In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960.

In and Out of Focus

Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960

Christraud Geary, with an essay by Krzysztof Pluskota

London: Philip Wilson Publishers for Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2002. 128 pp.; 154 b/w photos, some hand-tinted, some stereographs or postcards; 5 color photos. $29.95 paper.

Photography's Other Histories

Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, eds.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. 286 pp., 135 b/w photos. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.

Hector Acebes, Portraits in Africa 1948-1953

Essays by Isolde Brielmaier and Ed Marquand

Seattle: University of Washington Press for Marquand Books, 2004. 183 pp., 114 b/w photos plus images on endpapers. $40.00 cloth.

Literature concerning photography by Africans remains scattershot and largely insubstantial. As Massimo Zaccaria's (2001) bibliography reveals, scholarly attention to photography from any part of the continent is sketchy and some areas have received very little or no attention at all. Photographic materials are by definition fugitive, and harsh climates, house fires, vermin, civil strife, and other natural or cultural events can take their toll. Furthermore, as the bins of old photos in our own antique shops attest, people often lose interest in images when they no longer know whose portraits they have in hand and are willing to allow them to be dispersed as commodities. In other words, there are many factors that hinder research concerning photography by Africans, or by anyone else for that matter.

Still, the strong literature on local photography in South Africa or other parts of the world--India or Australia, say--suggests that work is possible that is more thoughtful than much of what one finds concerning Africa. (1) The same tired phrasing appears again and again: What do we learn when African photo studios are called "dream factories"? Aside from the clever use of backdrops suggesting such a topos (and here one must look beyond African Studies to find stimulating discussion of how use of backdrops may be a "subaltern" tactic that "resists, subverts or parodies the realist claims of photography" [Appadurai 1997:5]), how and why are they "dream factories," if, indeed, this is an appropriate way to describe them according to local cultural understandings of what dreaming is in the first place? Self-congratulatory posturing also occurs, as certain scholar/ curators don the mantle of "experts" who appear to have conducted little or no first-hand research and so have little or nothing original to say. The same images by the same few photographers--and especially by Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe--are published and displayed so frequently and now fetch such staggering prices that they have become iconic: For many they are African photography, while for others they have already become sadly trite. Yet without denying the obvious talents of Keita and Sidibe, to what degree is their work overexposed because of what might be termed the archaeological conceit: "I have found it, therefore it must be significant'? In other words, how many equally brilliant photographers remain to be discovered, through albums kept by African families (Geary, p. 103; see also Mustafa 2002), in studios located in less commonly visited places, or in obscure archives yet to be examined?

True, there are some bright and a few brilliant moments in this fledgling field of study. Several introductions to African photography have appeared recently, with Revue Noire's ambitious Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography (Saint Leon and Fall 1999) the best by far. Most of its short essays, by artists and scholars such as Santu Mofokeng, Simon Njami, Vera Viditz-Ward, and Tobias Wendl, are crisp and vivid, and an evocative selection of photos stands in distinct contrast to the bleak glimpses of "the imaginary Africas" found in the pointless parade of coffee-table compendia. Seydou Keita is in the anthology but as he should be, in the company of gifted artists like Depara from Congo/Kinshasa, Andrianarivelo of Madagascar, Ato Kebede Guebre Mariam from Ethiopia, and a host of others. A 1962 snapshot by Zaccharia Kaba taken in Kan Kan, Guinea, says it all: A cluster of young men and women are goofing around on a pirogue at the edge of a river, enjoying themselves and enjoying the moment (Saint Leon and Fall 1999:16). Kaba's lens captures a happy moment of altogether ordinary souls. No prurient gazes, no mean-spirited othering: An African artist simply photographs his friends. Who among us hasn't done the same? But why, then, is it still so unusual to see such an image from and of Africans?

Intellectual shortcuts compound this reviewer's sense that the study and exhibition of photography of and by Africans remains underwhelming. Rank exoticism may be confused with avant-garde creativity: Do contemporary photos of mentally alienated urban Africans such as Bouna Medoune Seye's or Dorris Haron Kasco's portraits from Dakar and Abidjan, respectively (in Matt and Miessgang 2002), illuminate or victimize their subjects? If such misery is "aesthetic," by whose criteria is such an evaluation made? And to what degree do essays about the nefarious scopic regimes of colonial times, illustrated as they often are with titillating photography, themselves promote voyeurism? Such thorny questions are not asked nearly enough.

Recent publication of three works about African photography allays some disappointment. Christraud Geary's In and Out of Focus (both the book and the exhibition it accompanied; see Christa Clarke's enlightening exhibition review in African Arts 37, l:82-3) was her swan song as she left a distinguished career as curator of the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art for a curatoria] position at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was she who built the NMAA's phototheque into one of the world's best, and her books Images from Bamum (1988) and Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (1998, with Virginia-Lee Webb) as well as her strong articles--including two in African Arts (Geary 1991, 1993)--have established Geary's preeminence among scholars of African photography. In and Out of Focus is her best work yet.

The book has two thrusts: the use of colonial photography in creating a popular imaginery with particular focus on "the image world of Casimir Zagourski," and the emergence of photography by Africans in these same contexts. Although colonial photographs were famously taken--with the political sense of the term quite literal--Geary asserts that soon enough, "African photographic subjects began to present themselves to the cameras of Westerners in ways they wanted to be seen and assumed agency, in the photographic encounter" (p. 20). While this section of the book is illustrated with fascinating images including postcards and stereographs from which ethnographic and historical data can be gleaned, these images seem without exception to have been staged to suit a variety of colonial rather than African purposes, making it difficult to find visual proof of Geary's hypothesis. If Africans who were "objects of 'visual consumption'" were somehow able "to communicate ideas about themselves" (ibid.), it must have been in subtle ways. Later in the book, Geary introduces photographs of proud and distinguished Kuba, Mangbetu, and Rwandan kings to stress that in the late years of the colonial moment, at least some African elites "had become skilled at directing photographic encounters and using them to their ends" (p. 102). While her assertion is compelling--and I, for one, want to believe this was so--Geary is on far firmer ground when she writes of the manipulation of visual imagery through colonial newspapers and magazines, tourist brochures, and business advertisements to confirm "an image" or, perhaps more likely, many imbricated images "of Africans that Westerners had created in their own minds" (p. 52).

Casimir Zagourski, a Polish-Ukrainian adventurer, is nicely introduced by both Geary and Krzysztof Pluskota in a brief essay embedded in Geary's text. Pluskota holds that between the World Wars, "no photographer visually articulated popular ideas about the peoples of central Africa more eloquently than Casimir Zagourski," and that "to this day, his photographs shape notions about central Africa" (p. 59). Zagourski saw himself contributing to the anthropology of the Belgian Congo, and his underlying political messages are clear enough: He often stressed exotic body arts and ritual practices, and many of his poses are stiff and seem involuntary. Yet the most haunting of the pictures Geary has chosen for her book depict ordinary scenes and individuals: boys playing with wonderfully complex model boats in the shallows of the Congo River (p. 73); a young Tutsi woman with her head tightly wrapped in a lovely scarf of European fabric, tranquilly gazing at the photographer (p. 78 and cover of the book). These few do seem to portray Africans on their own terms. The last part of In and Out of Focus concerns photography by Africans and reveals Geary's talents best. She tells of early photographers such as Augustus Washington, a man of mixed South Asian and African American heritage who moved to Liberia in 1853 "to find a better life" by work as a daguerreotypist (p. 103). We learn the fascinating tale of Herzekiah Andrew Shanu (1858-1905), a Yoruba man who grew up and was educated around Lagos and then moved to the Congo Free State in 1884 to work in the colonial administration. Shanu soon founded a number of successful businesses including a general store in Boma that offered photographic services, and a few of his glass-plate negatives have been identified in public collections, Shanu became engaged in Edmund Morel's Congo Reform Movement, however, and when revelations of local abuses were traced back to him, colonial authorities prohibited government employees from doing business with Shanu, his enterprises failed, and he committed suicide in his abjection (pp. 104-6).

It takes long and patient research to uncover stories of this sort, and Geary's work should prove a model for beginning scholars. Similarly, when Geary offers details such as "the photographic ritual" of pictures taken by a Congolese artist who worked outside on overcast days to decrease shadows but then invariably drew audiences that would just as invariably participate in and therefore influence the event (p. 112), or when she illustrates photos by Africans of other Africans taking photos of still other Africans (ibid.), she informs a more general sense of the potential for research on African photography, suggesting pertinent questions for a next generation of researchers.

The essays of Photography's Other Histories provide comparative cases and theoretical grounding for the kind of progressive work that Geary's volume can inspire. Only two chapters refer specifically to Africa, and both will be familiar to readers of African Arts: Heike Behrend revisits the Likoni Ferry, Photographers of Mombasa about whom she wrote in an African Arts piece of 2000, and Stephen Sprague's "Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves" is posthumously republished from a 1978 issue of this same journal. The latter article has proven especially influential over the years: witness the degree to which photography scholar Olu Oguibe has relied upon its insights (Oguibe 1996:243-5, 2004:85, 87; echoed in 2001:11-12). Sprague's discussion of Yoruba aesthetic conventions, such as when he suggests that "both of the subject's eyes must always be visible in a portrait" photograph as a reflection of "ifarahon--of visibility and clarity of form, line, and identity" (p. 250), deserves to be matched by a similarly nuanced understanding of photographic hermeneutics developed by people of other African cultures.

Perhaps more stimulating, however, are chapters of Photography's Other Histories addressing other parts of the world, for they suggest where study of photography of and by Africans might be taken. Jo-Anne Driessen and Michael Aird provide poignant anecdotes about how Aboriginal people of Australia are recovering, reinterpreting, and, indeed, revivifying ancestral photographs discovered in archives. When given the opportunity, people may "look past the stereotypical way in which their relatives and ancestors have been portrayed" (p. 25), happy to recover images of ones they love. Driessen is herself of Aboriginal heritage and was adopted and raised by a Dutch-Australian family; she provides a moving account of discovering that an archival shot of a handsome woman, to which she had been drawn for some reason, eventually proved to be her very own natal great-grandmother. In a similar vein, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, a woman of Seminole and Muskogee heritage, tells of establishing "photographic sovereignty" by assuming "responsibility to reinterpret images of Native peoples" (p. 41). Opportunities abound for Africans to begin a similar healing process by recuperating photographs of their ancestors, even as they establish what Nicolas Peterson refers to as "image ethics" (again with reference to people of Australia's first nations--p. 119), setting their own terms for what they feel should and should not be photographed, and how photographs should be used once they have been taken.

In the same collection, Christopher Pinney adds to his impressive work concerning the visual cultures of India (his books of 1997 and 2004 have direct comparative application to African Studies). Here Pinney offers comparison between Indian and African studio photography. In both cases, the photographers he has in mind "act as impresarios bringing forth an ideal and aspirational vision of the bodies that sitters wish themselves to be" (p. 214). The Likoni Ferry photographs Behrend presents certainly attest to this, as patrons choose to be portrayed before images of the Egyptian pyramids or in association with paintings of airplanes or ocean-liners (pp. 221-39). Such choices can constitute an important form of "visual decolonization" (Appadurai 1997:6). One path to "visual decolonization" is partially achieved in Hector Acebes, Portraits in Africa 1948-1953. Like Casimir Zagourski as described by Christraud Geary, Acebes--a Columbian citizen now in his eighties--has long been a larger-than-life character The several portraits of him published in Portraits of Africa prove the point: In one taken in war-time Germany, he is the spitting image of comedian Ernie Kovacs--cigar, mustache, humorous hands-on-hips stance, and all; in another he has a Dali-like insouciance as he turns his back and stares over his shoulder, his shaven head resonant in form with that of an unidentified African boy standing in the foreground, facing the camera. This picture strikes me as a rather insensitive joke, however, for the boy, nude to the waist, is sweating copiously and has a vacuous, slack-mouthed look as though he cannot fathom what is happening, as opposed to Acebes' self-assured nonchalance. Perhaps this reflects some of the ambivalence of Acebes' oeuvre to which Isolde Brielmaier refers in her all-too-brief essay accompanying a portfolio of Acebes' work.

Brielmaier makes an assertion that is both provocative and difficult to prove: "Acebes' photographs are unique in that they form a mediating link between the colonial world of objectification and African practices of self-representation" (p. 11). Can they really be "unique" in this? Occasional "anonymous profiles or ... full-frontal nudes displayed to us as privileged viewers and consumers ... reflect colonial perspectives," whereas "the majority of Acebes' images feature individuals who appear in control of the situation" (ibid.). On the latter account, it is true that many of Acebes' portraits are of smiling people who seem neither intimidated nor angry, most of whom appear completely at ease with the artist. As Brielmaier explains, Acebes preferred using a waist-held Rolleiflex, and its below-eye-level composition allowed him to maintain eye contact while helping him "capture ... people as active individuals full of feeling" (p. 7-8). The result is that those portrayed seem both eminently knowable and the sort of souls one would want to know. This said, why, then, did Brielmaier and Ed Marquand (director of the Acebes Archive and the book's designer/producer) choose to publish a jarringly lurid photo taken in Casablanca of a standing, fully naked young female prostitute? Presumably, the book is a retrospective and the artist's different sorts of work deserve reproduction, but the photo is exaggerated in the way it continues to demean a human life (and in answer to those like me who would defend the right of women to work as prostitutes or to do anything else they like, the individual in question glowers at the photographer rather than suggesting any assertion of agency whatsoever). Why perpetuate the colonial objectification by publishing the photo here? What is gained and what lost?

(1.) Literature concerning photography of and by South Africans is relatively plentiful and often inspiring, and deserves special consideration, especially regarding discussion of how photographic images were repressed or otherwise used as instruments of apartheid. For example, see Wilson, Badsha, et al. 1986; or Odendaal 1989. On a different front, for a riveting photographic journey through AIDS/HIV in Africa, see Mendel 2001. Thanks to Doran Ross and Gary van Wyk for discussion of these points.

References cited

Appadurai, Arjun. 1997. "The Colonial Backdrop," Afterimage 24 (5):4-7. Quoted in Christopher Pinney, 2003, "Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism, and Vernacular Modernism." In Photography 's Other Histories, edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, 202-20. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Behrend, Heike. 2000. "'Feeling Global': The Likoni Ferry Photographers in Mombasa, Kenya." African Arts 33 (3):70-77.

Geary, Christraud, 1988. Images from Barnum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya, Cameroon, West Africa, 1902-1915. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

--. 1991. "Missionary Photography: Public and Private Readings." African Arts 24 (4):48-59, 98-100.

--.1993. "Two Days at Mushenge: Eliot Elisofon's Images of the Kuba (1947)." African Arts 26 (2):72-77.

Geary, Christraud, and Virginia-Lee Webb. 1998. Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Matt, Gerald, and Thomas Miessgang, eds. 2002. Flash Africa! Photography from West Africa. Gottingen: Steidl for the Kunsthalle Wien.

Mendel, Gideon. 2001. A Broken Landscape: HIV and AIDS in Africa. New York: Bloom Independent Publishing Group.

Mustafa, Hudita. 2002. "Portraits of Modernity: Fashioning Selves in Dakarois Popular Photography." In Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, edited by Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin, 172-92. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Odendaal, Andre. 1989. Beyond the Barricades: Popular Resistence in South Africa. New York: Aperture.

Oguibe, Olu. 1996. "Photography and the Substance of the Image." In In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, 231-50. New York: Harry Abrams for Guggenheim Museum Publications.

--. 2001. "The Photographic Experience: Toward an Understanding of Photography in Africa." In Matt and Miessgang 2002, 9-15.

--. 2004. "Photography and the Substance of the Image."

In The Culture Game, 73-89. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pinney, Christopher 1997. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

--. 2004. "Photos of the Gods": The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion Books.

Saint Leon, Pascal Martin, and N'Gone Fall, eds. 1999. Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography, XIX and XX Century. Paris: Editions Revue Noire.

Sprague, Stephen. 1978. "Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves." African Arts 12:52-59.

Wilson, Francis, Omar Badsha, et al. 1986. The Cordoned Heart: Twenty South African Photographers. New York: Norton.

Zaccaria, Massimo. 2001. Photography and African Studies: A Bibliography. Pavia (Italy): Dept. of Political and Social Studies, University of Pavia.