Photography and Africa: Primary Sources

Since the emergence of “African Photography” as a subfield of art history in the early 1990s, critics and scholars have increasingly sought to respond to and account for how photographic images interfaced with other technologies of reproduction and circulation. Advertisements, album covers, billboards, books, calendars, ID cards, newspapers, oral testimony, passports, popular magazines, postcards, posters, pulp fiction, textiles, and the surfaces of domestic interiors, bureaucratic offices, and outdoor spaces, have all constituted sources for analyzing the aesthetics, display, and movement of historical photographic images (whether “vintage” or “modern”) in and of Africa. When considered alongside the profusion of contemporary art practices that employ the photographic broadly conceived, it becomes clear that the practice of photography in Africa has and continues to exert enormous pressure on any effort to adhere to “proper” interpretive protocols or research methodologies rooted in the conventions of Western art history and/or anthropology. This panel aims to address and map how scholars of African photography engage primary sources to better understand the medium, including photographic objects that can be construed as unconventional, i.e., that exceed traditional market and museological demand for unique or editioned prints. Key questions include: How do these sources compel different accounts of African photography? How does this engagement shift our understanding of the very concept of “medium” in African contexts? We welcome presentations that consider both historical and contemporary practices, and invite reflections that suggest trajectories for further research.