Beyond the “African” Archive Paradigm

Photographies in Africa in the digital age

“…among the very ‘source communities’ from which the pictures had come, as a means for both encouraging people to engage in their own visual heritage and for involving those communities in scholarly research projects). As Haney and Schneider have documented (2014), from roughly the late 1990s and throughout the early years of the 2000s, these combined imperatives generated new, and often highly transnational, networks of multidisciplinary scholars, museum curators, archivists, art photographers and commercial dealers and publishers, and led to a veritable explosion in the number of projects and initiatives aimed at identifying, saving, making accessible and in some cases bringing to market Africa's extraordinary photographic heritage.…”

“…For example, my own respondents in south-western Uganda had exactly these responses – and others besides – to a collection of some 650 historical images that I recently took to the field on my iPad and used in a photo-elicitation exercise 10 . Finally, if the period from the late 1990s onwards witnessed the emergence of new transnational and interdisciplinary networks of scholars, museum curators, archivists, art photographers and commercial dealers, then the digital revolution has greatly extended these and has allowed for far more extensive, and technically sophisticated, projects and initiatives to be conducted on an international scale and in real time (Haney and Schneider 2014).…”

EDITOR'S DESK Sharing African Photographic Archives in the Digital Era: Exploring Their Material and Affective Dimensions

“…In the footsteps of other researchers (Bajorek, 2013;Buckley, 2005Buckley, , 2008Haney & Schneider, 2014;Morton & Newbury, 2015;Schneider, 2018), two articles in this issue place their inquiries on the photographic archive itself, focusing on the "archive-as-subject" rather than "archiveas-source" (Stoler, 2002, p. 93). The Afterlife of a Colonial Photographic Archive: The Subjective Legacy of InforCongo by Sandrine Colard and Collectivizing (Re)sources: The Photographic Estate of Ulli Beier, jointly written by Katharina Greven, Lena Naumann, Siegrun Salmanian, and Nadine Siegert-all attached to the Iwalewahaus art and research center at the University of Bayreuthespecially deal with their diverse social lives, during and after their constitutions.…”