DISCUSSION 9 ARTS INITIAL AND REPLY

Colonial Imaginary, Tropes of Disruption: History, Culture, and Representation in the

Works of African Photographers Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya

•

To mount an exploration of African photographers, living or dead, exiled or residing on the continent, is to initiate

an investigation ofdaunting magnitude. Equally, it means~ntering the terrain of transnational debates on questions

of Africa1iity and issues of boundaries, race, culture, and politics, debates that areat onceproblematic andenriching.

It also entails highlighting new insights on modern and postcolonial African identities and experiences, which may

in turn lead to the uncovering of forgotten photographic material.

In pursuing this exploratory activity, it is pract ically impossible to examine African art and history of any period

without taking into account Western anthropology's compl icity in constructing and framing a natural history of

critical intransigencies and visual codes, as well as the specific means through which the West has apprehended,

consumed, and interpreted the African continent as a site of both scientific inquiry and popular entertainment. In

building the framework through which this encounter has been accessed and codified as unimpeachable knowledge,

photography has often been allied with anthropology. Such codification is exemplified by the tens of m illions of

postcards produced in the nineteenth century to sate Europe's appetite for exotic, colonized peoples as specimens

of curiosity inciting a lurid benevolence. This ethnographic sensibility, which inspired Western artistic, cultural,

and scientific pursuits in the past, seems inexhaustible today, as it continuously feeds the commercial hungers of

popular entertainment, particu larly in movies and pulp fiction. No continent meets the demands of these

entertainments better than Africa. Looking toward the more distant past, the movies Tarzan, King Solomons Mines,

and Birth ofa Nation come to mind, and a cursory examination of blockbusters made in the last fifteen years yields

such examples as IndianaJones, Out ofAfnca, Congo, Ace Ventura, and The Gods Must Be Crazy. Such movies indicate

that Africa remains a territory of the Western imagination, often crudely constructed as an abertanthuman domain

or as a comical screen upon which the visuals of such imagination can be projected.

In movie footage and also in literature, Africa has been made completely invisible, obscured and masked, screened

from our consciousness, and elided from the world's memory banks. For example, Africa is a void, a deep black

hole that young Charles Marlow, in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart ofDarkness (1902), hankered after to quell his

passion for maps and the glories of exploration. Says Marlow:

Now when 1 was a little chap Jhad a passion /or maps. I would look /or hours at South A merica, or A/rica, or Australia, and

lose myselfin all the glories ofexploration. At that time there were many blank spaces [our emphasis} on the earth, and when

I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they al/ look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When I grow

up I willgo there.• . . . But there was one yet-the biggest, the most blank, so to speak-that I had a hankering a/ter . ...

It had ceased to be a blank space o/delightful mystery-a white patch /or a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a

place ofdarkness.1

Marlow was seized by the giddy urge to possess and own, to occupy and have the power of sanction and legislation,

and to impose his will and mastery over territories, territories that could only exist as blank spaces. Today, Marlow's

passion and hankering might be read as a deformity, but his desire was very much in tune with late-n ineteenth­

century reasoning, a time of explorers, missionaries, and mad scientists. Just as Marlow's attitude rellected the

17

reasoning of even the most enlightened people of the period, Hearl o/Darkness set the contemporary literary tone

for the early twentieth century's perception of Africa: Africa as a tangle of bad dreams, hall ucinations, disease,

madness, and moral decrepitude, Africa as a place where the mind wilts in the humid frenzy of incomprehensibility

and crue lty. Of course, Conrad (who himself actually embarked on Marlow's journey to the Congo) as a fiction

writer took the liberty to conjure up images that would adequately frighten the European mind and thus reinforce

the idea of Afr ica as a no- man's-land filled with evil, from which only the strongest could emerge unscathed.

The specific ways through which spurious Western agents have constructed a dense cata logue of knowledge about

Africa, in the process distorting its rich and long historical and cultura l traditions, are telling. Such distortions, as

Nicolas Monti notes in his remarkable book Africa Then: Pl,otographs, 1840-1918, •formed the romantic myth in

which the European bourgeoisie tried for the last time to manifest two opposing values: freedom and power." 2

Ultimately, what the European powers that conquered, colonized, and exploited Africa produced is a rendering of

the continent as an amoral, primitive, and marginal site of dark, brooding forces, misery, and pestilence, a place

that both cripples and fervidly arouses the imagination of the traveler, explorer, missionary, bounty hunter, and

colonist. Indeed, it is a matter of quite some contradiction that Africa is also often promoted in the West as the

cradle of civil ization, an Eden where the last vestiges of a primeval paradise-with its lowland savannahs, misty

peaks of mysterious mountain ranges, evergreen valleys, and thundering waterfalls- can be glimpsed from safari

trails and game parks. There, in a pure state of nature, purged of any kind of native mediation, the spirit soars, the

•heart of darkness• collapses and gives way to untrammeled beauty, awe, and innocence. It is out of such invocations

that many Europeans have embarked on trips to Africa. One famous example is the French poet Arthur Rimbaud,

who, before abandoning poetry and setting out on his exploration of Africa, declared with fanfare and fantasy in

1873 that he was quitting Europe for odd climates that "will tan me." Above all, he craved freedom from a corrupt

France, which was terrorized by the Catholic Church. He ran away "to swim, to trample the grass, to hunt, above

all, to smoke; to drink liquors strong as boiling metal." He continued, "I shall come back, with limbs of iron, my

skin dark, my eye furious." What strange desires these were, desires that only the most fictional places on earth

could fulfil l. Of course, the Africa of Rimbaud's imagination became, upon his arrival, a place whose peoples he

regarded as "stupid and savage."3 Fifty years later, Andre Breton and his Surreal ist cohorts, in their love for

delinquency and juvenile rebellion, celebrated Rimbaud, in the first Mani/esto o/Surrealism (1924), as •a Surrealist

in the practice of life and elsewhere." The irony of Rimbaud's racist impulse, and the fact that he ended up in Aden

{Yemen) and Harar (in what is now Ethiopia) as a gunrunner and slave smuggler, was obviously lost on them.

As a result of the errant experiences and accounts of many such individuals from the West, Africa has remained

a foil for Europe's civilizing tendencies and delusions ofsuperiority, •a place of negations atonce remote andvaguely

familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace wi ll be manifest.'' Let us eavesdrop on

Rudyard Kipling focusing his imagination upon two vast territories: India, the subcontinentwhere he was stationed,

and Africa, the continent where he was born. He writes in "The White Man's Burden" (1899):

18

Take up t/,e White Man's burden­

Send forth the best ye breed-

Go bindyour sons to exile

To serve yourcaptives' need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild­

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Hal/devil and half child! In this last line, "Half devil and half child; Kipling, like his contemporary Conrad, provides us a peek into tl1e

binary code that not only gave impetus to, but also defined and justified, colonial subjugation. Beginning at the end

of the eighteenth century, after Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, a massive effort was made by European powers to

open up the African hin terland for trade and also for the pursuit of Christian missionary activit ies. The contest

between the French and British for the control of trade from the Red Sea led to the opening of the Suez Canal in

1869. In his essay "The Power of Speech," V. Y. Mudimbe notes that "the more carefully one studies the history of

missions in Africa, the more di fficult it becomes not to ident ify it with cultural propaganda, patriot ic motivations,

and commercial interests, since tbe missions' program is indeed more complex than the simple transmission of the

Christian faith."6 As par t of Europe's conquest of Africa, m issionaries and explorers came, followed by

photographers, anthropologists, and various other experts, under the guise of these firmly established scenarios and

motivations. African self-images grounded in centuries of civi li zation would be condemned by the European

scientific and intellectual communit ies as l1eathen, unclean, primitive, and savage. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,

in Philosophy of History (1840), writes that Africa •is no historica l part of the world; it has no movement or

development to exhibit. Historical movements in it-thatis in its northernpart-belong to the Asiatic or European

world."' This prejudice was developed later by Count Arthur de Gobineau and others. Its refutation would become

the lifelong quest of the Senegalese historian and anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop. According to Diop's writings,

the invention of the savage meant equally the invention of a master who must tame and guide him. Such notions

would pave the way for Europe's final assault on and subdivision of the entire continent into colonies.

On February 23, 1885, at the Berlin Conference, under the auspices of Otto von Bismarck, fourteen European

nations redrew the map of Africa, dividing the continent between themselves and conferring the right to e>.,,lore,

prospect, and draw subboundaries as they saw fi t, as long as these activities did not interfere with the territorial

claims of other member nations. This mad. drive, for it can be called nothing else, set in motion what is known

historically as the•scramble for Africa." After the rush was over, only three African cow1tries, Ethiopia (Abyssinia),

Liberia, and Morocco, maintained their standing as independent states.

The bruta l and total annexation and occupation of Africa lasted for less tl1an a hundred years. But it left an

indelible mark in it-s notion of African national identities, since such identities were more or less figments of the

19

colonial imagination. Borders were drawn indiscriminately by the European powers without any consideration of

the location of specific cul tures when the cartographers arrived. Beginning in the 1920s, attempts to reverse the

course of this territorial violence ,vere made, thereby challenging European hegemony and political and cultural

authority. These protestations, wl,ich gained momentum from the 1930s, laid the foundation for a protracted

battle for independence. The first independent states to come out of this struggle were Egypt, under Gamal Abde l

Nasser in 1954, and Ghana, under Kwame Nkrumah in 1957. These two figures helped usher in a new postcolonial

era, but, more importantly, they almost single-handedly defined the ideo logical positions of Pan-Arab unity and

Pan-African unity.

Although African nations won independence, Western stereotypes and misconceptions about Africans persisted.

It is pertinent to illustrate the kind of image of tl1e African that has survived for generations in tl1e West, since

photographic representation is essentially about the image and its construction as a visual analogue. Returning to

Heart o/ Darkness, in a passage characterized by both racism and the most implacable earnestness, Conrad enacts

a deliberately false description, as if to write a summation of the Western perception of the image of the African

savage:

A ndbetween whiles I had to look a/ter the savage who was/;reman. lie was an impro.edspecimen; he could/ire up a vertical

boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody o/breeches and

a /eatl,er /,at, walking on his hind legs. A /ew montl,s o/training had done /or that really /;ne chap. He squinted at the steam

gauge and at the water gauge with an evident effort o/intrepidity-and he had /;led teeth, too, the poor devil, and tl,e wool

o//,is pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each o/his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his

/,ands and stamping his /eel on the bank, instead o/which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcra/t, /ull o/improving

knowledge.'

It is the person and context of the above description that are the subjects of this exhibition. Whi le we cannot

redeem such distortions, the works in the exhibition provide a different account of that African landscape and

history, difficult as they may be to (re)present in two dimensions. Over the course of its encroachment in Africa,

no medium has been more instrumental in creati ng a great deal of the visual fictions of the African continent than

photograpl1y. Yet, ironically, in attempting to defuse the power of these historicist fictions, we must rely upon

photography and its vast array of signs, which also stand at the juncture of this refutation.

Photography and the World as Image

In its more than one hundred fifty years of existence, photography has left us a deep and startling archive of human

identity, its memories, presences, and absences. In a sense, what it has deposited in our care, for our gaze to linger

upon, are the traces and imprints of vanished moments, while it leaves unaccounted the motivations behind the

making of individual photographs. As a supplement, referent, or index, the photograph invokes the perception of

a presence on a flat surface. Yet the photograph in reality documents the absence of the subject represented. Drawing

20

on this apparent contradiction, Roland Barthes writes that •the Photograph is pu re cont ingency and can be nothing

else."9 Moreover, photography's prodigious ability to inhale and disseminate so much information multip lies this

false sensation of the inscription of presence, thus frustrating efforts to categorize the medium's meaning as a stand­

in for visual and/or experiential truth.

As we gather togetherthe stories or pictures created through photography, we must, however, insiston the necessary

contingency of all historical accounts, particularly in the case of modern African history, as we scan its progression

across the scarred pages of the legacy of European colonialism. An empirical doubt must arise when we are

confronted with the "veracity" of cer tain data-historical records and accoun ts, and images, espec ially

photographs-built around Africa. I n pausing on the issue of photography as an instrument furthering certa in

historicist fictions, charting and inscribing a visual palimpsest of the West's perceptions about otherness, we must

question wbat is often seen as photographic truth and the notion of photographic images asstable, fixed information.

Can decontextualized image_s be facts contained within an unembellished history? Can they represent an empirical

record of experience or serve as objective stand- ins for history?

For photographs to have any meaning beyond their functions as memento mori and as instruments of evidence

and record, we must acknowledge another stabilizing factor: the gaze, that which Gordon Bleach has aptly termed

"the negotiated space of viewing."'0 When we take on Africa as the subject and African photographers as the

interlocutors in this •negotiated space of viewing,' the difficulty of interpreting what has been encoded as visual

truth arises. Because there is now no prior existence of a language per se with which to discuss photographic activity

in Africa (although photography in Africa is no different from that in any other region of the world), what is revealed

in interpreting the gaze or tbe field of vision is its implicit contest for the power of ownership. We must raise the

question that has often encircled theoretical investigations into the nature of photography: who owns the image?

Is it the property of the photographer or the viewer, whose prejudices and habits of viewing disturb the field of

recognition, thereby unsettling the still waters of the photographic image, its codes and {mis)representations, and

its disintegration as a unitary embodiment of the subject represented, particularly wben the clues left bebind are

optical rather than experient ial? Bleach poses this problem as a • disorientation: the powers and dis/pleasures of

how it feels to (be) look(ed at) are integral to an account of the subject of vision."11

In considering the work of the thirty photographers selected, who were all born in Africa but may have lived

within or outside the continent, and who are diverse in nationality, ethnjcity, race, and religion, we are attempting

to explore the critical issues that underpin their practices, identities, and experiences as Africans. In one way or

another, Africa as seen through this exhibition is not a monolithic supposition, nor is it merely an idea that can be

bent to our wishes and desires. Consequently, all the participating photographers touch on the nodes of these

demands. They speak from positions that allow us to explore their various cultural and artistic imperatives, while

opening up avenues to examine the dynamic relationship between past and present, history and memory, time and

space, origin and authenticity, desire and ambivalence, and ethnic and sexual identity. However, what is truly

2:1

enriching, thrJling, and even vexing is the diversity of approaches, disciplines, and strategies that tl1e artists have

brought to photographic pract ice. T hey invite us to call upon the processes and resources of cultural, social, and

personal transformation as they are unraveled witl1in African realities and within experiences of relocation and

diaspora.

Several photographers represented ant icipated such issues that defined and at t imes unsettled aspects of

the African experience. Their responses to our request to submit personal statements for this catalogue, as well

as other writings by them, have been central to our formulations and interpretat ions. The artists' individual

subjectivities and attitudes about representation are also mapped upon the meta- territory of the exhibition site.

Santu Mofokeng of South Africa, for instance, writes that in the context of apartheid, "I had a rationale

for documenting the lives of black people in the South Africa of yore, but, now that things have changed, it has

become more difficult to legitimize my role as a documentary photographer in the traditional sense. As I get more

intimate with my subjects, I find I cannot represent them in any meaningful way. I see my role becoming one of

questioning rather than documenting. T h e projects I have undertaken recent ly are about the politics

of representation."12 Nigerian-born Rotimi Fani- Kayode, one of the most promising young African photographers

until his untimely death in December 1989, wrote, "As an African working in a western medium, I try to bring

out the spiritual dimension in my pictures so that concepts of reality become ambiguous and are opened to

reinterpretation." 13 Fani- Kayode wished to repossess "the explo itative mytho logizing of Black vir ility" and

"the vulgar objectiiication of Africa ... to reappropriate such images and to transform them ritual istically into . f . • ,, images o our own creation .

These critical positions are an impodant part of the emerging discourse about contemporary cultural production

within an African context. However, though rnany issues have been raised in this regard, much work remains

uneatthed or unexhibited. There are structures that historically have staked claim, appropriated, restricted, and

controlled the access, diHusion, circulation, and representation of African art, from London to Paris to Zurich,

which have also affected African photography. So how do we address questions of representation, self-imaging, and

artistic freedom when those initiatives are counteracted by stronger economic imperatives, and when the

contingencies of social and epistemologica l control are made to bend to the influence of power and access? The

answer atthe moment is that there is little thatcan be done until the scholarly and historical import of these primary

materials is mad.e public. Hence, this exhibition is necessary.

Signs of Disaffection: Photographic Truth, Technology,_and Ethnography

Once seen as both a novelty and a scientific breakthrough, photography has quietly been assimi lated into the realm

of trad ition. It no longer suffices to discuss photographic activity solely on the basis of its mimetic capabi lities.

Before the invention of pho tography, painting served this documentary function. And, just as photography

supplanted narrative painting, cinema and television in turn have attentuated photography's formerly exclusive

22

claim to the infinite reproduction and dissemination of the image. Today, video, digitized images accessed via

computer, and CD-ROMS occupy this terrain.

Nevertheless, photography remains one of the most enduring and focused instruments of documentation,

regardless of its fragmentary constitution, falsehoods, and mise- en- scenes. Its allure and seductiveness still

conscript our gaze, turn us into voyeurs, and utterly redefine our status as observers. Today, the aforementioned

technologies have setup new kinds ofvisual fields thatconvert tl1e retina toan active sensorium ofbodily experiences,

where codes of photographic meaning constantly seem to be turned into instruments o£ subversion. Through this

enmeshment, a relationship is established in which the very status of the image can be not only altered and made

contingent but also prol iferated through myriad networks, modes of production, and multiple routes of delivery.

However, it is important for us not to become engulfed by the latter visual fictions no matter how seductive and

apparently stable they may seem.

\Vith the advent of new imaging techniques, photography has crossed the boundaries set up by Walter Benjamin

in his essay •The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction• (1936), an illuminating reading of the

potential effects of the productivist economy and the reproducib ility of photographic images upon the ways that

art is traditionally valued. It is not that formerly dominant modes of visualizat ion have changed or that their

meanings have been obviated; rather what it is that images recount and conduct within the field of vision has shifted

perceptibly. Jonathan Crary elucidates this shift when he writes: •rf these images can be said to refer to anything,

it is to millions of bits of electronic mathematical data . Increasingly, visuality will be situated on a cybernetic and

electromagnetic terrain where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide and are consumed, circulated, and

exchanged globally."15 In this proliferation, it is the subject of the encounter in the electromagnetic terrain that

poses the greatest challenge to the reading of the photographic index as a document of experience. Crary grasps

th is di lemma and invests it with a set of questions that pierces the skin of what has been termed the discursive space

of photography: -What is the relation between the dematerialized digital imagery of tbe present and (that oB the

so-called age of mechanical reproduction? .. . How is the body ... becoming a component of new machines,

economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological? In what ways is subjectivity becoming a

precarious condition of interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information?"16

The questions raised by Crary bear particular relevance in how we image and consume the idea of Africa in that

"interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information." As technology changes, so do

the possible ramifications for our relationship to material culture and visua l information. If we suppose that visual

information is now availahle as cartographic inscriptions both coupling and delinking digital codes, does it yield

access to a new kind of vision and a new and renovated subject no longer bound up with the fetishism and voyeurism

of traditional photography, particularly that type prevalent within the discipline of ethnography?

From the.mid-nineteenth century on, with the growth ofcolonialismand territorial expansion, a commodification

and categorization of those peoples perceived to be different was practiced by Westerners. As a documentary tool,

23

photography was important in providing lasting evidence of the fieldworl~ of anthropologists, the discoveries of

eirplorers, and the results of scientific studies. The intense imagination of the West's ethnographic lens is revealed,

for example, in the Orientalist fantasies of pa intings by Eug~ne Delacroix and of F rench photographic scene el type

postcards that turn the bodies of nude A lgerian women into objects intended purely for the erotic pleasure of the

colonial gaze. Following Malek A llou la's seminal study of scene el type postcards, The Colonial Harem (1986), Salah

Hassan writes, in an astute interrogation of Orientalism, that •Delacroix's painting [ Wi11nen o/ Algiers] and the

postcards were partof the visual tradition built on preconceived notions essential to Western images and perceptions

of Oriental women." 17 Even for the naive Western consumer, to comprehend the subject as framed by the

ethnographic lens is to participate in the decapitation or cannibalization of the subject, as the grossly misrepresented

African body is consummately fed to the passions of a false imaginat ion, working in consort with the notion of

scientific inquiry.

In nineteenth- century studies, subjects could be put through all sorts of bizarre apparatuses in order to display

and quantify their encoded gestalts. P hysiognomy revealed the body as an avatar containing knowledge available

only to science, which could be docwnented as evidentiary truth by the analytical mechanism of photography.

Anthropometric photography was particularly useful in this exercise, because in providing measurements it

purportedly gave•objective• interpretations and records of the body as a specimen or type. Brian Street writes that

•the nineteenth- century focus on the physical and visual features of cultural variety gave to photography a particular

role in 'the formation of a particular discourse of race which was located in the conceptuali zation of the body as

the objectof anthropological knowledge.' . .. Anthropological interpretation of the body was conceptual ized through

'physiognomy'-the belief that the facial and bodily features indicate specific mental and moral characteristics."18

Today, even within the •enlightened• corridors of postmodern discourse, the quest ion of difference is still based less

on the existence of a multiplicity of identities than it is on the equating of difference with race and otherness.

Ethnography still replicates and enters into the service of power. According to Crary, •Problems of vision then, as

now, were fundamentally questions about the body and the operation of social power;•9 in the guise of benevolent

sc ientific investigations.

What then are the purposes of the purported meaning of photographs? What forms of knowledge do they expose?

For whom and for what? How can we trust or be sure of what is being proffered as a form of representation when

it is invested with a knowledge beyond mere incident? Elizabeth Edwards writes:

Central lo the nature o/ the photograph and its interpretive dilemmas is its insistent dislocation o/time and space. . . . Closely

related to temporal dislocation in a photographic context is spatial dis/ocal·ion. In the creation o/an image, photographic

technology /rames the world. Camera angle, range o/lens, type o/film and the chosen momento/exposure further dictate and

sl,ape the moment. Exposure is an apposite term, /or it carries not only technical meaning, but describes that moment exposed•

lo /,istorica/ scrutiny. The photograph contains and constrains within its own boundaries, excluding all else, a microcosmic

analogue o/the /raming o/space which is knowledge.11J

24

..

These fraught questions come into play in Barthes's critique of Richard Avedon's objectifying portrait of Wi ll iam

Casby (1963). l n the picture in question, a tight ly cropped, ~traight- on view of the face of anaged African American

man, Avedon took pains to excise all obtrusive details that might have inflected a different context to the reading

of Casby's portrait by zeroing in on the most delectable detail, the mask. Barthes follows Italo Calvino's use of the

word •mask" to •designate what makes a face into the product of a society and of its history." 21

The photograph is

modified by an important linguistic signifier, the title that reads "William Casby, Born a S lave." Clearly, th is is less

a portrait than a sociological and anthropological study. The t it le points to the limitations of the photograph as a

carrier of truth, for the portrait of Casby needs the stab ilizing factor of language employed not for clarification or

as a source of knowledge but solely for the viewer's delectation. In Barthes's context, Casby's picture purports to

tell us the essenbal truths of photography's "assuming a mask' in order to signify, when in reality it is feeding us

information about the otherness of the subject. The photograph seeks to reveal Casby's difference from the rest of

society. He is an endangered, dying breed, a monster who must be preserved, even if the process of preservation is

essent ially false. Indeed, the photographic mean ing of Avedon's project might have been completely lost to the

viewer without this signpost, the title that points to an irredeemable otherness. Avedon was thus able to create by

means of his camera, linguistic modification, and position of power as an objective observer a sample or fragment

of a "'type', the abstract essence of human variation ... perceived to be an observable reality." 22

The temptation is

to consume this image as if it represented a form of knowledge more profound than its trashy voyeurism. We are

tempted to use this inevitable detail to represent the whole, to allow the specific and incomplete to stand for

generalities, and to allow one image to become •a symbol for wider truths, at the risk of stereotyping and

misrepresentation. •23

Here, then, is Barthes's interesti ng reading of Avedon's image. Seeing the mask as a •difficult reg ion" of

photography, he goes on to elaborate that "society .. . mistrusts pure meaning: It wants meaning, but at the same

time it wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise .... Hence the photograph whose meaning . . . is too impressive

is quickly de!lected; we consume it aesthetically, not politically."24 Are we to assume then tbatAvedon's title, which

Barthes ignored in bis commentary, was purely incidental and not a calculated titillation serving to reveal to the

phot-0grapher's audience a different kind of essence lurking beneath the mask? No, Casby's portraitwas constructed

precisely because Avedon wished it to be consumed both aesthetically and ethnographically. T he portrait was made

for the picture gallery or for the coffee-table book. To put Avedon's portrait side by side with those of his African

contemporaries, such as Seyd.ou Keita or Cornel ius Yao Azaglo Augustt, delimits the maskandcalls it into question.

The projects of these two great portrait photographers from Africa undress- in part through the dialogue that

existed between sitter and photographer-the pretense of excavating a deeper meaning from the subject, a meaning

that ethnographic framing assumes as its lens pans across the body of the othered subject.

We can name in our aid three important technical elements in the interesting contest of power that ethnographic

authority employs in solidifying its scientific foundation: camera placement and lens angle, the position of the

25

photographer in relationship to the subject, and the • natural• environment selected by the photographer to enact

the subject's autl1enticity. Elaborating on th is technique and fram ing of authenticity, Edwards writes, "The 'real' or

the 'natural' or 'authentic; and the elements selected to represent that reality, depend on the status of the objects

concerned within the overall classification of knowledge and the representation of those objects in a way which will

be understood as 'real' by the viewer."25 In examining the entire spectrum in which photography worked in collusion

,vith ethnography and anthropology to both frame and undermine our knowledge of Africa, Edwards continues,

"In anthropology 'sign ificant' structures of a cu lture are observed, the fragments of informants recorded and the

final work born of synthesis and then generalization; the fragments become moulded to a unifying account of

'cu lture'. So, in pl1otography, the specific moment becomes representative of the wl, ole and tbe general.' 26

For the ethnographer, the African subject functions and exists in this delimited terrain to better yield access to

the kind of knowledge that the pseudoscience of nineteenth-cenhuy phrenology skillfu lly appropriated. It is not

the subject dep icted wbo is really of interest but what he or she is supposed or ought to represent, what the body

type reveals. Stripped of the most rudimentary of human attributes, of speech, choice, and subjectivity, the subject

might as well be a piece of dead wood. In this case, the African subject-who ne ither signifies nor embodies

consciousness- is beyond redemption and is, in Conrad's words, "a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving

knowledge.'

Negritude, Pan-Africanlsm, and Postcolonlal African Identity

The emergence of the concept of negritude in the late 1930s, in particu lar as a dialectical framework in the

development of African and Caribbean postcolonial literary discourse, is also pertinent to the broad discussions

that flow from this exh ibition. The first appearance of the term negritude was in the startling epic poem by the great

poetAime Cesaire of Martinique. In "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal• ("Notebook of a Return to the Native Land"),

published in 1939, Cesa ire set down the psychic and temporal order that would come to define this very important

branch of modernism. He writes simultaneously out of righteous scorn and penetratint;i irony:

oh /rie11dly light

0/1 /resh source o/light

tl,ose who have inve11ted 11either powder nor compass

tl,ose who could /,amess neither steam nor electricity

tl,ose who explored neither the seas nor the sky but those

witl,ou/ whom the earth would not be the earth

gibbosity all the more benef;cenl as the bare earth eve11 more earth

silo where that which is earthiest about earth ferments and ripens

my 11egritude is not a stone, its dea/ness hurled against the clamor of the day

my negritude is not a /eukoma ofdead liquid over the earths dead eye

26

..

my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral

it takes root in tl,e red f/esh o/ the soil

it takes root in the ardent f/esh o/ the sky

it breaks through the opaque prostration wit/, its upright patience"

Though Cesa ire originated the word, its conceptualization and subsequent growtl1 as a cultural movement were

not his alone. The Senegalese statesman, poet, and essayist Leopold Sedar Senghor was Cesaire's partner in giving

negritude its stamp and urgency in the tepid dawning ofFascismunder the gray sk ies of Europe. Negritude's founding

in Paris shortly before World War II was based on a fundamentally modernist vision intermixed with the ideal of

an originary essence of African identity. This ideal, however, relates more to Senghor's beliefs, which were rooted

in a kind of archaic revisionism, than to Cesaire's more fragmentary, indeterminate Caribbean syncretism. The

dates of negritude's emergence coincide more or less with the earl iest works in this exhibition. This connection is

not coincidental.

As negritude's tenets were taking hold (mostly among young Francophone African and Caribbean intellectuals

in Paris such as Leon Damas, David Diop, Rene Depestre, Frantz Fanon, and Tchicaya UTamsi), the irreversible

changes that would eventually inaugurate the struggle for the end of colonialism were being forged by the Pan­

African ideology of Nkrumah and the "scientific socialism• supported by Anglophone intellech1als who rejected

Senghor's negritude and Africanite as essentialist particularism, both emotional and regressive. At a writer's

conference in 1962 in Kampala, Uganda, the young Wole Soyinka (who in 1986 was named Nobel laureate in

literature) of Nigeria retorted with disdain, while discussing negritude, that "a tiger does not go about asserting its

tigritude." A few years later, in 1966, poet Christopher O kigbo rejected an award he had won in Senegal on the

grounds that it was based on the absurdity of race and ancestry. Benin's minister of culture, philosopher Paulin

Hountondji, criticized Senghor's position because he avoided political issues and was •engaged in the systematic

elaboration of 'artificial cultural problems."28 The points of these attacks are to be found in Senghor's unshifting

position vis-a-vis Africanite, negritude, and the past. Often, his beliefs seem dangerously close to the ideas of

nineteenth-century scientific anthropology, which privileged notions of originary essence. For example, Senghor

emphasized the past at the expense of the present. He wrote, "There is no question of reviving the past, of living in

a Negro-A/,.;can museum [our emphasis]; the question is to inspire this world, here and now, with the va lues of our

past.'29 Another bombshell that had intellectuals scrambling to the lectern for a rebuttal is this assertion: "The

Negro is a man of nature . ... He lives off the soil and with the soil, in and by the Cosmos. ... [He is] sensual, a

being with open senses, with no intermediary between subject and object, himself at once subject and object.' The

"Negro-African museum• evoked by Senghor's words is at once a recombined theor y of essentialism and a

recapitulation of Gobineau.

Negritude's rejection by many African intellectuals on the ground.s that it was revisionist and regressive seems to

be confirmed in the photographs made by Joseph Moise Agbojelou, Mama Casset, Salla Casset, Me,ssa Gaye, and

27

Keita in the same period. Nowhere in their works do we detect t l1e sitters' desires to live in that so-called Negro­

African museum. In fact, what we see is their re luctance to he confined in such a natural-history or ethnographic

setting. Looking at the majestic portraits of the worldly and sophisticated men and women who frequented the

studios of these photographers, we find the unique intersection and cross-referencing of notions of tradit ion and

modernity. Even Senghor himself sat for a portrait by Salla Casset. These photographs produced just before World

War II and thereafter contest Senghor's Africanite, an idea l rooted in an almost incontestable, primal authenticity,

which was drawn from the powerful residues of oratory and represented by the griot and traditional folklore.

The interpretation we may draw from this vehement cultural and ideological dispute is that the African self­

image in the late l 930s and the 1940s was already being radically transformed. The subjects of these photographs

are the electorate who would cast the dec isive vote for independence and ini tiate the radical break with colonial ism.

Indeed, the subjects of these portraits are African, but they are not contained by the questionable episteme of

ethnographic delectation and otherization. Their subjectivit ies and desires in a modern and modernizing Africa

conflict with the Senghorian interpretation of an originary African essence. For if, as he argued, tradition was the

mother of the prima l essence, then technology no doubt should have represented its antithesis and negation, an

incendiary apparatus imported from the West to deracinate and desacral ize tradition's deeply planted taproot. But

technology in the modern world was never the antithesis or negation of tradi tion. \Vhat simply happened, as James

CliHord notes, was that •after the Second World War, colonial relations would be pervasively contested .... Peoples

long spoken for by Western etlrnographers, administrators, and m issiona.r ies began to speak and actmore powerfu lly

for themselves on a global stage. It was increasingly difficult to keep them in their (traditional) places. Distinct ways

of life once destined to merge into 'the modern world' reasserted their diHerence, in novel ways."30

Before World War II interfered with the drive for self-governance, Africa's sense of itself was changing. Like

James VanDerZee in Harlem, New York and RichardSamuel Roberts in South Carolina, Mama Casset, Salla Casset,

and Gaye had already established studios in Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal that catered to the elite and common

folk of those cities. Tbey methodically documented an important milieu in that negotiated space bridging the gap

between colonial and postcolonial ident ity, between the self and the other, between modernity and tradition. Keita

set up a studio in Bamako, Mali at the end of the 1940s, largely continuing the same kind of portrait work, but

with a lyrical, modernist sensibility that is as fresh today as when bis photographs were made. The aforementioned

photographers' popularity as the preeminent image- makers of their time is attested to by the presence of their works

in many fami ly collections. Encountering theirwork today, we feel ourselves deeply emhedded in a site of recognition,

in a temporal zone between the pathos of loss and reju_venation. Their photographs chart an ontological space, a

period of modern history that has remained largely neglected.

The existence of photographs of the 1940s provides us with an insight into the diverse and complex sensibilities

that made up the face of Africa as it entered a new era. The images give us access to vivid, but by no means complete,

visual records of a continent gripped hy, yet emerging from, the po litical, economic, social, and cultural structures

28

..

imposed by colonialism. Given their incompleteness, these photographs represent on ly a part of that visual

history created and documented by Africans. Many of them, such as the cache of photographs borrowed for this

exhibition from little-known family archives in Senegal, are difficult to trace and hard to locate. They nevertheless

exist. T his vast archive of images staged for posterity remains a crucial testimony. Today the photographs reside

scattered and bur ied in colonial archives, obscure private albums, and commercial business records that have either

been abandoned, neglected, or totally forgotten. This hoard remains for historians and archivists to retrieve,

catalogue, interpret, and preserve for future generations.

The present exhibition constitutes part of that effort. In examining issues of modern and contemporary African

representation and identity, and the interpretation and dissemination of history, it calls attention to a continent

whose long historical traditions have crossed, touched, and influenced all the consequential byways of humanh istory.

That Africa has long been disparaged by innuendo and misrepresentation, its contribution to history eluding

comprehension and appreciation over the years, in part accounts for the selection of photographs in the exhibition.

We have passed over images ofwretchedness and misery, of disasters, genocide, war, hunger, and dictators-plentiful

elsewhere- in order to celebrate Africa, to throw its artistic modernity and contemporaneity into sharp relief.

In presenting Africanvisions, the exhibition also suggests how theirstaging testifies against the dominant notions,

preconceptions, and normative codings entrenched in modernist iconography. What we seek to reveal is a whole

transactional flow that refutes both Senghorian negritude's salvage paradigms and a complacentWestern lustoricity

of morbidly inscribed ethnographic yearnings, lusts, prejudices, appropriations, and corrosive violence. The

exhibition presents an African subjectivity from east to west, from north to south, emerging out of the entire

continent's multiracial, multiethnic, multilinguistic, and multirel igious realities. The continent was also caught up

in the dystopic upheavals of modernity, whose currency-from Pablo Picasso's and Georges Braque's Cubist

pastiches to Henri Matisse's Orientalism and Breton's Surrealism-was built on a syncretic practice of quoting,

renovating, and discarding disparate elements refined across cultura l borders. In crossing those borders, signs of

authenticity disintegrate, disparaging all claims to an originary essence or purity.

C l ifford thoroughly challenges "such claims to purity" and essence as they have persistently marked

and circumscribed African representation. He writes that such claims (which, in any case, simultaneously represent

negritude's and Western ethnography's attitudes) •are always subverted by the need to s-tage authenticity in opposition

to external, often dominating alternatives."31 It is by no means an exaggeration when C lifford notes that something

happens "whenever marginal peoples come into a historical or ethnographic space that has been defined by the

Western imagination. 'Entering the modern world,' their distinct histories quickly vanish."32 But he goes further in

amending and supplementing this view of quickly vanishing cultures by contesting a cultural reading based 011 the

preservation of "endangered authenticities.' Thus, he suggests that • geopolitical questions must now be asked of

every inventive poetics of reality." But "Whose reality? Whose new world?"" he asks.

Africa is no different from other places in the shifting, indeterminate landscape of current world conditions,

29

inwhich every process of cu ltura l texturing goes through a com.binative loop of excisions and additions to contradict

the persistent ethnographic dramatization of otherness. From the sense of "impurity' and "inauthenticity,"

we observe that when "intervening in an interconnected world, one is always, to varying degrees, 'inauthentic':

caught between cultures, implicated in others. Because discourse in global power systems . .. elaborated vis-ii­

vis ... a sense of difference or distinctness can never be located solely in the continuity of a culture or tradition.

Identity is conjunctural, not essential."" In a global system under rapid transformation, •who has the authority to

speak for a group's identity or authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture?

How do self and other clash and converse in the encounters of ethnography, travel, modern interethnic relations?""

Here, purity becomes incapahle of performing even a metonymic duty, em.bedded as it is with inauthenticities.

Portraiture, Reality, and Representation

Prior to the period of independence, those representations of Africa's socia l rea lity available in the West were the

work of European photographers. The ubiquity of these photographs produced in mass numbers as souvenirs

obscures the existence and avai labi lity of work by African photographers who were active in the colonies as

early as the 1860s. A. C. Gomes, for instance, established a studio in Zanzibar in 1868 and opened a branch in

Dar es Salaam later on; N. Walwin Holm started his business in Accra in 1883 and was, in 1897, the first

African photographer inducted as a member into the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. Other

photographers active during the later part of the nineteenth century were George S. A. Da Costa (in Lagos from

1895), E. C. Dias (in Zanzibar in the 1890s), and F. R. C. Lutterodt (of Ghana, who worked in Accra, Cameroon,

Gabon, and Fernando Po in the 1890s). Many other names are currently lost to history.

The material available on these photographers suggests that they were not (either thematically or historically)

linked to the decline and the disintegration of European colonial dominance. Nor could we say that they were

involved in any way in the destructuring of European hegemony in Afr ican existence. Since very little early

photography by Africans is available publ icly, it would be difficult to claim their production as the embodiment of

some counterdiscursive "native• sensibility in an insurgent photographic practice that could have overthrown the

imperialist mechanisms of European invincibil ity and superiority. Within artistic practice, the reclamation of

African subjectivity, in any kind of considered manner, existed within the practice of painting, in what Olu Oguihe

identifies as a reverse appropriation in the work of the Nigerian painter Aina Onaholu, who was working in Lagos

during the early 1900s and in Paris in the 1920s.'° Kobena Mercer identifies the same process at work in Mama

Casset's portraits of the 1920s and l 930s. He writes:

Wl,ereas the depiction o/Africans in prevailing idioms o/p/10/o-jormialism tends to imply a vertical axis which fneral!y looks

down upon the subject, thereby cast into a condition o/ pathos and abjection, ivf.ama Casset's portraits are o/ten set on a

diagonal whereby the women he portrays seem to lean out o/the /rame la look straight out lo the viewer, with a sel/-assured

bearing t.l,at evidences an interaction conducted on equal footing."

30

This positioning and sense of confrontation coincide with the reflective discourses advanced by the African

liberation struggle, discourses that affected the work of thf portraitists represented in tl1e exhib ition. T ims, the

period of independence, which began roughly at the end of World World II and ended in the early 1970s, ,vas not

a period of amnesia, tabula rasa, and newborn Africanity, but a time of sociopol itical resurrection, reassessment,

and transformation. The temptation to search for some sort of •natura l• or "pure state of African photography

emerg ing from this period is great. To proceed from such an assumption, which anticipates an allegedly original

photography and an • other• photography, would overlook and mar the very existence and repercussions of the

colonial enterprise. O n the other hand, it conforms to the idea of an imagined 'difference" that marks borders

around those • other" cultural practices, isolating and fetishizing them. This kind of paternalistic identification thus

separates the viewer from African cu ltural production and from the soc ia l conditions that have shaped its forms.

At the same time, it reaffirms the imaginary unity of Western photography and the myth of its own distinctiveness,

authenticity, and superiority.

Likewise, in assuming the ill,1sion of an allegedly universal photographic language, we may be reinforci ng the

systematic process and hegemonic posit ion of Western projection, identificat ion, and appropriation. Too often,

many Western critics, curators, and scholars, instructed and trained within the theoretical frame of \'Uestern

photography, seem predisposed to applying their presuppositions to non- European photographers or artists, thus

ignoring or dismissing specific sociocultural situations and ideological conditions that inform artistic practice in

other regions of the world.

Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses an instance of Western projection in his revealing In My Father's House: Africa

in the Philosophy o/ Culture: "The French colonial project, by contrast with the British, entailed the evolution of

francophone Africans; its aim was to produce a more homogeneous francophone elite. Schools did not teach in

'native' languages, and the French did not assign substantial powers to revamped precolonial administrations. You

might suppose, therefore, that the French project of creating a class of black 'evolues' had laid firmer foundati ons

for the postcolonial state."38 Appiah also asserts that •the majority of French colonies have chosen to stay connected

to France, and all but Guinee ... have accepted varying degrees of 'neocolonial' supervision by the metropole,"

either culturally, militari ly, or economically. A nd, in most cases, tbe colonial languages of the British, French, and

Portuguese remained the languages of government after independence, according to A ppiah, • for the obvious reason

that the choice of any other indigenous language would have favored a single linguistic group." T hese arrangements

and policies might have been the only compromising response to the fact that not even the new states with the

smallest populations were ethnically homogeneous: •The new states brought together peoples who spoke different

languages, had different rel igious traditions and notions of property, and were politically (and, in particular,

hierarchically) integrated to different- often radically different- degrees."39

Ironically, in this period that promised African independence from Europe, the liberation struggle was formulated

·through many visions and schemes that were ideologically, culturally, and politically articulated within Eucopean

31

history and philosophical traditions. Both Senghor's Africanite and Nkrumah's •scienti fic socialism' were nothing

more than Eurocentric ideas projected and presented either as Africa's own seU-conception (in the case of the

former), or as a universal and globalized paradigm that unequivocally occluded African historicity and its concrete

political and cultural existence (in the latter) . If the former internalized and ontologized racism, as Tsenay

Serequeberhan pointedly evidences in his piercing analysis of Senghor in his book The Hermeneutics o/ A/rican

Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse, the latter, by employing the abstract and universalizing language of Marxist­

Leninist idealism, subordinates African existence to the terrain of a homogenized historicity determined by the

"historical logic" of the international hegemonic power of the Western proletariat and of European modernity.

Other writers, statesmen, and intellectuals associated with the African liberation struggle, such as Cesaire,

Amilcar Cabral, and Fanon, focused instead on establishing an African political tradition grounded in African

historicity. They articulated a critique exposing the contrast between the unfulfilled promises and ideals of African

"independence• and the pol itical realit ies of the new states. Aware that newly independent African countries were

still connected to colonial attitudes and values, they enunciated a notion of liberation as a process of reclaiming

African history.'° The •return to the source" established by Cabral as the basic direction for the movement he

directed in the 1960s in Guinea- Bissau is not, however, a return to tradition in stasis; nor is it engaged, as

Serequeberhan explains, •in an ·antiquarian quest for an already existing authentic past.' On the contrary, in

"returning," the "Westernized native' brings with him "the European cultural baggage that constitutes his person,"

absorbing the European values into a "new synthes is.' Serequeberhan elucidates, •111 this dialectic European

culture/history is recognized as a particular and specific disclosure of existence, aspects of which are retained or 1

rejected in terms of the lived historicity and the practical requirements of the history that is being reclaimed:•

The works ofphotographers like Agbojelou (working in what is now Benin), Augustt (Cote d'Ivoire), Mama Cassel

(Senegal), Salla Casset (Senegal), Gaye (Senegal), Keita (Mali), Moumoune Kone (Mali), Boufjala Kouyate (Mali),

and Youssouf Traore (Mali) are instilled with the euphoria and the disappointment, the pride and the insecurity,

the confidence and the contradictions of this period of transformation. Even if none of these photographers directly

problematized cultural, political, and social issues of colonialism and postcolonialism, they employed narrative

means that contribute to unravel ing the issues under discussion and to situating them within the specific historical

and ideological framework of the African experience of this period. Taken as a collection of disparate images and

aspects of traditional and modern forms and effects, these photographs reveal African societies in flux. Even

Agbojelou's traditional and more luxurious portraits of weddings and other political, cultural, and religious

ceremonies offer tradition as something alive, not sealed in the antiquity of a "reconstructed• culture.

In general terms, the portraits by these photographers are descriptions of individuals as much as they are

inscriptions of social identit ies. Although most of them are frontal poses of individuals and groups in the

photographers' studios, the portraits expose as much as they hide from view through the complexity and

sophistication of representation. Set as they are within a historical model of photographic configuration, these

..

32

portraits are not necessarily telling any 'truth• about their subjects, but, as products ofsignification, t,hey are claiming

a specific presence in representation. Portrait photography, in general, creates the illusion of fixed, immutable

presences in images rendered as real bodies. When we pose, we either imagine what people see when tl1ey look at us

and then try to act ou t this image, or we want to look like someone else and imitate that appearance. We imitate

what we think the observer sees, or what we see in someone else, or what we wish to see in ourselves. This process

of reconfiguration and acting out of an ideal is what is so fasci nating in the cl1aracter studies of African studio

portraiture. It evidences not o nly a social transformation but a structural and ideological one, in which the complex

negotiations of individual desires and identities are mapped and conceptualized.

Probing how the subject inserts itself into this matrix, Peggy Pl1elan, following Jacques Lacan, asserts: "Like a

good correspondence, the mode l's rep ly to the inquiry of the photographer is based on the quality of the

photographer's question. Portrait photography is the record of the model's self-inquiry, an inquiry framed and

directed by the photographer's attempt to discover what be sees. Models imitate the image they believe photographers

see through the camera lens. Photographers develop the image as they touch the shutter; models perform what they

believe that image looks like. And spectators see aga in what they do and do not look like." 2 As is the case with all

portraits, those by these African photographers vacillate between glamorizing the sitters and uncriticall y reflecting

their projections and desires. These portraits do not only render reality; they penetrate and evaluate it. T hese

portraits are archetypes, models for the way tbei_r sitters wanted to appear. The portrait is, therefore, the outcome

of an elaborate constitutive process. AsJohn Tagg writes: 'We cannot quantify the realism ofa representation simply

through a comparison of the representation with a 'real ity' somehow known prior to its realisation. The reality of

the real ist representation does not correspond in any direct or simple way to anything present to us 'before'

representation. It is, rather, the product of a complex process involving the motivated and selective employment of

determinate means o/representation."'3

While reminiscing on that transitional period of the late 1940s, Keita comments that, by then, •men in town

began to dress in European style. They were influenced by France. But not everybody had the means to dress like

that. In the studio I had three different European outfits, witl1 tie, shirt, shoes, and hat . . . everything. And also

accessories-fountain pen, plastic flowers, radio, telephone- which I had available for the clients.' Most of Keita's

pictures depict individuals in traditiona l African clothing, but the variety, elegance, or origin of these clothes

(already cultural inscriptions in themselves) is not precisely what these portra its emphasize; what they revea l is their

own sociocultural value a,s signifiers of status and their functional role in the construction and transformation of

identity.

Keita also recognizes that he helped his models to find ways to look their best. In h is studio, he displayed samples

of his photographs so customers could choose how they wanted to look. •r suggested a position which was better

suited to them, and in effect I determined the good position," Keita admits. H is cl ients were as conscious of their

poses as of their dress and accessories. A ll elements amount to the construction of solemn images composed as

33

signs of wealth, beauty, and elegance, wl, icb act-with the complicity of the photographer- as surrogates for the

essences of their subjects.

The clients and subjects of portraiture by SaIla Casset, Gaye, and Ke ita are primarily family members and friends,

civi l servants, bureaucrats, society ladies, and well- to- do people. Confirming his own position as a sought-after

photographer, Keita comments, "Even our first president of the Repub lic [of Mali.] came:" Mostof the photographs,

whether taken inside or outside the stud io, place the models against plain or patterned backgrounds. In most cases,

the backgrounds isolate the model with accessories and props; particu larly in Keita's majestic photographs, they

may hlend with the subject's clothes, emphasizing the faces. Despite tl,e realism and purported individuality and

particularities of tl, ese portraits, the generic solid or decorative backgrounds and the props give them an abstract

qua lity. Certainly, Casset, Gaye, and Keita were not trying to create or document a taxonomy of social types, but

the generic character of such elements seems to counteract the subjectivity of individual models.

Portraiture in Africa recorded how models wanted to be remembered, or inventoried their past; sitters could then

witness their own (or somebody else's) transformation as well as the disappearance over time of customs and cultural

symbols. While the portrait, as a memento mori, could suggest a pathos to the model in its reminder of mortal ity,

it could also be put to societal uses. Much of the moststimulating work of Augustt, for instance, consists of portraits

made for identity cards in the mid- l 960s. They are teclmically as sharp and clear as Keita's, but stylistically

straightforward and uncomplicated. Augustt's portraits, of the poor, workers, job-seeking rural people, and others,

make up a much broader social sampling than Keita's. The head-on-stare of Augustt's models evokes a cross between

the mug shot, documentary photo, and old-fash ioned studio portrait, although the portraits themselves assert an

unusually modern qua lity.

Portraits also have religious functions in different African cu ltures. In a continent where technology is always

narrated as being at loggerheads with tradi tion, pl1otography- from the moment it was conscripted into service to

create funerary objects- bas been renovating and supplementing an existing tradition. Within this context, the

portrait, in addition to being a presence in the world, carries great symbolic value, for it is said to represent the

spirit of the subject, as an index, a pure trace of the body. ln various African cultures, photographic portraits 1,ave

been appropriated so that the images are perceived, almost literally, as surrogates for the body. Families cherish

them. They protect and guard them against evil spellsand ill will. Theircodesandmeanings, their aspectof liminality

between the realms of the seen and the imagined, are invested, almost, with the potency of magic. C hristian Metz

writes about photography having the character of death. Photography, he notes, "is a cut inside the referent, it cuts

off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no retum."45 While this scenario essays

photography as a fascinating outtake of immobility, we wotJ d argue the opposite, that the portrait as the object of

an elaborate funerary enterprise exists in a ra ther complex metaphysical location, where it is subsumed within many

traditional codes. Rather than being fixed in the immobility of death, the deceased's portrait is rescued from that

still ether of abjection by tl, e performative surrogacy enacted by the synecdoche of metaphysica l transference.

34

..

Thus in various contexts, the portrait's meaning in Africa possesses its own distinctcodes, its own play ofsigniliers.

It enters into the service of myth and fetish ism when its perceived optical ity is turned into a rich and complex field

of signs invested with ritualistic meaning. In eastern Nigeria, among the Igbos, the portrait has come to occupy the

realm of the immanent. After a person dies, his or her portrait is usually placed on a bed and addressed by mourners

as if it were the live person. In such moments of private communication, tl, e portrait serves as a totemic symbol

that banishes the death and projects more than a likeness. It also serves as an aid for eternalization, fixing the

subject within the temporal space of remembrance.

A nother example of tl,e portrait as part of the accoutrements of funerary ritual is found in Ethiopia. In the

1880s, photography was, according to Richard Pankhurst, "assimilated into the country's traditional struch1tes." ...

Prior to this assimilation, it had been customary for mourners in funeral processions to display the effigy of the

deceased along with his personal belongings. T his tradition was transformed with the introduction of photography.

Pankh,1tst writes that "with th~ advent of the camera such articles tended to be supplemented-and the effigy even

replaced-by photographic portraits of the departedwhicl, mourners held high above their heads, while they wailed,

ritualistically, and perhaps recounted episodes of the deceased's life and achievement:" Another example of

portraits used as objects of ritual performance can also be found in ibeji, the Yomba cult of twins, whicl, Oguibe

disettsses in this catalogue.

The works of Samuel Fosso of the Central African Republic enter another type of pl1otographic performative

space by drawing 011 concepts of mimicry and by expanding, enacting, and theatricalizing the relationships between

and limitations of identity and representation. Fosso's self-portra its suggest that, in the transformative atmosphere

of the l 970s (a period that, as a resu lt of the legacy of colonialism and. neocolonial ism, was still entangled in

struggles for independence, social upheavals, civil wars, and revolutions), African male subjectivity was located in

disguise and displacement, in tl, e negotiated space between the construction and dissolution of identity . .Much in

the same manner that Cindy Sherman would later analyze stereotypes o f women, in 1976 Fosso started a large

seriesof self- portraits picturing himself disguised as different and easily recognizable •types," in wl1ich the presumed

•reality" they refer to is interestingly absent, as if they were anonymous characters. lo Fosso's work, these characters

are like reliquaries in the theater of the imagination. The photograph l,as lost the na'ivete that, to some degree,

commanded the composition and aesthetic decisions of earlier portraitists, who were still somehow allied with the

"reality' of their subjects. Fosso openly undertakes and absorbs photography as a degeneration of that rea lity, as a

corruption of any st..,ble representatio11.