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  • Postcards From Africa : Photographers of the Colonial Era, Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive by Christraud M. Geary
  • Sandrine Colard (bio)
Postcards From Africa : Photographers of the Colonial Era, Selections from the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive by Christraud M. Geary Boston: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, 2018. 148 pp. 110 color ill. $45.00 hardcover

Christraud Geary's Postcards from Africa: Photographers of the Colonial Era, is the latest book by one of the world's specialists of photography in Africa. As one of the pioneers of the discipline, Geary has laid out the foundations for a less binary and more complex reading of colonial era's images, one that recognizes nuanced power dynamics. She applies it here with brio and precision to one of the most versatile photographic objects: the postcard. Based on the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the geographical scope of the book follows the contours of former French, German, and British empires and the routes followed by anonymous or now well-known European and African photographers: Edmond-François Fortier, Casimir Zagourski, Jean Audema, and Alex A. Acolatse, among others. Since Geary's first foray into an exploration of the postcard medium, Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards, was published in 1998, the multiplication of scholarships about African photography has considerably grown, and Geary masterfully weaves and sums up these into her discussion of the African postcard.

The first chapter, "Photographers and Picture Postcards," traces the biographies of various European but also African practitioners who participated in the lucrative postcard business—so feverish that one observer called it "postal carditis" at the turn of the century. Benefiting from the growing scholarships about early African photographers such as the recent J.A. Green: Reimagining the Indigenous and the Colonial by Lisa Aronson and Martha G. Anderson (2017), Geary is able to give a large panorama of the African—often Creole—photographers who for a long time remained hidden behind European names: Neils Walwin Holm, or George Goethe, for instance. The author succeeds in maintaining a delicate balance between the resolute agency of indigenous photographers as image-makers, the recognition of the historical information that postcards provide, but also the imperial artifact that they constitute.

The second chapter, "Colonial Worlds," exposes that photography and the postcard medium were complicit in the justification and perpetuation of Empire. Geary demonstrates with mastery how images initially destined to promote the imperial enterprise become formidable tools for postcolonial critique. Views of modern infrastructures are revealed to be propaganda, and images of colonial order and subjugation are revealed to be records of the human rights' abuse, destruction of fauna and flora, or again, missionary proselytism. Following closely the "social lives" of the postcards, Geary also examines the interactions between the writing and the image, opening up additional venues for interpretations. At the same time, complicating the omnipotence of the "colonial gaze," the author acknowledges how an African photographer such as F.W.H. Akhurst produced images of high-ranked officials and events, giving them the power to represent colonial actors. Similarly, a striking image of the studio of the photographer Alphonso Lisk-Carew in 1938 proudly advertised the patronage of the Duke of Connaught, after he was granted a royal warrant. Supported by thorough historical research about the persons populating the photographs, Geary eschews any simple generalizations about oppressed and oppressors.

As the most fraught genre of the colonial archive, the portrait is dedicated two chapters: one entitled "Tribes, Types, and Portraits" and the second "People and Leaders." In these two sections, Geary perfectly demonstrates the semiotic slippages and the instability of interpretations that these images received at various points in time and for different audiences. The most blatant examples of African subjects' "authorial presence" are particularly powerful in the representations of chiefs, when the author analyzes how African rulers and monarchs agreed, sometimes commissioned, and instrumentalized their portraits and their circulation to advance their own political agenda, from Madagascar to Togo and Zambia. At the same time, however, Western viewers could project onto those same pictures evidence of "mimicry" instead of cosmopolitanism, of loyalty to colonizers or, on...

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