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African Histories of Photography

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Soon after the invention of photography in Europe, the new technology travelled to Africa where, in coastal towns, photography studios were established. Simultaneously, European anthropologists used the new technology to document ethnographic “types” for the purpose of racial science. From the start, therefore, photography, with its multiple affordances, has been used to do different things. In line with an important essay by Allan Sekula, one might argue that photography in Africa was used for both its “honorific” and its “repressive” affordances. But in the struggle for African independence, photography also assumed the role of documentary, expanding the sphere of the political imagination as Jennifer Bajorek has recently argued. In this seminar, we will try and pay attention to the different affordances of photography in Africa. The aim of the seminar is to study these affordances thematically and historically. We examine how anthropologists used photography in the production of colonial knowledge. Then we examine the appropriation of photography by African photographers in studio photography and the role photography played in the struggle for political independence. We also pay attention to the very important role of photography in resistance against apartheid in South Africa. The seminar will also examine the continent’s emergent art photography. Finally, we look at photographers who have turned to the archive as a method to explore the history of the continent. The seminar aims to define the canon as widely as possible and will include the work of LGBTQ activists as well as White South African photographers. close

Suggested reading

Bajorek, J. Unfixed: photography and decolonial imagination in West Africa. Duke University Press, 2020. Enwezor, O. Snap Judgments: New positions in contemporary African photography. Göttingen: Steidl, 2006. Haney, Erin. Photography and Africa. London, 2010. Jörder, Katharina. Building a White Nation: Propaganda, Photography, and the Apartheid Regime Between the Late 1940s and the Mid-1970s. Leuven University Press, 2023. Landau, Paul, and Deborah D. Kaspin, eds. Images and Empires: visuality in colonial and postcolonial Africa. University of California Press, 2002. Newbury, D., Newbury, D., Thomas, K. and Rizzo, L., 2020. Women and photography in Africa. Routledge. Peffer, John, and Elisabeth Lynn Cameron (eds). Portraiture and Photography in Africa, Indiana University Press, 2013. Ryan, James R. Picturing empire: Photography and the visualization of the British Empire. University of Chicago Press, 1997. Sealy, Mark. Decolonising the camera: Photography in racial time. Lawrence and Wishart, 2019. Vokes, Richard, ed. Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives. Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2012. close