From Context to Text: African Arts and Photography, 1967–2017

It is evident that, as the study of photography in Africa opens up, many other fascinating topics will emerge. Photographs by Africans, of Africans, and of African arts in and out of context will come to receive the fuller attention they deserve (Cole and Ross 1985a:28).

In the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, the repositioning of photographs as art rather than as documents relying on mechanical reproduction coincided with the growing appreciation of objects from Africa, which moved from being perceived solely as ethnographica and artifacts into the domain of art. Beyond these parallel histories, photography and African art have been intertwined in other ways, for photographic representations of objects from the African continent in print media helped legitimize them as artistic expressions. At the same time, photographs taken in Africa illustrated explorers’, ethnographic, missionary, and governmental publications and provided evidence, that is, glimpses of the contexts, in which objects appeared and were used. Thus, photography played an important role in presenting and contextualizing African art when African Arts was founded fifty years ago.

This overview examines photography’s essential role throughout African Arts’ history. It highlights three special issues on photography and a selection of essays and features that appeared in the journal over the years. (The numerous reviews of exhibitions and books devoted to photography and Africa are, however, beyond the scope of this brief discussion.) I focus on several interrelated aspects, beginning with the journal’s use of field images, that is, pictures evoking context, and contributions devoted to the evidentiary nature of such pictures. In another set of essays, which foregrounded image making by European and American professional photographers and researchers in the humanities and social sciences, photographs moved from illustrations providing context to the actual text to be examined. The final part of this overview looks at contributions exploring indigenous photographic practices on the continent, the social lives of images in different material forms, and the nature of the African archive.

FIELD PHOTOGRAPHY

The first issue of African Arts in autumn of 1967 set the stage for the subsequent use of color and black-and-white images and contextual photographs, which illustrated several articles. To give just one example, Peggy Harper, a dancer and choreographer who studied life and dance in Nigeria, contributed an essay entitled “Dance in a Changing Society” (Harper 1967). It provides documentary images of dances, taken by Harper and Frank [Francis] Speed, an acclaimed British ethnographic filmmaker and photographer, who recorded the cultures in Nigeria (Fig. 1). In 1969, the journal presented the first field images on its cover and back, with the back one artfully enhanced by Alice McGaughey, the journal’s designer (Fig. 2). Taken by folklorist Dan Ben-Amos during work in Nigeria, these images accompanied an illustrated essay entitled “Keeping the Town Healthy: Ekpo Ritual in Avbiama Village,” an Edo village in the Benin Kingdom, by Paula Ben-Amos Girshick and Osarenren Omoregie (Ben-Amos and Omoregie 1969).¹

These and many other pictures in the journal belong to the tradition of photography for evidentiary and scholarly purposes, which began in the mid nineteenth century, after the first photographic processes had been invented and became commercially available. Soon explorers, travelers, and researchers in various disciplines, most prominently in anthropology, as well as missionaries, colonial employees, and residents in Africa, engaged in photography, using the technology to create seemingly objective documents.² Throughout the twentieth century, and certainly by the 1960s, taking along cameras and film for documentary purposes had become de rigueur for researchers in disciplines such as anthropology, art history, and architecture.

Much to the chagrin of the editorial staff, however, many contextual pictures submitted for publication did not meet the high professional standards of the journal, which strove to appeal to a scholarly readership as well as to collectors, connoisseurs, and general readers not involved in academic pursuits. This gave rise to the first special issue on photography in 1985, in which editors Herbert M. Cole and Doran H. Ross covered different aspects of image making in Africa. Their article “The Art and Technology...