Fashionable Photography in Mid-Twentieth-Century Senegal

Abstract

This article explores the reciprocal transformative effects of Senegalese fashion and photography from the post-World-War-lI movements for Independence to the transnational youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It draws upon photographs from a museum archive and several family collections in Senegal. Photographs as physical objects and their particular archival spaces decisively influence the way we read photographic content. They thus also influence the way we read the look and meaning of the fashions portrayed. But the converse also holds: new, politically imbued fashions can disrupt established genres of Senegalese

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