Photography's Other Histories by Christopher Pinney; Nicolas Peterson

Board of Trustees, Boston University

Photography's Other Histories by Christopher Pinney; Nicolas PetersonReview by: Corinne A. KratzThe International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2003), pp. 682-687Published by: Boston University African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3559457 .

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682 BOOK REVIEWS

Photography's Other Histories. Edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson. Objects/Histories: Critical Perspectives on Art, Mate- rial Culture, and Representation series. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Pp.viii, 285; illustrations. $22.95 paper.

Though photography initially spread through the world from Euro-American sources, its paths of circulation soon became more complex. As photographic technology spread, it often became uncoupled from the meanings, uses, aesthetics, and formal-stylistic conventions developed in Euro-American settings, as photographic practice developed in other settings in diverse ways. Photography's Other Histories builds on this basic but critical point to recast the history of photography as typically narrated and to decenter its usual Euro-American focus-to provin- cialize it in Chakrabarty's terms (p. 12). The pluralizing of photography's histories that results bring into view a much broader range of photographic practice, one in which the production of images and their meanings, uses, and circulation are both locally grounded and engaged in an array of regional, national, and international interchanges.

Combining papers from a 1997 Australian conference with three well- selected reprints, the book's twelve essays demonstrate that all aspects of photographic practice are subject to recasting as they are recontextualized and reinter-

preted through different visual traditions and diverse cultural-historical-political circumstances. Solid, theoretically informed case studies cover a wide geographic and historical range and do not shy away from the detail needed to explore specific, sometimes intricate, examples of photographic reinterpretation. Most of the studies include multiple perspectives representing the array of actors involved. This not only helps to decenter Europe and the United States within photography's histories, but maintains the pluralizing project within each case by recog- nizing and examining the diverse meanings, actors, and sites involved and tracing the cultural and political-economic circuits that shape particular modes of photographic practice. The entanglements of colonial and postcolonial relations become a recurrent theme as well because of the book's expansion and recasting of photographic histories. Several papers also go beyond photographic images to consider how photography itself is understood in relation to other visual media, genres, and

imaging practices in different circumstances. (In describing the book further, I note related resources for Africanists that supplement the book's cases.)

Each of the volume's three sections-"Personal Archives," "Visual

Economies," and "Self-Fashioning and Vernacular Modernism"-foregrounds particular themes that take intriguing turns from one paper to the next and cross- cut the other sections. Pinney's brief introduction sets the stage with sharp, insightful questions about photography and the limited modes of analysis and



BOOK REVIEWS 683

overdetermined interpretations (what I call "allegorical readings"1) that charac- terize much recent scholarship. His astute examples of shifts in the meanings and uses of the same images in different circumstances for different people raise issues developed further in the papers. Pinney provides the theoretical foundation for the cases that follow with provocatively original observations on the uncon- trollable openness and unpredictability that arise from photography's inclusive indexicality (i.e., the fact that the camera records everything that appears within the frame). From the full image created, different details and juxtapositions come alive for viewers with different cultural expectations and ways of interpreting and using images. Pinney and the other authors examine how this interpretive potential is variously constrained and shaped in particular situations by political economic relations, paths of circulation, and conventions of interpretation and use.

The first section, "Personal Archives," begins the book's project with a postcolonial emphasis. Its three papers bridge time to recuperate colonialist photographs by widening their contextual trajectories, making those pictured known as individuals, and re-placing images taken for administrative or scientific purposes within personal and community relations. The papers demonstrate the potential power such photographs hold for moving testimony, recovering lost relationships, the shock of unanticipated recognition, and transforming vague memories and stories into physical form. Their accounts recall Clifford's work on photographs and exhibits in Northwest Coast museums in Native American communities and my own work on different photographic interpretations in Kenya and the United States.2

Jo-Anne Driessens's photographic research was a personal journey that helped track her Aboriginal birth family, lost to her as an adopted infant, even as it personalized images in archival collections by identifying people and contextu- alizing the photographs. Michael Aird also emphasizes Aboriginal people's role in adding documentary layers to archival images, constituting their visual histories and often looking past stereotypical conventions to see their ancestors. He considers contrasts and relations among contemporaneous photographic traditions in Australia-scientific and government documentation, studio portraits, family collections-and underlines the value of early photographs in documenting the

1 See Corinne A. Kratz, "On Telling/Selling a Book by Its Cover," Cultural Anthropology 9, 2 (1994), 1-22.

2 See James Clifford, "Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections," in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C., 1988); Corinne A. Kratz, "Okiek Portraits: Representation, Mediation, and

Interpretation in a Photographic Exhibition," Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 141-42, XXXVI (1-2) (1996), 141-42, 51-79; Corinne A. Kratz, The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition (Berkeley, 2002).



684 BOOK REVIEWS

range of Aboriginal situations as well as diverse attitudes and daily relations between Aboriginal people and others. At the same time, he raises questions about photographic ethics, ownership, and whether some colonialist images are impos- sible to recuperate and reclaim. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie treats such limiting images differently, asking how photographic interpretation might draw on other epistemologies and forms of knowledge production, including dreams and tattoos as well as archives. Her reprinted paper recounts how her interpretive shift from observer to observed led her to reinterpret Native American photographs in terms of resilience, survival, perseverance, and personal relations. Native American photographic histories contain disturbing events, however, and raise questions about which narratives and perspectives are attached to images in various contexts, and how those photographed can be heard as well as seen. Although Tsinhnahjinnie poses the questions in relation to indigenous people, they apply to any marginalized group.

Papers in the second section, "Visual Economies," sketch the many facets encompassed by that notion, emphasizing questions about image circulation, considering the interactions and ambiguities inherent in the process, and including the variety of perspectives and actors involved. They trace photographic circuits related to different histories, modes of production, styles, aesthetics, values, uses, and meanings, presenting cases from New Guinea, Japan, Navajo (U.S.), and Australia. Roslyn Poignant's paper continues to personalize visual archives with fuller life narratives. Seeking to "destabilize stereotypes" of savagery (p. 62) surrounding the display of Aboriginal people, it inaugurates a larger project on how persistent popular images and stereotypes are produced and sustained

through circulation across performance, visual images, narrative media and

changing technologies of representation.3 Like other recent work on human

displays,4 Poignant takes the perspective of those displayed but also sets people within their communities. James Faris, too, considers stereotypes and how limits of popular representation are recreated, sorting a broad swathe of Navajo photographs taken by non-Navajo photographers into four major categories. He raises

questions about photographic repatriation and how political policies help shape which images are shown, but prefers to leave issues of reclamation to native artists, scholars, and activists. Morris Low's discussion of Japanese colonialism in Manchuria shows the role of photography in a different partnership of science, administrative power, and popular media, one that was in dialogue with modes of

3 Compare Corinne A. Kratz and Robert Gordon, eds., "Persistent Popular Images of

Pastoralists," special double issue of Visual Anthropology 15, 3-4 (2002).

4 Phillips Verner Bradford, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (New York, 1992); Ciraj Rassool and Patricia Hayes, "Science and the Spectacle: /Khanako's South Africa, 1936-1937," in

Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes, and Gary Minkley, eds., Deep hiStories: Gender &

Colonialism in Southern Africa (Amsterdam and New York, 2002).



BOOK REVIEWS 685

colonialism elsewhere and took the form of a 1920-1930s expedition closely con- nected with a newspaper.5

Nicholas Peterson and Christopher Wright offer the section's most fertile and subtle papers. Wright develops a richly layered series of interpretive contexts for the staged photographs of tattooed girls produced by a colonial officer in New Guinea, resisting easy but anachronistic condemnations of the images. He considers the different aesthetics, genres, and notions of the person and self-fashioning pertinent to the Hula people, other New Guinea people, and the colonial, scientific, and society settings of Victorian Britain, paying particular attention to ideas and attitudes about children and youth. He follows the images' multiple trajectories, examines their range of audiences, and explores the complexities of cross- cultural encounter and a changing set of assumptions about photography. Peterson traces interconnected shifts in ethical concerns, politics and power relations in Australia that have altered access to and relations with indigenous photographic subjects. Aboriginal land rights play a decisive role in this important history, where different attitudes to knowledge production and circulation are at stake. Peterson shows how these power relations have been embedded in photographs through genres, poses, and inclusion/exclusion of subjects like religious activity and outlines concurrent changes in the nature of photographic practice and images in public circulation.

The final section, "Self-Fashioning and Vernacular Modemisms," presents cases from Peru, India, Kenya, and Nigeria. Deborah Poole's reprinted paper on an early Peruvian photographer and the shaping of "indigenous" and regional identities provides a good transition, continuing the visual economies concern with strong political economic grounding and a sense of both constraints on

personal opportunities and shifts in technologies of reproduction, representation, and fashion. She considers interactions of form and meaning across visual traditions and media, and how sentiment and value attributed to images feature in

political and cultural philosophies, condensing them in iconic characters (echoing Poignant's and Faris's papers). Christopher Pinney explores imaginative spaces and playful, ephemeral identities created in studio settings, through montage printing and in ways photographs are altered and enhanced as objects. Comparing Indian photographic practice with 1950s studio work by Malian photographer Seydou Keita (not "postcolonial" in a chronological/historical sense), he uses a notion of "surfacism" to highlight formal/aesthetic similarities in textures, shallow

depth, and general approach to photographs.

Pinney's intriguing essay leads into two final papers on African studio

photography by Heike Behrend and Stephen Sprague. African vernacular and

5 Compare Robert Gordon, Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition of 1925

(Athens, 1997).



686 BOOK REVIEWS

studio photography shows considerable variety and change across the continent and over time,6 but the importance of portraits and the portrayal of social identities and relations are abiding features through which ideas about the body and character are related to visual representation and aesthetics. Behrend describes informal studio and street photographers currently working at the Kenyan coast. Her ethnographic sketch of this interesting group calls out for more systematic and textured description of their place within photographic practice in Kenya and Mombasa (which has had studios since 1900), of the range and proportions of people photographed, and the styles and kinds of images produced, and for a better sense of what Kenyans do with their photographs. Some interpretations presented accord very well with postcolonial and postmodern theory, but it is not clear whether these are largely Behrend's ideas or somehow related to the ways that Kenyans themselves understand studio photographs and the iconic places depicted on backdrops. A richer depiction of the people involved and their photographic practice would also clarify this.

The final piece in the book turns to Yoruba popular photography in Nige- ria. Sprague's superb paper presents thorough analysis of studio negatives combined with interviews to offer systematic information on genres, stylistic conventions (including camera angles), and patterns of social use, relating photographic portraits and poses to Yoruba aesthetic-moral concepts. He notes varia- tions across and within Yoruba settings and indicates some professional trajectories for local photographers. We can be grateful this 1978 classic will be more widely available through this reprinting. It still sets a standard for including photographers, those photographed, and others who "consume" the images, the range of photographic uses and presentations, and the breadth of issues raised. (A similar effort to relate photography and photographers to other representational modes, including sculptors and painters, is found in the recent film "Future Remembrance: Photography and Image Arts in Ghana."7)

Photography's Other Histories is chock-full of complex, interesting, and thoughtful scholarship. Some detailed images in Poignant's and Low's papers are reproduced too small to see properly. And while one can hardly expect to cover the entire world and every case in one book, it is still unfortunate that African photographic practices are represented only by studio work (both West and East

6 Jean-Bernard Ouedraogo, "La Figuration Photographique des Identit6s Sociales: Valeurs et

Apparences au Burkina Faso," Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines XXXVI, 1-2 (1996), 141-142, 25-50; Jean-Francois Werer, "Produire des images en Afrique: L'example des photographes de studio," Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines XXXVI, 1-2 (1996), 141-142, 81-112; Kratz, The Ones that Are Wanted, 118-24, 141-48.

7 Tobias Wendl and Nancy du Plessis, "Future Remembrance: Photography and Image Arts in Ghana" (Institut fur den Wissenschaftlichen Film, distributed by Documentary Educational Resources, 1998).



BOOK REVIEWS 687 BOOK REVIEWS 687

Africa). Stunning work on photography and visual history in southern Africa has been appearing in the past decade by such scholars as Hartman, Silvester, and Hayes; Marijke du Toit; Santu Mofokeng, and others.8 Their work resonates with the book's essays and raises other issues as well-looking at photography in South Africa's intra-African colonialism in Namibia (cf. Low's chapter here), image archives produced by colonial officers (cf. Wright's article), chasms between family portraits, government documentary images, and the personal memories that cross them (cf. Poignant's paper and the Personal Archives section), how photographs combined with words to forge racial-ethnic national- isms and define economic margins, and the challenges of combining visual and political engagement. An essay from this powerful regional scholarship would have been a welcome way to round out the volume. Yet overall this is a marvel- ous book and the breadth of historical and geographical range it does cover helps to make its compelling case. Above all, it is the way these essays work together and the conversations and counterpoints that arise among the papers and well- organized sections that make it so important. Indeed, the overall volume succeeds in making it very hard to think of photography only in terms of European and American settings, conventions, and histories. That is a major achievement.

CORINNE A. KRATZ

Emory University

Les secrets du Manding: Les recits du sanctuaire Kamabolon de

Kangaba (Mali). By Jan Jansen. Leiden: Center for Non-Western Studies, 2002. Pp. 163; bibliography, index of cited sources. ?18 paper.

This slender book attempts several tasks and accomplishes them with varying degrees of success. In its most useful aspect, Les secrets du Manding offers a collection of narratives that can be considered a current version of the creation

myth for certain portions of Mande society. They were collected from Lansine Diabate, the current kumatigi, or "master of speech," of the village of Kela, who is

responsible for declaiming them during the re-roofing ceremony of the Kama-

8 Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester, and Patricia Hayes, eds., The Colonising Camera:

Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Athens, Ohio, 1998); Marijke Du Toit, "'Blank

Verbeeld,' or the Incredible Whiteness of Being: Amateur Photography and Afrikaner Nationalist Historical Narrative," Kronos (Special Issue on Visual History) 27 (2001), 7-113; Santu

Mofokeng, "Trajectory of a Street-photographer" and "The Black Photo Album," in Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography (Paris, 1999).

Africa). Stunning work on photography and visual history in southern Africa has been appearing in the past decade by such scholars as Hartman, Silvester, and Hayes; Marijke du Toit; Santu Mofokeng, and others.8 Their work resonates with the book's essays and raises other issues as well-looking at photography in South Africa's intra-African colonialism in Namibia (cf. Low's chapter here), image archives produced by colonial officers (cf. Wright's article), chasms between family portraits, government documentary images, and the personal memories that cross them (cf. Poignant's paper and the Personal Archives section), how photographs combined with words to forge racial-ethnic national- isms and define economic margins, and the challenges of combining visual and political engagement. An essay from this powerful regional scholarship would have been a welcome way to round out the volume. Yet overall this is a marvel- ous book and the breadth of historical and geographical range it does cover helps to make its compelling case. Above all, it is the way these essays work together and the conversations and counterpoints that arise among the papers and well- organized sections that make it so important. Indeed, the overall volume succeeds in making it very hard to think of photography only in terms of European and American settings, conventions, and histories. That is a major achievement.

CORINNE A. KRATZ

Emory University

Les secrets du Manding: Les recits du sanctuaire Kamabolon de

Kangaba (Mali). By Jan Jansen. Leiden: Center for Non-Western Studies, 2002. Pp. 163; bibliography, index of cited sources. ?18 paper.

This slender book attempts several tasks and accomplishes them with varying degrees of success. In its most useful aspect, Les secrets du Manding offers a collection of narratives that can be considered a current version of the creation

myth for certain portions of Mande society. They were collected from Lansine Diabate, the current kumatigi, or "master of speech," of the village of Kela, who is

responsible for declaiming them during the re-roofing ceremony of the Kama-

8 Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester, and Patricia Hayes, eds., The Colonising Camera:

Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Athens, Ohio, 1998); Marijke Du Toit, "'Blank

Verbeeld,' or the Incredible Whiteness of Being: Amateur Photography and Afrikaner Nationalist Historical Narrative," Kronos (Special Issue on Visual History) 27 (2001), 7-113; Santu

Mofokeng, "Trajectory of a Street-photographer" and "The Black Photo Album," in Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography (Paris, 1999).



Photography's Other Histories by Christopher Pinney; Nicolas Peterson

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