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

African Arts, Winter, 2003 by Deborah Stokes

... 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)