and styles of photography, which leads to a misconstruction of certain technical and professional realities. In his own article in the volume, Vokes locates an understanding of the vernacular both within the studio and in the Ugandan government’s efforts to use studios to create ID documents. In turn, he explores the relationships fostered between studios and different governing regimes. (I would add that these alliances tend to be more visible, and hence accessible, in postindependence contexts, but they can also be traced to and within the contours of colonialism.) While he discusses similarities in terms of images and production networks between government-affiliated photographers and those who worked independently, he states that the scholarly objective is no longer to map different photographic practices, but instead to determine how and why certain similarities exist among diverse practitioners. “Similarity” or mimesis, like Patricia Hayes’s idea of repetition or Heike Behrend’s concept of withdrawal, can then be considered in relation to cultural practices in a place like Uganda, where people give multiple images of themselves to validate social relationships, an act that emphasizes the interrelationships among societal notions of personhood, secrecy, and photography (227). Corey Kratz’s article extends Vokes’s analysis by investigating the image display practices of Kenya’s Okiek population. Informed by comparative and ethnographic research on how photographs are displayed in people’s homes and the ways that they came to occupy walls, her analysis uncovers the architectural and material constraints that determined certain photographic displays while also highlighting photographs’ “moral economies,” the acquisition of photographs through familial affiliations and their display at special gatherings (252). “Seeing,” according to Kratz, is an idiom in which the Okiek talk of change, recount memories, and preserve familial bonds.

Kratz’s and Vokes’s essays in Photography in Africa help readers to position the significance of the case studies by Katrien Pype, Katie McKeown, and Jennifer Bajorek contained in the book’s second section, “Picturing the Nation: Photography, Memory and Resistance.” Pype documents the display of political posters and wall paintings throughout Kinshasa, Congo. She demonstrates how Joseph Kabila’s picture fosters a type of historical lineage that translates into political legitimacy. She also explores the complex emotional responses that governments try to play into with their images and even the destructive responses of possible voters. McKeown studies the documentation, imagination, and reworking of the image of Gorongosa’s National Park. While her essay overlooks the regional and political dynamics that engulfed Gorongosa, in addition to conditions under which photographers worked, the piece does propose an interesting relationship between the imagination of landscapes, photography, and discourses of conservation, one that displays dimensions both of erasure and repetition (to draw from Hayes’s concepts). Lastly, Bajorek frames the Senegalese magazine Bingo as a site of political participation and argues that a type of pan-Africanism emerges through readers’ submission of photographs. At times she makes a few unsupported claims about the magazine’s editorial processes, but her analysis does raise new questions for exploring the political alliances and differences of opinion in regard to press publications that developed among Africa’s literate classes. Also of interest is Bajorek’s ethnographic encounter with the family of the Senegalese photographer Doudou Diop. A retracing of his practice through her own engagement with his photographs highlights another dimension to the political spaces that developed around West African studios, particularly patrons’ awareness of the studio’s “public-ness” and the power of discourses and performances of photography as sociopolitical critiques.

The works reviewed here situate interested scholars on new ground. Photography is inherently revisionist and introspective. So, it is not surprising to find scholars in these works revisiting and revising their previous analyses and wrestling with the possibilities presented by new theories such as the types of “visibilities” that come with “partialities” and “opacities.” However, while these authors do propose new theoretical and methodological approaches, they tend not to consider what processes of writing do to the documentation and representation of photography’s seemingly oral and visual dimensions. Here I am reminded of the writer Teju Cole (Reference Cole2014), who incorporates his own photographs into his fictional and nonfictional works, and other contemporary African writers such as José Eduardo Agualusa, who in the Book of Chameleons (2008) features as the central character a photographer who distorts reality by offering clients new identities. In a recent reading, Cole explained that photographs are fictionalized when they are decontextualized, but he noted that when he integrates photographs into his fiction “there is a vibe of not being entirely made up.” The taking of pictures in the mode of a street photographer allows him “to capture what is here right now,” and it is a process of trying to apprehend meaning through the photograph that enters his writing, which he characterizes as having the descriptive quality associated with interpreting a photograph.^{Footnote 3} Thinking about the ways that students of photography assign power to practices of image-making and -viewing through the act of writing opens a space to consider how critical theory on photography is not always translatable to an African context and how documented practices on the continent advance existing analytical frameworks. Furthermore, examining how writing shapes our field of knowledge about photography raises new topical possibilities, including the fictionalizing capacities of images and the narrative of photography that emerges through what Suren Pillay called a “sense of play” provoked by the affective and speculative registers.^{Footnote 4} Notwithstanding, these works push against the binaries imposed by genre distinctions such as “press” and “commercial” as characterizations of photographic practices, and they highlight strategies for moving beyond cameras and printed images as central sites of visibility.