Afterword Uncertain trajectories and refigured social worlds: the image entourage and other practices of digital and social media photography

Drawn from East, West, Central and Southern Africa, the case studies in this special issue build on several decades of important work on photography in Africa. That work has examined colonial photography and postcards, studio work from colonial times to the present, activist photography, photojournalism, and artists who work with photographic images. It has addressed issues of representation, portraiture, aesthetics, self-fashioning, identities, power and status, modernities and materiality, the roles of photographs in governance and everyday politics, and the many histories and modes of social practice around making, showing, viewing, exchanging, manipulating, reproducing, circulating and archiving photographic images. Yet these articles push such issues and topics in exciting directions by addressing new photographic circumstances emerging throughout the world, initiated through new media's technological shifts and possibilities. In Africa, this has fuelled a range of transformations over the last fifteen years or so, transformations that are still unfolding. As the articles show, digital images, mobile phone cameras and social media (also accessed via phone) constitute the potent triad that has set off these transformations.

The articles capture moments of change, adaptation, reinterpretation and social adjustment. Some happen quite quickly. George Agbo notes that mobile phones with cameras first spread in Nigeria in the mid-2000s, the same time Facebook and Flickr launched there, and Juliet Gilbert records major shifts in her Nigerian research area between 2010 and 2015. On the other hand, Richard Vokes uses a heavily photoshopped 2007 Ugandan billboard of Yoweri Museveni and Muammar Gaddafi to sketch a longer trajectory of governmental visual displays that imagine and embody futures amid political contestation. His analysis reminds us that the effects and implications of these new photographic circumstances emerge in relation to previous practices and histories and will continue to have an impact through social relationships and daily life, reshaping the expectations, meanings and practices that surround photographic images now and in the future.

The interlinked triad of digital images, pervasive camera phones and the rise of social media has led to critical shifts in the visual and political economies of photography, accentuating certain aspects and potentialities of photographic images and practice. The authors in this issue introduce new concepts to capture these novel developments, concepts with traction beyond the African cases presented. Thus we have notions such as the ubiquitous camera (Agbo), the archive of aspirations (Gilbert), the temporarily iconic (Graham), and the historic future tense (Vokes). It is no coincidence that many of these concepts reach for ways to talk about time, space and scale in photographic practice, aspects central to transformations that come with new media. Likewise, the part special issue's title, 'Photographies in Africa in the digital age', points to the imaginings, yet-to-be-defined possibilities and uncertain trajectories prefigured by current visual technologies and practice. These transformative trajectories involve the production of photographic images, the image/object itself, the diverse contexts and means of sharing and circulating images, the uses and work to which they are put, and other such aspects of photographic practice.

All the articles deal in some way with two fundamental results of the spread of mobile phone cameras and social media: the democratization of photographic production and the resulting proliferation and wide circulation of images. If earlier changes in photographic technology freed the camera from the studio, so that itinerant photographers could work anywhere, mobile phone cameras allowed anyone to be a photographer. This produces not only an enormous number of digital images, but also changes in the way in which people relate to the camera, as they become photographers as well as photographic subjects (Carrier). Further, they become curators, gathering images from other sources into the collections archived on their phones, and visual commentators, making satirical selfies in front of public images (Vokes) and expanding the political role of images through social media circulation (Agbo). In some cases, it is not just the proliferation of images that is striking, but their exaggerated size as well. The six-metre-high billboard that Vokes describes is only one example of how both the...