Publication- Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives

I have just published my latest edited collection, called 'Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives' (James Currey, 2012). Full details of the publication can be viewed at the publisher's website here, and the book can also be purchased at Amazon.co.uk here (or Amazon.com here).

The collection includes a series of empirically rich historical and ethnographic case studies, which examine the variety of ways in which photographs are produced, circulated, and engaged with across a range of social contexts. The volume includes examples drawn from across the continent, and from each of Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa. In this way, it elucidates the distinctive characteristics of all African photographic practices and cultures, vis-à-vis those of other types of 'vernacular photography' worldwide. In addition, the studies included here also develop a reflexive turn, by examining the history of academic engagement with these African photographic cultures, and by reflecting on the distinctive qualities of the ethnographic method as a means for studying such phenomena.

The volume critically engages current debates in African photography and visual anthropology. First, it extends our understanding of the variety of ways in which both colonial and post-colonial states in Africa have used photography as a means for establishing, and projecting, their authority. Second, it moves discussion of African photography away from an exclusive focus on the role of the 'the studio' and looks at the circulations through which the studios' products - the photographs themselves - later pass as artefacts of material culture. Last, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between photography and ethnographic research methods, as these have been employed in Africa.

In addition, the book pay particular attention to the fast changing nature of African photographic cultures, especially since the arrival of widespread digital imaging technologies. For example, to take my own field site of South-western Uganda, it is interesting to note that although digital technologies have only become available in significant numbers since around 2009, they have already begun to generate keen discussion, across a wide variety of social contexts. Thus, even in settings in which people are not yet entirely familiar with digital imaging technologies, people are already beginning to debate, for example, what impact pre-natal scan images will have upon concepts of personhood (in a context in which practically any reference to an unborn child is regarded as strictly taboo), what effect digital portraits will have upon exchange relations (in a context in which photographic image-objects play a significant part in many types of exchange relationships), and what impact the advent of Facebook, and other social networking sites, will have upon relations between people ‘back home’ and those now living in the Diaspora.

I recently conducted an interview about the new collection with the editor of African Griot. The interview provides further information about the volume, and some background on the genesis of the project. The full text of the interview can be viewed here.

Publication- Photography in early colonial Uganda, circa 1904-1928

We have recently published a special issue of the journal History and Anthropology, entitled Routes and Traces: Anthropology, Photography and the Archive. The collection is co-edited by myself and Marcus Banks, of the University of Oxford, and explores recent debates concerning the interpretation of historical ethnographic photographs.

The collection includes chapters on Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, West Africa and elsewhere. However, my own contribution explores the early history of the camera in Uganda, especially in the period around the staging of the famous Kampala Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition (which was held on the newly created show-grounds, below Mengo Hill, on 9th November 1908). Like other colonial expos of the time, the Kampala Exhibition was a key event in the early development of the colonial state in Uganda.

Many of the 'official' photographs that were taken in and around the Kampala Exhibition were produced by one photo studio, the Alfred Lobo Studio, which was opened in Entebbe in 1904, and which later moved to Kampala - where it remained until its closure circa 1939. Very little is known about Alfred Lobo himself, or about any of his studio's staff. The few biographical details we do have are neatly summarized in the Royal Commonwealth Society Photographers' Index, at the University of Cambridge Library. Nevertheless, my article argues that much can still be deduced from Lobo images about the contexts of photographic production, and circulation, in Uganda at this time.

Specifically, the article argues that many 'official' photographs of this period were taken in an attempt to represent the new Uganda colony as an inclusive, even collaborative, social project - one in which all of Uganda's ethnic groups, and all classes of its European colonists, had some part to play. However, these intentions were subsequently lost, as the photographs themselves were later circulated, and reproduced, in new ways. In particular, the article traces how several images from the Exhibition were later reprinted in a series of picture postcards, in ways which instead cast their African subjects in largely negative, and in some cases overtly racist, terms.

The contents of the special issue can be viewed here, on the Taylor and Francis website. This contents page currently allows the introduction to be downloaded, and it also includes an audio-interview I recorded with journal editor Stephen Lyon, in New Orleans in November 2010. The interview discusses the evolution of this special issue, recent scholarship on African photography, and some current general issues in visual anthropology.