The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies ed. by Christopher Morton, Darren Newbury (review)

Standing on a pile of rubble with his back to the viewer, Xolani Ngilima is fixed on the cover of this recently published collection of essays in the act of pasting an enlarged photograph, originally taken by his great-grandfather, Ronald Ngilima, onto a brick wall in Actonville (Benoni, Gauteng), South Africa. Taken by one of this compilation’s twelve remarkable contributors, Sophie Feyder’s documentation of the 2011 informal street exhibition “Searching for the Old Location” visually introduces the reader to several of the questions the authors of this volume engage. How does the publication of African photographers’ previously private collections aid in or complicate the production of local histories? How do curators and scholars navigate the tensions that exist between the complex historical pasts photographs depict and their visual and material affects? What roles do oral histories play in the formation and interpretation of photographic archives that are located both on and off the continent and, extending from this, how do digitization efforts and new online platforms challenge our understanding of African photography as a categorical construct?

Edited by Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury, The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies comprises an introduction and eleven significant case studies by authors who deftly explore the methodological challenges confronted by those researching the continent’s photographic histories and sincerely interrogate the abounding practical, theoretical, and ethical matters of the archive. The well-illustrated book is separated into four parts along thematic, rather than chronological or geographical lines. While the first section, “Connected Histories,” returns to the institutionalized collections of expeditions and colonial-era missions (Morton, Rippe), the book’s second section, “Ethnographies,” comprises studies that consider the potentially more precarious archives held and displayed in individual homes (Zeitlyn, Behrend, Vokes). “Political Framings,” the book’s third section, offers four case studies stemming from the South African context. Containing some of the compilation’s most self-reflective essays, the authors in this section honestly explore the challenges of relocating previously neglected photographic collections in the present (Feyder, Newbury, Hayes) and complicate our understanding of once-oppressive images as they are artistically repurposed (Peffer). Further opening up discussions of the reinvention and relocation of photographic archives is the book’s fourth and final section, “Archival Propositions.” Featuring a photo essay (Stultiens) and a forceful contribution by Erin Haney and Jennifer Bajorek, this concluding portion of the book rigorously interrogates the roles Western institutions have played thus far in enclaving photographic collections while simultaneously forefronting the generative potentials of artistic and cross-regional archival collaborations.

In his contribution to the first part of the book, Christopher Morton offers detailed object biographies of two sets of Richard Buchta’s (1845–1894) mounted albumen prints made during the Austrian photographer’s early travels through Equatoria. Looking to the reproductions of Buchta’s images in nineteenth century European literature, Morton addresses how Buchta’s photographs shaped the visual representation of Central Africa throughout the nineteenth century and argues that they continue to do so today as dematerialized images online. Heike Behrend also looks to the ways in which images have been translated across mediums in her consideration of the shifting role photographs have played in funerary rites in central Kenya. In her discussion of how photographs from family archives have been edited and repurposed for printed funeral programs, Behrend links the resulting photographic biographies to the “progressive structure” of generation-sets and the growth of the genre of biography in the region (pp. 81–33). In his contribution to the book’s third section, John Peffer similarly engages the home-as-archive and considers the ways in which images have been creatively modified for other uses. Looking to the repurposing of passbook photos into enlarged, airbrushed, and hand-painted wedding portraits, Peffer intriguingly shows how images originally produced for an oppressive archive have been reclaimed by their subjects and actively shifted into a new image...