"Getting Pictures Right": a symposium honoring Paul Jenkins.

"Getting Pictures Right: Context and Interpretation" was the title of a symposium that took place in Basel on September 19-20, 2003. It honored Paul Jenkins, who retired last autumn as a lecturer at the University of Basel and archivist of Mission 21 (formerly the Basel Mission Archive). Organized by his former students (Jurg Schneider, Veit Arlt, Barbara Muller, Michael Albrecht), the event was inspiring, and I have rarely felt so happy about the course of a conference. Guests such as Paul's early colleague David Birmingham (Canterbury), Adam Jones (Leipzig), and Patrick Harries (Basel) gave affectionate tributes, to which Paul replied with his own modest but cheerful and humorous words.

The symposium's title refers to Paul Jenkins's endeavors to make sense of early mission photography, about which next to nothing was known. Specialists in the field of photography tackled this task from various points of view in four panels. A number of them elaborated on their previous research on photographs in the Basel archive. Elizabeth Edwards (Oxford) explored photographs as social objects, as "a source and as a medium." Anton Holzer (Victors) complemented her view with his study on the mobility of early photography which traveled in the form of postcards all around the globe. Ruedi Brassel (Basel) examined Basel Mission photography in its colonial context and critically reflected on the changing concepts of the mission and its representation in the media after the Second World War. Thoralf Klein (Erfurt) characterized the Basel Mission Society as a transcultural organization and discussed the discourses of missionaries in China and the problem of agency in their photography. Marisol Palma (Leipzig) studied the question of the reality represented in the roughly thousand photographs that Martin Gusinde took among the "lost cultures" of Patagonia between 1918 and 1924 (in the archives of the Anthropos Institute in Sankt Augustin, Germany). Richard Fardon (London) discussed the thus far unnoticed pictures of the Lela festival of Bali-Nyonga, taken in 1908 (Fig. 1), and their possible author.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The concluding papers brought us closer to the present; they focused on the postcolonial project of visual representation by African photographers themselves. In her paper "Photographers Everywhere!," Christraud Geary (Boston) explored photo studios that flourished in Barnum, Cameroon, particularly in the 1950s. Barnum is well known from the numerous portraits taken by the Basel missionary Anna Wuhrmann between 1906 and 1915 (Fig. 2). In a similar way, Martin Taureg (Dakar) researched the biographies of Senegalese photographers and their genres in Senegal from 1950 to 2000. The symposium ended with a workshop in which Barbara Frey-Naf (Basel) had participants explore the specific relationship between wooden engravings and photographs in practical examples. The papers are currently being prepared for publication.

"Getting Pictures Right" did not, of course, mean there was one right way of understanding an image. It rather referred to the need to find encompassing ways and new discourses with which to grasp historical photography, and to consider as many aspects of a photograph as possible. It meant treating an image as a social entity and paying due respect to its individuality. It meant acknowledging that a photograph had its own history, a context in which it was created, an author who had snapped it, and journeys taken before arriving at its temporary destination in a museum or an archive. Paul Jenkins's aim was to create a consciousness for these ideas. And very importantly, he wished to enable as many interested researchers as possible to participate in "his" photographs' lives and histories. In the end this discourse would enrich the meaning of the images. Patrick Harries called Paul "a veritable gatekeeper of heaven." Everybody who has done archival research knows how much one's yield depends on the readiness of the archivist to allow discoveries.

It all began in 1972, when Paul and his family left Ghana. He found the job at the Basel Mission Society and was intrigued by the enormous accumulation of unsorted treasures in its archive. The most urgent task, he felt, was to organize the material, which comprised not only written documents but also huge numbers of photographs. The holdings include 50,000 photographs taken in Africa before 1945/50. One third of these predate 1914. For Paul, these images were among the earliest visual testimonies of a precolonial African past (1994; 1999:11). His pursuit of photography was greatly encouraged by an exchange of thoughts with Christraud Geary, with whom he soon published an article in African Arts (August 1985) on the Basel images. (1)

Paul's great achievement--bringing order to the archives--was realized in several steps: in collaboration with Barbara Frey-Naf, he created an archival system; digitized the photographs, thereby protecting the originals; and, above all, made the images internationally available on the Web (see www.bmpix.org). The main sponsors of the last-mentioned project were the Christoph Merian Stiftung Basel and the Getty Grant Program. Presently researchers have access to 28,400 pictures online, together with whatever information exists in the archive (legend, photographer, date, meaning, etc.). Getting the Basel Mission pictures right was a tedious but fascinating task.

The insufficient documentation by the early missionaries probably had to do with their red sons for taking pictures. What did they want to show with their photographs? They documented their achievements, but they also did not refrain from documenting "heathen practices." Did they wish to convey something of their "exotic" environment for those at home? At the same time, most of them preferred to give "a typical view" rather than a portrait of a specific personality (Jenkins 2000:13).

Paul was fascinated by the challenge of finding more information on the pictures. This was like detective work. Any additional detail could change the meaning of the image, since the viewer interpreted it against the cultural background of what he already knew. One picture, for example, bore the caption "black pastor with his family," which suggested that the pastor was the important person in the group. Later, Paul learned that the woman sitting in the center was the queen mother in this matrilineal society; he now saw the picture with different eyes (Jenkins 2001a:161-64; 2001b). Another example is an undated picture showing the Basel Mission teacher Anna Wuhrmann at Fumban with a group of women who are knitting socks. One's first impression is that the photographer wanted to document the missionary's educational endeavors. Paul then discovered Wuhrmann's notebook in which she explains the scene: in 1915, during the First World War, the German governor ordered the women of the colony to knit socks for soldiers who were cut off from supplies from the coast (Jenkins 1999:13-14).

Although Paul Jenkins has retired from his post as archivist, that does not mean that he will stop researching the meanings of photographs. On the contrary, he will just have more time to continue his explorations of pictorial pasts.

Notes

(1.) The symposium poster shows a man with an elaborate feather headdress. The same man appears in a similar image reproduced in Jenkins and Geary's article (1985: fig. 5), where he is identified as "a swordbearer of chief Addow Kwame of Abetifi (Ghana)." Both photographs were almost certainly taken by Fritz Ramseyer between 1878 and 1896. The two authors have since continued to produce major work on photography: Paul Jenkins basically on Ghana, and Chris Geary on the Cameroonian savanna kingdom of Bamum.

References cited

Jenkins, Paul 1994. "The Earliest Generation of Missionary Photographers in West Africa: The Portrayal of Indigenous People and Culture," Visual Anthropology 7:115-45.

Jenkins, Paul. 1999. "Photographiesammlungen in Missions-archiven und ihre Erfassung--Erfahrungen aus Basel," ULPA (University of Leipzig Papers on Africa). Mission Archives 5: 11-16.

Jenkins, Paul. 2000. "Schlummernde Schatze--Unbekannte Bestande historischer Photographien aus der nichtwestlichen Welt und Prinzipien ihrer Erschliessung," Baessler-Archiv n.f. 48:1-23.

Jenkins, Paul. 2001a. "Sources of Unexpected Light. Experience with Old Mission Photographs in Research on Overseas History," Jahrbuch fur europaische Uberseegeschichte 1:157-67.

Jenkins, Paul. 2001b "On Using Historical Missionary Photographs in Modern Discussion," Le fait missionaire 10:71-89.

Jenkins, Paul, and Christraud Geary. 1985. "Photographs from Africa in the Basel Mission Archive," African Arts 18, 4, (Aug.):56-63, 100.

Ute Roschenthaler

Institut fur Historische Ethnologie

Universitaet Frankfurt am Main