Documentary observations: the African photographs of William B. Fagg, 1949-1959.

... I have tried to free my mind of preconceptions and liberate my thoughts about objects ... yet let the reader not think that where I have said little or nothing about a piece, it is necessarily a negligible one, for the photograph may say otherwise, and I do not generally see any point in rehearsing in words what can better be said in pictures. In general, I like always to remember that every work of art is a synthesis and that in a work of appreciation words should be directed to the understanding of this synthesis, rather than to sterile analysis.

(William Fagg, African Tribal Images, p. xii)

William B. Fagg (1914-92) was internationally recognized as a scholar, not a photographer. Over a period of forty years, Fagg, who was Keeper of Ethnography at the British Museum and a leading authority on African art, wrote more than two hundred publications--books, articles in academic journals, exhibition catalogues, and later, notes on individual objects for Christies' Tribal Art auction catalogues. His writing was "carefully phrased with the lapidary (his own description of his style) care one would give to a Latin epigram. As a result, one has to read his words attentively, not because they are difficult to comprehend, but because they often have a subtlety of meaning that may be lost in too rapid a reading" (Willett 1991:14).

Fagg's field photographs were less celebrated. During several trips to Africa between 1949 and 1959, he took more than 2,500 photographs, though not all the negatives survived for later printing. (1) Until 1984, when I embarked on the massive project of cataloguing his entire body of photographic work (see Stokes Hammer 1994), only a small number had been published. The photographs were a result of Fagg's systematic effort to provide visual evidence for his research. Along with handwritten field notes, they served not only as a personal daily record that later enabled him to reconstruct his experiences and observations from one town to the next but also as mnemonic devices that he drew upon when writing his interpretive scholarly prose.

Collections of photographs offer a point of view that often is not readily apparent in the study of single images. The William B. Fagg Archive, available for study in several major museums, (2) constitutes a unique opportunity for historians of African art to participate further in the growing dialogue about historical photography. Are such field images self-contained documents, or does the viewpoint of the photographer, intended or not, factor into what is visible? Does the contemporary viewer add a third-person perspective, and how do the three converge? Or as one art critic has stated, "... perhaps there are only two spaces: the relationship between photographer and subjects then and between me/us and the photograph now" (Lippard 1992:78). Re-examining the Fagg Archive and other large photographic collections through the lens of postmodern theory has brought forward both their unique and shared subtexts within the "critical exploration of modes of representation of the Other ..." (Geary 1991b:36). (3)

Fagg was 35 years old and curator of the African collection at the British Museum when he went to Africa for the first time, in November 1949 (Fig. 2). During the next four months he produced nearly 800 frames, including images of Igboland, Yorubaland, and the area around Jos and Kano in Nigeria, and of Leopoldville, Luluabourg, and Basongo, among other places, in the Belgian Congo (Stokes Hammer 1994:84). He took notes throughout this period.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

In 1953 Fagg was invited by Nigeria's Department of Antiquities to assist his brother, Bernard, in the first excavations at Ife. Although Fagg was unable to locate any notes from this four-month trip, he was able to caption the resulting prints from personal recollection. There are more than 250 photographs from northern Nigeria, Nupe country, and the Jos Plateau. Five years later, from November 1958 to April 1959, he traveled with the Yoruba Historical Research Scheme, led by S.O. Biobaku of the Western Region Government of Nigeria, and took nearly 1,500 photographs. One can re-create his travels through his photographs and his sequence of observations about them in his journals.

Aims, Methods, and Influences

William Fagg's photographs are impersonal and deadpan, lacking the delicate humor of his writing. The intent was documentary rather than narrative. Fagg was quite familiar with the photographs of the Emil Torday expeditions of 1900-1909 in southern Congo, which are in the British Museum archives. Describing the context in which Torday's photographs should be considered, John Mack notes:

   Data was not to be collected for the
   exemplification of a thesis, but
   for the construction of one.... the
   photographic print was the ethnographic
   equivalent of the anatomical
   drawing--its virtue lay
   precisely in the fact that it deals
   only in givens, not in interpreting
   and interrogating its subject ..."

   (Mack 1991:62)

Similarly, Fagg used the camera for its descriptive accuracy. For Torday in the early twentieth century and Fagg forty years later, "the subject in front of the lens was what counted, not the person behind it" (Mack 1991:62). The latter scholar's goal was the creation of a paradigm of accuracy and clarity in the classification of form. His principal intent was to isolate systematically the regional and individual elements of design within the wide array of Yoruba carved sculpture, and conclude in a definitive illustrated index of style.

Fagg therefore did not profess to have an artistic vision; in fact, one might say his images exhibit no style at all. Compositions were quickly determined, often without the benefit of a table on which to position the objects. Pieces were propped up on Fagg's duffle bag, a fence post, a piece of fallen tin roof, a leather briefcase, a drum, or, most often, on the ground, against a dried, cracked wall. Cropping appears arbitrary: the frame includes what was seen through the lens from a specific vantage point at a particular moment. Any visual indication of aesthetic considerations was providential. For example, the few photographs taken inside a dark doorway or unlit shrine exhibit dramatic shadows, but that was because Fagg did not use flashbulbs. On the whole, a lack of light was an obstacle that he and other anthropologists endeavored to overcome. (4) Similarly, the weather--or nature in general--inherently unreliable, does not intrude in any of the frames, and its absence, combined with the muted tones of the black-and-white images, evokes a sense of isolation in the photographic subjects. Part of that effect may be the inadvertent consequence of photographing only when the weather was good or of traveling during the dry season. This is not to say that Fagg did not try to take the best photograph that he could, but simply that aesthetic concerns were secondary.

The composition of Fagg's photographs was also influenced by his choice of equipment. He used a Rolleiflex double-lens reflex camera, which produced negatives in 2 1/4"-square format. The two lenses are mounted in the box, one on top of the other. The upper lens is enclosed on three sides by collapsible shutters, shielding the upper lens from reflections and ensuring proper focus. Because one looks down into the box, Fagg often lowered the camera to waist level or even placed it on the ground. The twin lenses cause the picture to appear in reverse, right to left. The camera had to be manually advanced, and the moments it took to do so added to a static quality evident in sequences of moving subjects, especially masquerade performances. Alternatively, dancers were often simply posed (Fig. 3).

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Although many of the earliest photographs, taken in 1949, have too much space around a small (sometimes) centered object, in images taken a decade later, one sees that Fagg, now a more experienced photographer, has filled the frame with the subject, and details come into closer focus for study (Fig. 1). Ilford HP3 ISO 400 film was favored because it produced sharp prints under low-light conditions. Fagg used black-and-white film exclusively. There were no darkroom manipulations; he relied on commercial developing of his negatives for publication.

The images reflect the colonial order under which Nigeria was then governed. Fagg recorded the Yoruba and their art as a representative of the British government. His goal was to gather information that would further the research component of the British Museum's collections. He interviewed and photographed informants as an outsider from a dominant culture, and his status was a component in the formal responses he elicited, both posed and spoken, with few exceptions the photographs do not reveal a rapport with the subjects: they appear neutral and anonymous, even anthropological. The people and their art are frozen in time and space. There are no signs, for example, of the Nigerian struggle for independence, won in 1960, or, in the years prior to the Biafran War, of disease, ethnic tensions, or hunger.

The photographs and accompanying notes also illuminate an internal Western bias that is manifested in the artificial organization of Yoruba objects into prototypical, purely "classical" visual styles. The often repeated words "true nature," "ideal," and "absolute form" suggest that Fagg was searching for the Yoruba "Golden Mean." This orthodoxy would not be viable as shifts in modern Nigeria took place. In 1986 he lamented the "degradation" of the Yoruba style:

   ... from the 19th century there developed
   a strong influence of Western
   materialism, leading in the
   20th century to the influence of industrialism,
   culminating in the
   wealth from oil, all with imponderable
   effects upon Yoruba culture.... There
   was degradation of
   carving traditions as the Yoruba
   abandoned their traditional values
   and paid more attention to
   the demands of the tourist trade
   for export, which is without any
   merit, and still more to the production
   of fakes which at the very
   least have only demerits, being
   only the supposititious children of
   the Yoruba.

   (Fagg 1986: n.p.)

Fagg's dismissal of the new transitional forms that fuse African and European elements suggests a strong disapproval of an expanded definition of Yoruba art.

Fagg developed his method and style of fieldwork through an array of influences. The Golden Bough was bedtime reading for many years (Willett 1991:14). his anthropological approach grew out of his formal education and strong background in the Classics. His idea of Early, Middle (Classical), and Late periods in Benin art, borrowed from Western art history, would inform his method of cataloguing Yoruba as well as Benin styles.

In 1946 Frans M. Olbrechts, in Plastiek van Kengo, put forward a methodology for style analysis. Fagg called it "the classical work on Belgian Congo sculpture" and the "most systematic work yet produced for any large field of African art" (in Crowley 1976:43). Olbrechts's anatomical approach was one that Fagg also employed to determine attribution. He catalogued numerous style areas, substyles, and individual carvers through the analysis of posture, proportions, scarification, eyes, ears, mouth, nose, hands, feet, and attachments.

Fagg often spoke of a "classical" Yoruba style and referred to Kenneth Murray, the noted Yoruba scholar and former Director of Antiquities in Nigeria as inspiration: "[He] ... had been gathering his great collection of field data on Yoruba art for twenty years when he initiated me into the Yoruba mysteries in 1949. He came on many trips with me to the bush, gave me free use of his documentation systems, and above all, passed on to me his concept of the individual artist ... (Fagg 1982:3). In 1980, in the Lagos Museum storeroom, Fagg showed me a pair of twin figures (ere ibeji) as the model for Murray's ideal Yoruba type, labeling it the "absolute" Yoruba form (Fig. 4). He also followed Murray's method of photographing multiple views of the same object--front, side, three-quarter, and back. The almost three-dimensional documentation made it possible to discover and define the characteristics of distinct carving areas along with individual artistic styles.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

A short time before his first trip to Nigeria in 1949, Fagg called his close friend Leon Underwood "probably the most prominent Western sculptor ever to visit Nigeria" (Fagg 1982:3). Underwood's own work in bronze, using the cire-perdu method, established links between two worlds of art, something Fagg would do when cataloguing the development of the Benin style, using Classical Western art-historical methods and terminology.

Though he was not formally trained in photography, Fagg did have friends who were, and it is likely that they influenced his approaches to field photography. Eliot Elisofon, a war correspondent for Life magazine in the 1940s, was an internationally recognized photographer and filmmaker. Fagg wrote the text for Elisofon's The Sculpture of Africa (1958). All of the book's 405 photographs were by Elisofon, but Fagg's field photographs served as a resource for the text.

One of Fagg's earliest major publications, Nigerian Images (1963), was a collaboration with the famed German photographer Herbert List. List, who was known for capturing transitory atmospheric effects in his own work, photographed approximately two-thirds of the illustrations using the African collections in Munich, the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Hamburg, and the British Museum. Fagg wrote an endorsement of the use of natural sunlight to bring out "the true nature" of African sculpture:

   The exciting forms and spaces of
   African art offer such dazzling
   opportunities for "dramatic" photography
   that we have become
   increasingly conditioned in recent
   years to accept without much protest
   the right of photographers to
   put "something of themselves"
   into their photographs by means of
   their own special brands of artificial
   lighting; we may have become
   so used to these subjective techniques
   as not to realize at first sight
   that Herbert List's method, so far
   from being yet another variation
   upon them, is to employ only natural
   daylight. By this almost
   unheard-of technique he achieves
   the closest sympathy with the
   original artists--who were similarly
   limited by the light of the sun--and
   has, I believe, succeeded in
   preserving and liberating for us
   the real nature of these sculptures.
   I find his photographs the truest I
   have ever seen.... by using dark
   backgrounds for dark objects, List
   softens the silhouette to a properly
   secondary status and so partly
   overcomes the limitations of the
   two-dimensional surface.

   (Fagg 1963:16)

Fagg had an opportunity to travel in Nigeria with Arnold Newman. The renowned American portrait photographer is best known for incorporating iconographic emblems into abundantly orchestrated poses. The choices of space and props are meant to bring to the viewer's mind the sitter's own preoccupations. One of his most famous portraits is of Georgia O'Keefe, at Ghost Ranch near Santa Fe, posed against the desert landscape with emblematic props of canvas, easel, and horned antelope skull. Similarly, Newman formally posed the Oni of Ife, who grasps a white flywhisk and sits at an improvised table with the accoutrements of his office in front of him--several bronze ancestral heads dating from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries--and a large housepost in the rear (Fig. 5). An unidentified Yoruba assistant holds a reflector board as Newman sets his camera. Fagg would use this directorial approach and formal arrangement, sans table (Fig. 6). However, it was not Fagg's intent to capture personality or a moment of expression but to record the objects that were on display. Although both Newman and Fagg use a direct frontal pose, the results are strikingly different: one is expressive, the other documentary.

[FIGURES 5-6 OMITTED]

The Photographic Archive

The photographs in the William B. Fagg Archive can be categorized under three major rubrics: objects, portraits, and landscapes.

Objects

By far the most ubiquitous images are of artifacts made of carved wood or cast metal, both ritual and secular. Fagg was object-oriented, having the desiderata (his word) for encyclopedic documentation. This approach was particularly important to his analysis of Yoruba styles and identification of individual carvers, and to his use of the twin figure (ere ibeji) form as a heuristic "tool" in the pursuit to identify other works of art.

   ... a start had already been made
   with the treatment of ere ibeji as
   markers of style (by Kenneth Murray,
   probably before 1939, and subsequently
   others in the Nigerian
   Department of Antiquities and the
   British Museum), and it was surely
   clear by that time what a great
   potential was opening up with still
   greater promise for the future of
   Yoruba studies. Indeed, we have
   made many identifications of fine
   works solely on the evidence from
   the twin cult. For the collection of
   specimens and documentation we
   should be ready to gather records
   not only back to the middle of the
   last century, but in commonprudence
   to about the year 1800. It is
   almost inconceivable that there
   should not be examples documented
   as of the earlier nineteenth century,
   extant but not detected. The
   two ibeji from the vicinity of Abeokuta
   which were accessioned at
   the British Museum (in mint condition)
   in 1854 were bought from
   a dealer; and a pair were found at
   Ila-Orangun in 1950, and near to
   Gbongan another pair in 1959--both
   these pairs being fully and
   accurately documented in the field;
   the dates elicited being respectively
   about 1820 and about 1840.

   (Fagg 1986: n.p.)

Because of technical, material, and time constraints, Fagg had carvings taken out of houses, shrines, and rafters and placed in areas with the most beneficial lighting conditions. Most often they were photographed as the sole subject. Shrine objects were often placed against the exterior wall of the shrine in which they resided and functioned (Fig. 7). In other cases, multiple Gelede masks were arranged in cluttered groups on the ground, or young men posed wearing them, sans costume (Fig. 8). Houseposts were also arranged in large groups and photographed (Fig. 9). In some cases twin figures appeared with the owner, but a larger context for the subject was not represented (Fig. 10). In fact, the posing of ibeji outside the calabashes or shrines in which they were customarily placed disregarded the authentic environment in which they would have been seen and used.

[FIGURES 8-10 OMITTED]

Fagg's notes would later assist in putting the works in greater cultural perspective, a process whose importance he frequently stressed. Fagg saw his photographs as a kind of sketchbook. In fact, when he did not have the opportunity to use a camera, he instead drew numerous diagrams in his notebooks.

Portraits

The portraits in the archive reflect Fagg's preoccupation with the arts of Nigeria--of the Yoruba in particular--and the themes of kings and chiefs. In many ways the Yoruba system of royal authority echoed the British culture of royalty and aristocracy of which Fagg was a product. Crowned Yoruba chiefs and kings (obas) had the wealth and prerogative to commission works of art. Within the royal family compound a group of male artists and craftsmen (isonas) were responsible for carving as well as for making the beaded apparel of the oba for both religious and secular events. The overwhelming majority of the portraits are of men--royalty or artisans.

The compounds appear sparsely populated, evidence of an altered order. Instead of recording the obas during a ritual installation or ceremonial occasion, Fagg requested that they pose outside in their regalia. The portraits are generally straightforward and dignified, with some allowance for the obas' participation as they themselves wanted to be seen. Fagg preferred a full-length frontal view (Fig. 11). When there was more than one person in the photograph, it was usually an unidentified attendant shielding the oba with an umbrella, or an anonymous retinue of other attendants and uncrowned chiefs of the village. Rarely were the obas photographed with wives or children.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

The focus of these portraits is not the individual but his ritual symbols of office: beaded crowns (Fig. 12), shoes, staffs, flywhisks, and other accoutrements of royalty. Fagg did record the names of important obas, such as the Dagburewe of Idowa, whose ceremonial objects were particularly distinctive. (5) He also took note of royal symbols in other works of art, such as Gelede, Egungun, and Epa masks (Fig. 13). In one case, he posed an oba next to an Epa mask with the same flywhisk and gesture of royal authority (Fig. 14).

[FIGURES 12-14 OMITTED]

Fagg regarded artists with particular interest because of his work identifying individual carvers (Fig. 15). His approach was catholic and methodical. When he arrived at a village, he would ask the oba to direct him to the local blacksmith or carver. Fagg would then ask to see the man's tools. Local chiefs also helped him locate the names of carvers, blacksmiths, bead craftsmen, and musicians.

These portraits look like clinical studies, detached and unemotional. In fact, Fagg often titled groups of people as "types," a common practice among anthropologists in the early twentieth century. The imposed artificiality is also a consequence of his itinerant method of fieldwork; because he was passing through town after town, he required a quick, standardized recording method.

Landscapes

Among the Yoruba, rivers, trees, and hills are often said to have an eternal presence, and the natural physical environment plays a large role in religious beliefs (Ojo 1971:159). The first photograph Fagg took in Africa, and the first numbered in the archive, is a landscape with a prehistoric stone bridge at the center. Fagg's landscape photographs were taken at a distance. They show both natural and constructed environments, some with architecture and some with sacred groves related to historical or ceremonial events (Fig. 16). Often the subject appears ambiguous; Fagg explained that they were a reminder to himself that these areas were important to research in further detail (personal communication, London, 1983).

[FIGURE 16 OMITTED]

Field Notes and Archive Captions

   ... when working with him in the
   field, as I did myself during 1958-59
   when he based himself [in] Ife, one
   could not but be struck by how
   few notes he took. During that time
   we were both Honorary Advisors
   to the Yoruba Historical Research
   scheme. At one of its management
   meetings in Ibadan, near the end
   of his visit, he made a reference to
   the information he had recorded
   in his notebook.... Six months' work
   was contained in only one pocket
   sized notebook, tie relies, with
   justification, on his phenomenal
   memory.

   (Willett 1991:20-21)

The value of Fagg's photographs would not be complete without his field notes. Fagg regularly made dated entries in these small, portable, composition notebooks, which are now in the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. The entries were written in pencil and were not always easily legible; through repeated reference over many years, the pencil began to rub off and fade, and the paper became brittle and quite fragile along the edges; in some cases, small corners were missing. In 1983 he decided to transcribe the data in his journals, word for word, and print them onto index cards. I assisted him in this huge undertaking. (6) The notes were organized sequentially, and it was decided that the transcription would be organized as follows: WBFF (William B. Fagg Field), Year, Page Number of Field Notebook, Month, Day, and Town (e.g., WBFF 49 P2 November 18 Jos).

William Fagg was a man of lists, and many appear in the notebooks: lists of words for ironworking and tools, written in Hausa and Nupe and with their English translation; of purchases and prices (in shillings); of Igbo mask names. He took special note of the names of Yoruba chiefs and artists, including dates of birth and death, as well as names of their grandfathers, fathers, and sons, if known. He would later use this data to re-create genealogies of significant carvers and carving compounds in Yorubaland. Fagg also made lists of stylistic similarities between ibeji seen in the field and those in museums or private collections. During the process of transcribing his notebooks, he made additional annotations in the margins referring to supplementary information he had since collected.

The principal source for the archive captions was William Fagg himself. Although not computer knowledgeable, Fagg nonetheless liked the idea of entering his field research into a computerized database. Perhaps it also piqued his competitive instincts, as the note he wrote me in 1983 suggests:

   Awaking at 7:30 am this morning,
   I was amazed to find that my
   personal subconscious computer
   had been working during my
   sleep.... (Though it employs no silicon
   chip, it may perhaps perform
   equal wonders of speed in the last
   moment before sleep ends.) In the
   next few minutes, it had presented
   to me the following succinct report:
   Before field photographs are
   processed on computers, they must
   first be arranged in date order of taking
   [Fagg's emphasis]--or in some more
   logical order, such as that by towns
   which I have done, and which itself
   is best approached by starting with
   them already in date order.... I am
   glad to know that my rough and
   ready system of recording my photography,
   instituted in 1949, has
   stood the test of time into the computer
   age ...

I began by organizing the photographs by negative number. Each print was numbered in the following way: the initials WBF appear first; then the year (or years) of the African trip in question (1949-50, 1953, 1958, 1959); the roll number in chronological sequence, indexed and filed by town; and finally the frame number (1-12). Previously, when Fagg wanted to locate a photograph to illustrate a point in one of his many essays, he had to rummage through boxes of negatives. Now it was a simple matter to access an image, without handling the negatives or prints, through four databases catalogued by negative number, town, object, and subject.

In the early 1980s museums had just begun to use computer programs in collection management. Most at the time time relied on what I call the three-part MEI method: Manual (catalogue cards/accessions), Electronic (computer), and Intuitive (curators/registrars). The Fagg Archive was the first collection of African photographic images to be entered into a computerized database. (7) Fagg's memory of long-past events was quite reliable, especially when sparked by a review of the photographs in daily chronological order as he had shot them, this time all in an 8" x 10" format. Fagg was able to reconstruct the experience of his fieldwork, looking over the prints in their entirety for the first time and recalling thoughts for further research.

The titles are minimal because Fagg did not want the viewer to bring personal images to mind. He wished to avoid contaminating the photographs with cross-cultural interpretations. The only reference was the object itself or the identification of a particular person, along with the town in which it was photographed. Fagg felt that his archive would be most valuable when used in a synthesis of image, field notation, and non-narrative title. Added to previous research and cross-referenced with data from other researchers, this would create a method for accurate and reliable documentation.

A Shifting Paradigm

Perceptions of objects change as they are extracted from their original setting and placed in another frame. Sidney Kasfir declares: "The experienced museum goer knows that the art-museum display policy in which an isolated mask or figure is encased in a vitrine or lit with track lights means to convey the information that the object is to be apprehended as 'art,' ..." (1992:47). One might also substitute "photograph" for "mask or figure." A unique opportunity to witness this shift from document to fine art took place in 2000 at the Art Institute of Chicago, where several of Fagg's field photographs figured in not only a temporary exhibit of objects from the museum's permanent collection but also a symposium, "In Context/In Depth: A Symposium about Yoruba Art and the William B. Fagg Photographic Archive." Curator Kathleen Bickford Berzock added an aesthetic dimension by framing and highlighting prints as art objects (Fig. 17). Each one was selected to contextualize the Yuruba objects on display. In some instances the image showed the same work in situ, so that the historical photographic record validated the authenticity of the sculpture. The photographs also served to endorse a curator's collections expenditures and emphasize the object's value.

[FIGURE 17 OMITTED]

The exhibited matte-finish silver prints were extraordinarily beautiful and rich in detail. The Royal Anthropological Institute had them handprinted with great care from Fagg's original negatives. Yet the printer, by adding a grainy textural depth, created an expressive poetic content not visible in the first glossy printings in 1984. While the soft noir atmosphere adds a spaciousness, silence, and mystery that reflects the slow and leisurely pace of the photographer, the pictures no longer read as neutral documentation but take on the patina of the viewer's experience and perceptions and are invested with an aesthetic sophistication they never originally possessed. In the exhibition aesthetic considerations dominated curatorial choices, thereby reflecting an underlying Western bias.

The Fagg Archive is of great value in furthering the understanding of Yoruba history and culture and in helping to define the chronology of the art of Benin, Owo, and Ife. Initially the images provided concrete evidence of aspects of material culture, and, with their associated historical data, became useful resources for studying individual carvers and identifying Yoruba styles in museum and private collections worldwide. Four decades later their significance has been redefined by museum curators, who are including them in exhibitions as both anthropological evidence, to contextualize and highlight the historical importance of objects in their collections, and as fine art, to be framed, mounted, and spotlighted.

Fagg's photographs have progressed threefold, from his personal unprinted negatives stored in small boxes, to 8" x 10" printed documents of traditional material culture, to aesthetic products. And finally, there is a fourth transmutation: when viewed today, the photographs are filtered through our own recollections, feelings, and judgments about William Fagg to become reminders of the man himself and of his stature in the field of African art history (Fig. 18).

[FIGURE 18 OMITTED]

[This article was accepted for publication in October 2003.]

"Documentary Observations" was suggested and inspired by Christraud Geary, curator of African and Oceanic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I am especially grateful to Pam Stokes for her professional editing of this article; Marilyn Houlberg, professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for her suggestions; and Jaime and Jonathan Hammer, who supported the writing of this article,

(1.) William Fagg, conversation with the author, 1983 According to Fagg, some negatives did not survive the elements in Africa, particularly the heat. Others suffered technical flaws or were simply lost.

(2.) The archive exists at the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Robert Goldwater Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. The Royal Anthropological Institute in London retains the original negatives and holds copyright.

(3.) The William B. Fagg Archive is one of several large photographic collections in museum libraries and archives. Among other important field collections are the photographs of Emil Torday from southern Congo, 1900-1909, in the British Museum, London; the Kenneth Murray archive in the National Museum, Lagos; Herbert Lang's Belgian Congo photographs, 1909-1915, in the American Museum of Natural History, New York; nineteenth-century photographs of the Zulu in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Yolk There are also collections of images taken by missionaries, most notably by Wilhelm Schneider in the Grassfields of Cameroon; Schneider's photographs are now in the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.

Various scholars have written significant critical interpretations of these collections in African Arts Christraud Geary was guest editor of a special issue, "Historical Photographs in Africa" (Geary 1951). The journal later published an article on this subject by Virginia-Lee Webb (1992). A special issue called "Photography in Africa," guest-edited by Herbert M. Cole and Doran H. Ross (1985), had already appeared in African Arts.

(4.) Dr. G.I. Jones, a former district officer in Nigeria, discusses the numerous difficulties of "tropical photography" in "A Memoir of Early Field Photography" (Jones 1985).

(5.) William Fagg notes: "The most spectacular array of beaded regalia that I have seen was also at a village on the outskirts of Ijebu-Ode in 1950, when the Dagburewe of Idowa had them displayed for me as a demonstration of the antiquity of his throne" (1980:12).

(6.) Fagg and I read the notes aloud and tape-recorded them. Then I transcribed the narratives so they would print out onto the index cards with the date and town at the top. (Early dot-matrix printers had index cards with side holes and perforated edges.) Fagg then annotated them, making additions and corrections, which are marked with the date 1984.

(7.) Christraud Geary noted at the Art Institute symposium in 2000 that the Fagg Archive was the first that she had come across cataloged and indexed in a computerized database.

References cited

Cole, Herbert M. and Doran H. Ross (eds.). 1985. "Photography in Africa," African Arts 18, 4 (August). Special issue.

Crowley, Daniel. 1976. "Stylistic Analysis of African Art: A Reassessment of Olbrechts' "Belgian Method," African Arts 9, 2:43-49.

Elisofon, Eliot. 1958. The Sculpture of Africa New York: Praeger.

Fagg, William. 1963. Nigerian Images. New York: Praeger.

Fagg, William. 1968. African Tribal Images Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art.

Fagg, William, 1980, Yoruba Beadwork: Art of Nigeria. New York: Rizzoli.

Fagg, William. 1982. Yoruba: Sculpture of West Africa. New York: Knopf.

Fagg, William. 1986. "Yoruba Carving Styles" (working title). Unpublished ms.

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