"Image ethics" in and about Africa

African Arts, Summer, 2008 by Allen F. Roberts

The thoughts to follow are inspired by a number of recent works in art history and visual culture, most of which concern parts of the world other than Africa. The excellent essays of Photography's Other Histories (2003) edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson and the chapters of Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (2001) by Elizabeth Edwards are particular sources for my ruminations. How might the insights of writers working in Aboriginal Australia, Papua New Guinea, or First-Nation America be applied to the various "image worlds" of Africa and its diasporas? This First Word is a call for discussion concerning locally appropriate "image ethics" and "visual repatriation," as these phrases to be explained below are being articulated by activist scholars.

Africans have long been subjects of photography by non-Africans, and as Salah Hassan notes, "appropriation of Africa's visual world through the invention of the camera went hand in hand with the appropriation of Africa's wealth" (2007:8) during the colonial period and subsequently as well. Hassan raises an essential question in his introduction to the Fall 2007 special issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art that is dedicated to photography and film: What happens when African and African diaspora artists "turn the camera on their own culture, or when they shift the focus to cultures other than their own?" (ibid).

Such local, reflexive use of photography by and for Africans began by the mid-nineteenth century. For example, Augustus Washington (1820-1875), who was "born in the United States, the free son of a South Asian mother and an African-American father," became "the first daguerreotypist in West Africa," Washington "moved his business and family to Liberia in 1853 to find a better life," and examples of his photography of Liberian notables have been preserved (Geary 2002:103; see also Schumard 1999a, 1999b). He went on to become an important sugar farmer in Liberia, but continued to practice his photography for some time, traveling as far as Senegal to take and sell daguerreotypes to local African elites as well as expatriates (Chapuis 1999:51; Ann Schumard, personal communication 2006).

We know very few fascinating histories of this sort, as the lacunae of Massimo Zaccaria's (2001) valuable annotated bibliography of writings on African photography make painfully clear, yet one can hope that African photography has many stories yet to tell. Perhaps we shall never know some, especially concerning the earliest work of photographers such as Augustus Washington, given how perishable photographic products of those and more recent times were and are. Recent studies by Erika Nimis (2005) and Jean-Bernard Ouedraogo (2002) suggest how fruitful diligent and innovative research can be, however, and one can imagine there are troves of images yet to be found in public and private collections in Africa and around the world.

An important aspect of research on historical images in/of Africa is what they tell us now, often despite what they told us then--with the "us" of this sentence referring to people outside the communities in which the photographs were taken. In other words, what can rereading reveal about the subjects of photography but also about how photographs have been and are interpreted by others? A number of excellent studies such as the strong papers of Images and Empires: Visuality on Colonial and Postcolonial Africa edited by Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin (2002) and sensitive monographs like In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960 by Christraud Geary (2002) make the intellectual potential of such study very apparent, as do collecting and pedagogical activities at the National Museum of Mall and a few other institutions. Power relations and politics are often explicit in such work and, as Christopher Pinney cautions, "we must not lose sight of the extraordinary circumstances of inequality (encompassing the range from cultural, political, and economic hierarchy to systemic genocide) that gave rise to the vast majority of images inhabiting the colonial archive" (2003:8). Put another way, "like the state, the camera is never neutral" (Tagg 1993:63). The histories borne by photographs are often "raw" indeed, "in both senses of the word--the unprocessed and the painful" (Edwards 2001:5); and certainly, we must always keep in mind the lasting effects of what is so often "discriminatory representation" (Pinney 2003:9). But what of local-level politics? What might the same photographs mean to and do for the descendants of their original subjects? Here practices of "visual repatriation" (Bell 2006) come to the fore, as will be discussed shortly.

This "First Word" also concerns photography of Africa by people whose heritage is not necessarily African. It is difficult to imagine that any reader of African Arts fortunate enough to have visited some part(s) of Africa or its far-flung diasporas has not taken photographs, and probably lots of them. After more than forty years of my own research combined with my spouse's decades of visual and museum studies, all available nooks and crannies of our home are stuffed with mountains of slides and miles of video, with memory cards and computer files overflowing. But what "burdens of representation" are so implied, to adapt John Tagg's (1993) evocative words, but without Kiplingian connotations?