Cine-film, Film-strips and the Devolution of Colonial Photography in The Gambia

Buckley, Liam

doi:10.1080/03087290903361522

Cited by 6 publications

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“…In turn, the participation of these photographers in colonial public relations formed part of a wider increase in the participation of Gambian colonial subjects in the governmental and civic life of the colony. The photographs depict new forms of participation at events such as parades, sporting affairs, the visits of dignitaries, and the opening of legislative sessions (Buckley ).…”

Section: Methods and Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, some of them were related to people who had served, from the mid‐1930s onward, on the Cinematograph Board of Control. This board had advised the colony's administration on matters related to visual media and reviewed all imported imagery including still photographs, films, posters, and advertising material (Buckley , 149). These people would have been children aged five to ten when the photographs were taken, and in their early twenties at independence.…”

Section: Methods and Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This essay draws on ethnographic research into the relationship between photographic aesthetics and postcolonial studies. I analyze a series of interviews centered on photographic images of life in the Gambia Colony in the 1940s and 1950s (see Buckley , ) . Rather than interpreting the images historically, in terms of the politics and socioeconomics of colonial life, the interviewees resolutely focused on the photographs’ aesthetic details.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Photography and Photo-Elicitation after Colonialism

Buckley

2014

Cult. Anthropol.

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In photo-elicitation studies of colonial imagery, photographs are seen as repositories of historical data. This article examines the author’s experience of photo-elicitation in the postcolonial context of The Gambia, West Africa. Here, Gambian viewers responded to the aesthetic and compositional details of colonial photographs rather than their historical content. This attention to the surface of the photograph and its aesthetic qualities suggests a disconnection or distraction from the colonial history depicted in the images. This photo-elicitation does not engage or resolve a historical relationship with the colonial past. Rather, it reveals an engagement with elements of the photograph in which the visual legacies of colonialism—identification, representation, memorialization—remain absent. The absence of acknowledged connections to the past calls into question the ability of the photograph to represent the colonial past or its subjects to the viewer. In Gambian viewers’ preoccupation with aesthetic details, the photograph becomes a crafted object, rather than a link to colonial subordination. This calls into question the efficacy of photo-elicitation to demonstrate reactions to colonialism that move beyond Eurocentric frameworks.

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Section: Methods and Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methods and Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Photography and Photo-Elicitation after Colonialism

Buckley

2014

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…The first relates to the ways in which, from the establishment of colonial rule onwards, successive administrations often used photography as a means for making visible their future goals for the country. Most notably, from the time when Europeans first arrived in the late nineteenth century, they frequently employed or commissioned photographers to extensively picture official opening ceremonies, new civic buildings and modern institutions (such as schools, hospitals and prisons), and other ‘examples of “progress”’ (Buckley 2010: 147; cf. Vokes 2012b).…”

Section: Signs Of Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signs of development: photographic futurism and the politics of affect in Uganda

Vokes¹

2019

Africa

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This article contributes to recent scholarship on an emergent public political visual culture in Africa. Through an ethnographic study of political billboards and other government-sponsored public political imagery in Uganda, it argues that this new visual culture is primarily characterized by African states’ extensive use of post-photographic techniques as a means for projecting fantastic visions of their future development goals. However, drawing on recent insights from the ‘material turn’ in visual theory, it finds that – in Uganda's case at least – the potency of these new public visual artefacts may stem less from what they show than from how they invoke in their citizen-viewers an embodied sense of future possibilities. Once generated, this affective response can be mobilized by the state and its agents in the ‘here and now’, for political gain. The article looks at how this worked in the run-up to Uganda's 2016 presidential elections, when, in the context of major new spending on national infrastructure projects, the images and artefacts of this new visual culture served to greatly amplify the sense that all citizens would benefit from an emergent global capitalism. This inflated aspiration was mobilized in turn by the National Resistance Movement government as an integral part of its election campaign, and played a key role in returning the government to power.

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“…In other words – and as a growing body of recent scholarship has highlighted – their efforts to dominate the photographic domain were always and everywhere undermined by other kinds of photographic practices that were going on at the same time, and that in many cases were antithetical to their state-building projects. For example, Liam Buckley's work in the Gambia has highlighted how, from the start of colonial rule, government-employed photographers would frequently also conduct their own private or commercial photographic work ‘on the side’ – the products of which often presented a quite different view from the official line on the nature of the colony's ‘progress’ (2010: 147–8; see also Haney 2010). Similarly, Jennifer Bajorek's work in Senegal has shown how, throughout the late-colonial period in particular, state-sponsored studios also produced their own images, which later became central to a nascent iconography of African nationalism (2010).…”

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confidence: 99%

Photographies in Africa in the digital age

Vokes¹

2019

Africa

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In recent years, all kinds of African photographies, both on the continent and in the diaspora, have undergone a digital ‘revolution’ (Ekine and Manji 2012). Without doubt, the key driver of this trend has been the rapid, and massive, influx to practically all African countries of ever more affordable third generation/advanced mobile phone handsets, or smartphones. Even compared with earlier technological revolutions on the continent, both the speed and the scale of this spread have been simply breathtaking. For example, the establishment of transistor radio sets – the process through which personal radios became ubiquitous across Africa – occurred over the period of at least a decade and a half (between roughly the late 1950s and the early 1970s). Similarly, the original mobile phone revolution – i.e. the process through which early generation/low functionality mobile phones went from being a source of novelty, to a domain for experimentation, to technologies that were routinized in everyday life, throughout the continent – took more than a decade to unfold (the crucial years being those between roughly 1999 and 2010) (Vokes 2018b). Against both of those earlier processes, the emergence of smartphones occurred over a much shorter timeframe. Between 2011 and mid-2015 alone, the number of smartphones being imported into Africa – the majority of them sub-US$100 Android-based systems – jumped from around 10 million units per annum to almost 100 million (Tshabalala 2015), as a result of which these devices became quickly established as a common feature of everyday life. Today, more than one-third of all mobile phones in Africa are smartphones, and this percentage is set to rise to two-thirds by 2020 (GSMA Intelligence 2017).

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Cine-film, Film-strips and the Devolution of Colonial Photography in The Gambia

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Photography and Photo-Elicitation after Colonialism

Photography and Photo-Elicitation after Colonialism

Signs of development: photographic futurism and the politics of affect in Uganda

Photographies in Africa in the digital age

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