Of Jumbled Valises and Civil Society: Photography and Political Imagination in Senegal

If You Were in My Sneakers: Migration Stories in the Studio Photography of Dakar‐Based Omar Victor Diop

“…Photographic images across independent West Africa incorporated local ways of seeing and being seen (Ouédraogo ). This “emancipatory power” (Bajorek , 434) of independence‐era studio photography contrasted with scientific aims and narratives of colonial‐era photography that presented subjects as specimens and types (Rabine , 314). Moreover, Keita, Sidibe, and Casset, in contrast to other commercial photographers of their era, were master archivists, a key criterion for global recognition early on .…”

Photographies in Africa in the digital age

“…Finally, a growing body of more recent work, inspired by the wider ‘material turn’ within visual cultural studies, has sought instead to define ‘Africanness’ in relation to the physical photographs themselves, and to the way in which these may operate as culturally meaningful artefacts (Vokes 2008; 2012b). The argument here – which is made more or less explicitly by different theorists – is that ‘African photographies’ refer to only certain kinds of photographic image-objects: those that have been produced in identifiably African social and material contexts (for example, Bajorek 2010; Bleiker and Kay 2007; Haney 2004; 2010); are circulated through and are engaged with as part of the kinds of domestic activities, ritual practices and exchange networks that exist on the continent (see, for example, Behrend 2003; 2012); and invoke culturally distinctive kinds of embodied sensory responses from their viewers (Kratz 2012; Pype 2012; Vokes 2015). In other words, the ‘African’ qualities of particular photographs refer less to the identity of their producers or to anything that they represent, and more to the work that they do as part of their being incorporated into particular kinds of life worlds.…”

Beyond the “African” Archive Paradigm

“…Perhaps the most problematic is the sequestering of unique cultural and artistic material behind private walls, with collections' worth registered in radically different terms for collectors, dealers, auction houses and publishers. The radical decontextualization and losses of civic, familial and political value that accompany abrupt sale or destruction of photographic objects and archives, particularly recently, are the subject of several thoughtful critiques [Bajorek 2010;Haney 2010;Micheli 2012;Nimis 2014=this issue]. Isolating and valorizing the aesthetic qualities of particular strands of photography, in particular studio portraiture, is a particular bent that has marked the display, exhibition and publication of material.…”

“…A further challenge for historians of photography is at the level of materiality, given the conditions of disintegration. Records of earliest photographic practice are almost never found on glass or printing-out paper on the continent, but register in many iterations of reprinting and=or rephotographing, in illustrated books and ephemera, and on paper forms that show significant material decayed or altered [Bajorek 2010;Buckley 2005;Haney 2004;Nimis 2005;Schneider 2011]. Patently these conditions are difficult, and material is often inaccessible to all but a small number of people.…”

“…In various African cities and towns there is a stunning degree of variegation characterizing the formations and registers of photographic archives. They range from private and family collections of historical material, such as the Bruce Vanderpuije studio archive of Accra, to the multiplications and re-renderings of photographs ascribed to archivists of Dakar's CRDS, to minute and fractured family collections scattered across houses and national borders [africultures 2007;Bajorek 2010;Haney 2004]. Archive value is nevertheless widely recognized.…”