"Image ethics" in and about Africa

African Arts, Summer, 2008 by Allen F. Roberts

Again, a tactic of image ethics is to confront and, to the degree possible, reverse such obliviscence. As Joshua Bell has discovered,

   the random inclusiveness of photographs, their
   indiscriminate documentation of the quotidian,
   allows the photograph's smallest detail to become
   prompts for, and the centerpiece of, more complex
   ... histories.... [Furthermore,] the oral performances
   that result from viewing photographs
   enable new spaces for the preservation and exploration
   of identity, history and culture to emerge.
   In the process, more inclusive and critical histories
   of ... cross-cultural engagement can be written,
   and the various misconceptions that we and
   others writing before us have created and perpetuated
   can be interrogated from different vantage
   points (2006:198).

A number of poignant cases of visual repatriation suggest how Africanists might adapt and apply this tactic to their own research contexts. Jo-Anne Driessens is a person of Australian Aboriginal heritage who was adopted by a Dutch-Australian family when she was two weeks old. While working with Michael Aird, then curator of Aboriginal photographs at the Queensland Museum and now a publisher specializing in books on photography and Aboriginal history, she was attracted to a photograph of a woman whom she later discovered was her own great-grandmother. She also found a photo of her great-grandfather, but because the available pictures were "mainly taken to show physical types, they are very controlled and impersonal," which left Ms. Driessens with "feelings of sadness" (2003:20). From that image, however, she has been able to identify others of her great-grandfather, including one of him playing a "euphonium" (a small tuba) in a band, and she happily concludes that collections of "photographs of the old people are still a fountain of valuable information for anyone who is in a similar situation as myself" (ibid). Here is certainly a case of how "even the most dense of colonial documents can spring leaks," as Elizabeth Edwards (2001:12) puts it so evocatively.

Michael Aird contributes a similar set of stories to Photography's Other Histories. He notes that, "perhaps surprisingly," photos taken during colonial times for colonial purposes "are often valued by Aboriginal people despite the criticism they [the photographs] have been subjected to" because of "the artistic or political inclinations of the photographer and by misguided and racist beliefs resulting in the portrayal of Aboriginal people as savages, beggars, or as the last of a dying race" (2003:23, 25). Aird "has seen Aboriginal people look past the stereotypical way in which their relatives and ancestors have been portrayed, because they are just happy to be able to see photographs of people who play a part in the family's history" (ibid, p. 25). He has discovered long-lost photographs of his own Aboriginal ancestors, including a very rare image of his great-great-great-grandfather, and in 1991 he organized an exhibition called "Portraits of Our Elders" that included photos taken by Aboriginal people themselves, as well as others taken in a colonial idiom. Not surprisingly, those taken by Aboriginal people "showed a side of Aboriginal life in the 1920s that was ignored in publicly circulated photographs which almost always exclusively depicted people in situations of poverty.... [Instead, they] show well-dressed and confident Aboriginal people who sent their children to schools" (ibid)--normal people leading normal lives, that is, however "normal" could be defined in such fraught circumstances.