Photography in Africa: Ethnographic perspectives

Abstract

In his savvy introduction to this valuable book, Richard Vokes notes the expansion of interest in making sense of the history of photography in Africa, and by Africans, over the last 20 years. We have moved past simple attributions of significance to pictures, to think in terms of the social construction of meaning. Vokes sets out three ‘overlapping, discursive contexts’ for the book: technologies and ‘movement,’ for one; the relationship between the image and political power, for another; and processes of social change, a third. ‘Movement’ allows Vokes to accommodate a variety of issues, but most of all, the deployment and consumption of images, even their ‘destruction,’ is now grasped as part of the evaluation of intent. Put simply, how and when a picture is viewed makes a huge difference to its meaning. The essays in this book are generally of a high quality. Images in E. E. Evans-Pritchard's photography (Christopher Morton's chapter) are usefully revealed as showing the anthropologist's comfort among the Azande, and his alienation from the Nuer. Great Britain had strafed them, killed their ‘prophet’, and taken many of their cattle – and now an English civilian just out of uniform wanted to photograph the remaining herds! It is a wonder Evans-Pritchard was tolerated at all, not that they abridged his photographs of their initiation ceremonies. The evaluation of images in the context of their production also concerns Chris Wingfield in a fascinating if long chapter about Max Gluckman's picture-taking in 1938, which reconstructs the anthropologist's photographing of a meeting on a bridge, altering our understanding of his famous essay, ‘An analysis of a social situation in modern Zululand’ (1940).