Tarrying with our negatives (and positives).

It is only via the act of knowledge that the object becomes what it truly "is."

Slavoj Zizek Tarrying with the Negative, 1993

Many of us who have worked in Africa for several decades face the practical problem of what to do with our photographs and slides. Not just the Kodachrome and Ecktachrome transparencies that form the stock in trade for class use and lecture circuits, but also our negatives, be they color, black-and-white, 35mm, or the more exalted 2 1/4" by 2 1/4" format of the Rolleiflex or Mamiya. We know that we should make copies, use cold storage, protect against scratches, and above all, annotate each shot, since fading colors and images often combine with fading memories of dates and events. But how many of us cut corners, get lazy, use originals, postpone the task of rigorous indexing, or work with several loosely organized systems while gambling against physical loss and destruction?

In the mid-1990s I thought that information technology would solve such problems through superior digital cloning. I raised seed money for a scanning project, beginning with my own Yoruba slides in order to develop a system that, in principle, could be shared with my colleagues. I hired an undergraduate skilled in Adobe Photoshop who made two copies of each negative or slide--one a "cheap" image at low resolution for fast access and basic recognition, the other a refined and labor-intensive image, doctored for focus, color, and tone to yield megabytes of pixels that in many cases surpassed the original exposure in technical and aesthetic quality. For a while I was caught up in the euphoria of digital reproduction, in a dream world of vast image-archives linking photo graphic collections into transposable matrices of African cultures, styles, regions, and ritual complexes, remotely accessible and reproducible without entropic degradation. Images would be liberated from original slides and negatives, which could be housed, like crown jewels, in some noncirculating storage facility deep within a mountain or museum. And perhaps even forgotten, for what use is a corruptible and degradable original when digital copies can be searched and cloned at the click of a mouse?

My utopian vision of a brave new image-world crashed, quite literally; with the hard drive of my campus computer. These things happen, of course, and my project should have been protected by the global back-up system of our university-networked server, which ran every night as the ultimate safeguard. But for some mason, it didn't work. A mysterious glitch prevented my expansive archive of digital images from "interfacing" with the safety net, and six months of work, several thousand dollars' worth of labor, and the customized enhancements of nine hundred tiff and pdf files were lost. Although some images were recovered from the mangled hard drive, the project was finished and my enthusiasm waned. Since then I have worked with digital video and CD-ROM production, and I am in no way a critic of the new technologies. But my foray into digital archiving taught me a few object lessons, to which I now turn.

First and foremost is that I love my originals, badly stored as some of them are, scattered across categories, faded, scratched, or imperfectly exposed. Whatever the philosophical arguments against fetishizing the negative (or positive, as with slides), be it endowed with the cult value of heroic field-work, the bourgeois rhetoric of empiricist transparency, or the materiality of a transcendental signifier, the original is indeed a sacred object. As a practical issue, it must be preserved in ways that protect it from harm while providing restricted scholarly access. If no single system or solution works best, it is time, in this age of digital reproduction, to revisit the options for original collections. I will leave that to the experts. Turning to philosophical considerations, however, the question of originals raises a number of issues pertaining to visual signification.

Is a photograph an object, or an image of an object? It is of course both, depending on purpose and viewpoint, and a study of African postcards or portrait photography is no less "primary" than the objets d'art so beautifully reproduced in the pages of this journal. With the representational photographs that we take in the field, however, our purpose is primarily documentary. We strive to reveal the arts of Africa as lived, performed, experienced, embodied, and also exhibited at home and abroad. Our pictures "of" other objects and actions imply a theory of reference that is curiously entangled with issues of authenticity. A good ethnographic or art historical photograph blends technique and composition with information and context. Despite principled disclaimers, shots of local rituals performed in situ are superior to those purely staged for the visitor. Photographs of masks and icons in motion claim a higher value than images of those brought out of storage. The object-in-authentic-context establishes the baseline of cultural if not aesthetic value.

As much as we deconstruct the colonial history of representing African arts and cultures, our cameras often betray our critical intentions, resurrecting the colonial tradition of noble savages in the bush or of hybrid modernities in the cities. Clearly we need not defend this history by perceiving its legacy, but neither can we so easily abandon its effects, including the epistemological separation of image and object. It is not the tenacity of the distinction that concerns me, but that, for better or worse, we cannot do without it. For if the object-in-authentic-context has a checkered past, it also sustains an important critical perspective. Let me illustrate with two examples concerning colonial and postcolonial genres of signification.

In his discussion of le spectacle at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, Timothy Mitchell (in Colonising Egypt, 1991) identifies a revealing optical illusion whereby an exhibited Egypt produced in the West became more real and authentic than the land and people themselves. This inversion of simulacrum and original--a kind of commodity fetish writ large--characterizes the imperial ontology of the world-as-exhibition, in which the framing devices of models and plans became political realities with perceived truth-effects. In subsequent displays of African villages at British, French, and even American world's fairs, the "real" Africa was similarly uplifted according to imperial logics of classification and administration that transcended empirical realities on the ground. Mitchell notes how travelers to Egypt complained that the real Cairo paled in comparison with the one featured in Paris.

In Nigeria, C.L. Temple, the governor's second in command, berated career officers for being out of touch with the locals. In his classic Native Races and Their Rulers (1918) he wrote: "An officer in the Secretariat, Treasury, Customs or Railway departments ... who has spent his whole official career in an African Protectorate may easily, nay very probably, be no more in touch with the natives than an official of a government department at home who has never been within thousands of miles of Africa, but who has visited the various shows and pageants in which natives figure in London." Although intended as an ironic jab, Temple's observation underscores the subtle but powerful inversion between imperial images and objects of representation so characteristic of colonial governmentality. On a more concrete level, this ontological reversal is captured by covert acts of photographic trickery. As Christraud Geary reveals in her work on African postcards, many images of putatively authentic native life were initially photographed in world's fairs and colonial exhibitions and subsequently reissued as scenes from the bush, minus the original captions from the exhibitions themselves. In this last example, we see why the photographic original and its relationship to an authentic object-in-context must be retained: without such distinctions, this important reversal of images and objects could not be grasped.

My second example comes front Achille Mbembe's critical discussions of the post-colony in Africa, in many ways a variation on Fanon's "occult zone of instability," but embellished with political cartoons, critical metaphors, floating signifiers, and sliding identities. If some of his renditions of a hallucinating Africa appear overstated in On the Postcolony (2001), his basic characterizations of phantom states, transgressive regimes, and the privatization of the public sphere capture the consequences of another ontological transformation more recently associated with neoliberal reform. Unlike the ontology of colonial representation, in which the distinction between image and object was preserved and even heightened by its very reversal, in the postcolony the distinction collapses into a social imaginary of deceptive improvisation. My own research on "419" fraud in Nigeria corroborates those violations of the social contract that substitute signs and images for objects of value in confidence tricks, faked invoices, simulated financial instruments, and staged venues. In my reading of Mbembe, the postcolony represents a particular crisis or representation in which signs increasingly replace their referents--less a reversal than a substitution. Again, my point is not to take issue with Mbembe's extreme portrayals but to ground the value of his critical perspective on the crucial distinction between image and object--one that must be sustained because it is continually honored in the breach.

Let us return to our original photographs and slides filed in trays, sheets, and boxes. By fetishizing the original, am I not confounding the very distinction I have argued should be preserved, transforming the image into an object of value? I certainly hope not. Rather I ant sustaining an interpretive ground, a constellation of relationships that retain our grip on a certain measure of objectivity and authenticity. From this perspective, which owes much to Deborah Poole's Vision, Race, and Modernity (1997), the truth-value of a photograph is based on its relationship to the object that it represents, whereas the exchange-value of a photograph derives from its reproducibility and substitutability within a visual economy of icons and images. The original negative or positive is not generally exchangeable, but preserves the photograph's truth-value as an image of an object. Prints and copies that are reproduced, accumulated, and exchanged serve as image-objects unto themselves, accruing exchange-value within various spheres of circulation (including the advertisements in this journal). Curiously relevant to the language of African art, with its history of originals and reproductions, the authentic and the fake, ritual art and airport art, precolonial African culture and postcolonial Afrokitsch, the constellation of relationships I have in mind is neither old guard nor avant-garde, but captures the colonial past in the postcolonial present. When that past is lost, the present is poorly understood.

Andrew Apter is professor of history and chair of the M.A. Program in African Studies at UCLA. His books include Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society (Chicago, 1992) and a study of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC '77) entitled The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago, in press).