Temporal frictions: on the geopolitics of decay

Like many scholars working on photographs in places outside Europe and North America, I have often engaged, in my research, with photographic prints and negatives in advanced states of decay. I have argued for an approach to these faded, frayed, and crumbling prints and negatives that “accepts and embraces the ongoing decay of the image” as an essential part of photography and its histories in West Africa. My research explores the relationship of photographic decay to distinctly West African concepts of history, memory, and time; the invitation to orality represented by the fading image; and aesthetic questions linking decay to traditions of ephemerality in African art. Parallel to my research, since 2012, I have been involved in a series of preventive conservation projects undertaken with museum and cultural heritage professionals in West Africa. These projects, while urgently necessary, can be practically and politically messy, and they often highlight and even amplify the friction between Eurocentric philosophies and protocols of conservation and West African realities. This paper details and responds to this friction. I argue that an acceptance of decay is necessary if we want to respect the significance of photography to local practices of historiography in West Africa and to support new approaches to local collections. I also argue that we must reframe decay as a geopolitical (rather than physical, methodological, or aesthetic) question, and that it is only through such reframing that we can begin to assess the growing significance of photographic images and collections to decolonial thought.