Photographies in Africa in the digital age

In recent years, all kinds of African photographies, both on the continent and in the diaspora, have undergone a digital 'revolution' (Ekine and Manji 2012). Without doubt, the key driver of this trend has been the rapid, and massive, influx to practically all African countries of ever more affordable third generation/advanced mobile phone handsets, or smartphones. Even compared with earlier technological revolutions on the continent, both the speed and the scale of this spread have been simply breathtaking. For example, the establishment of transistor radio sets–the process through which personal radios became ubiquitous across Africa–occurred over the period of at least a decade and a half (between roughly the late 1950s and the early 1970s).¹ Similarly, the original mobile phone revolution–i.e. the process through which early generation/low functionality mobile phones went from being a source of novelty, to a domain for experimentation, to technologies that were routinized in everyday life, throughout the continent–took more than a decade to unfold (the crucial years being those between roughly 1999 and 2010) (Vokes 2018b). Against both of those earlier processes, the emergence of smartphones occurred over a much shorter timeframe. Between 2011 and mid-2015 alone, the number of smartphones being imported into Africa–the majority of them sub-US$100 Android-based systems–jumped from around 10 million units per annum to almost 100 million (Tshabalala 2015), as a result of which these devices became quickly established as a common feature of everyday life. Today, more than one-third of all mobile phones in Africa are smartphones, and this percentage is set to rise to two-thirds by 2020 (GSMA Intelligence 2017).

Among their many effects, smartphones and their associated infrastructures for communication–from high-speed internet connections to social media platforms such as Facebook, Friendster, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and WhatsApp–have vastly expanded the possibilities for taking, storing, manipulating, circulating and displaying photographic images. Most obviously, these devices have allowed their users to produce far greater volumes of photographic images than ever before, compared with earlier cameras such as 35 millimetre cameras and even standalone digital camera units (which rely on expensive Secure Digital, or SD, memory cards to function). So smartphones have also enabled photographers to store their pictures in new ways, given these devices' capabilities for an immediate, and straightforward, placement of digital image files into virtual folders. This contrasts with previous processes, in which storage necessarily required photographers to first develop their images into physical photographic prints, and then to sort them and locate them in some kind of physical collection. Smartphone-based software has facilitated its users to alter images much more quickly and easily than ever before, in particular via all manner of photography-focused apps, which might typically do anything from changing an image's lighting to replacing its background–all with just a few touches. Again, manipulations of this sort would have previously required lengthy interventions by a studio at the very least. Finally, smartphones have allowed their users to share photographic images in new ways, especially through online 'social media' platforms such as Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and WhatsApp groups. These platforms have allowed photographers to share their images with much wider, and more geographically dispersed, audiences than ever before, and to combine their own photos with those taken by other photographers, and/or with other kinds of images–for example, with all manner of pictures downloaded from the internet–increasingly easily. They have also enabled photographers to engage with new online formats for display, including virtual 'albums', audiovisual/multimedia formats, and visual essays in blogs and online magazines.²

Unsurprisingly, these new possibilities for the production, storage, alteration, circulation and exhibition of photographic images have in turn brought about broader shifts in photographic practice across Africa. The most obvious of these has been a general expansion in the range of places and social contexts in which photography takes place, so that it is no longer an activity particularly associated with special events and occasions (from state and church functions to lifecycle events such as births, weddings and funerals), as it was...