Photography in Africa: ethnographic perspectives by Richard Vokes (ed.) (review)

A book project on photography in Africa requires courage as well as a lot of knowledge about the history of both photography and Africa. With this anthology, Richard Vokes demonstrates that he has both. In his introduction, he reminds us that African photography is not a monolithic field; and that ‘the sheer diversity of photographic practices … compels us to instead think in terms of multiple, overlapping African photographies’ (p. 3). All the book’s chapters engage with current ongoing discourses in visual anthropology about translocal, entangled flows of images across histories and spaces. But many contributions also offer surprising treasures that illustrate the importance of indigenous agency both in the process of image making and in the production of meaning. For example, Neil Carrier and Kimo Quaintance returned and discussed with relatives and descendants the photographs taken of individuals in northern Kenya during the 1950s. In this way, images originally taken to represent an ‘exotic’ culture were reinvested with history and biography, offering the collection another layer of meaning as well as a social after-life.

Figure 1.

(Fig. 4.5 in the book) Bokayo and young relative looking at a photograph by Paul Baxter taken in the 1950s, Marsabit, July 2010

(Photo by: Kimo Quaintance. Reproduced by permission)

The first part of the book focuses on ‘Photography and the ethnographic encounter’. Here a chapter by Christopher Morton explores Azande and Nuer attitudes towards photography during E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s fieldwork in the 1920s and 1930s in Sudan. Morton raises the questions, ‘Why are there no group portraits of Nuer families? Or age mates? Why are there relatively few informal images of Azande involved in everyday tasks and activities?’ (p. 34). He argues that many Nuer refused to gather for a supposed family portrait, to be taken by Evans-Pritchard, without those of their family members who had just been killed by the British army. Contending that the role of ‘indigenous agency in the shaping of the ethnographic archive’ (ibid.) has hitherto been under-analysed, Morton’s chapter reveals the absence of family photographs as the product of a process of self-empowerment by the putative ethnographic visual ‘objects’. Like other ethnographic encounters, fieldwork with the camera is irrevocably dependent on its historical context.

In the second part of the book, ‘Picturing the nation: photography, memory and resistance’, a contribution by Katie McKeown examines the role of photography in establishing and promoting Gorongosa National Park. Exploring how ‘photographic representations of Gorongosa have been entangled with political imaginings’ (p. 166), she discusses the making and labelling of the Park as one of ‘Africa’s Edens’, which was aimed at promoting international wildlife tourism. Pointing to similar processes in other parks, such as the Kruger National Park, McKeown suggests that neo-imperial hunting with the camera is one of the most debatable post-colonial appropriations of African people, landscapes and wildlife.

Figure 2.

(Fig. 2.4 in the book) Group portrait with Evans-Pritchard seated in a chair and a group of Zande boys saluting in a line behind him, with sticks as imitation rifles slung over their shoulders, Yambio, Western Equatoria, southern Sudan.

Photographer unknown (but seemingly taken with Evans-Pritchard’s camera), 1927–30 (Reproduced by kind permission of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, Classmark: 1998.341.576)

In the final section, ‘The social life of photographs’, Heike Behrend looks at wedding photography along the East African coast. Behrend focuses her contribution on the ‘processes of disentanglement, rejection and withdrawal from global media, as well as the creation of new opacities and secrecies that have been largely ignored by scholars’ (p. 229). Photographers in Africa are predominantly male, and Behrend discusses female photographers on the East African Coast who have emerged and occupied a professional space that formerly belonged to men (p. 239). Mirroring Morton’s emphasis...