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Portraiture & Photography in Africa

Indiana University Press

Portrait Photography: A Visual Currency in the Atlantic Visualscape

JÜRG SCHNEIDER

African historians' interest in photographic sources is still rather recent and can be traced back to the mid-1980s. Today, after more than twenty years of research, we know the general outlines of the history of African photography, but have yet to move beyond the larger picture. In looking closely at some centers of the early history of West and Central African photography, such as Sierra Leone, Fernando Po, and Gabon, as well as at the professional careers of African photographers such as Francis W. Joaque, this essay will contribute to a better and deeper understanding of the early history of West and Central African photography. Particularly, it will show how portrait photographs served within what I term the "Atlantic visualscape" as a visual currency thus allowing "facework between absentees" in an increasingly globalized context.

The Atlantic Visualscape

The long contact between the Western world and Africa and hence between different cultures and continents, which intensified in the sixteenth century, created a space where images of all kinds circulated, were produced, and were consumed. Within this area of interaction Africans came in contact with drawings, oil paintings, lithographs, lantern slides, engravings in illustrated newspapers, illustrated books, and eventually photographs. For instance, during the reign of Queen Victoria (who, like her husband Albert, was an early enthusiast of photography) portraits of the Queen and the Royal Family were printed, painted, and engraved on various materials and came to be omnipresent throughout the British Empire. Evidently the appropriation of the West's visual repertoire and practices did not occur without mutual misunderstandings, as the following incident shows: "When some natives took Catholic images brought to [Cuba] by Columbus's men, buried them in a cultivated field and urinated on them in order to produce a rich harvest, the Spanish responded by burning the offenders to death." However, many other sources point to a natural integration of the new images into Africans' visual practices. According to the British trader John Whitford, King Eyo from Creek Town (near Bonny in the Niger Delta) had a portrait of Queen Victoria taken from the illustrated newspaper The Graphic hanging in his house. The prevalent habit of African elites of hanging up pictures of all kinds was also noticed by the French medical doctor Griffon de Bellay in the Gabon hinterland as early as 1862. Europeans and Americans in Africa and at home, at the same time, became acquainted with masks, sculptures, patterns, and drawings on cloth, walls, and bodies. Few, but quite illustrative, sources provide hints as to the practice of exchanging photographs in a way similar to how business cards are given to business partners today.

The concept of the "Atlantic visualscape" draws on the seminal works of scholars such as Arjun Appadurai, Paul Gilroy, Deborah Poole, Marie Louise Pratt, and Anthony Giddens. All of them point to the importance of considering an extended space—geographically, socially, politically, and economically—as a "contact zone" where a multitude of ideas, artifacts, and people circulated. Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic is well known and since its introduction in the early 1990s has triggered an ongoing thread of critical and fruitful discussion. Deborah Poole introduced the terms "image world" and "visual economy," with which she sought to capture the complexity and multiplicity of the realm of images that we might imagine circulating among Europe, North America, and Andean South America. Appadurai, by undertaking an approach to a general theory of global cultural processes, employed a set of terms (ethnoscape, finanscape, technoscape, mediascape, ideoscape) to stress different streams or flows along which cultural material may be seen to be moving across national boundaries. Both Poole and Appadurai underline the simultaneously material and social nature of vision and representation which situates the Atlantic visualscape at the intersection of materiality and discourse.

In her book Imperial Eyes, Marie Louise Pratt argued that travel reports "gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized." The ideas expressed by Pratt can be broadened into two directions: first, by including all potential readers, not only Europeans, within the Atlantic visualscape, and second, by merging them with Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities which emerged from the very activity of "reading," or rather, for our purposes, "seeing things together." This in turn takes us back to Appadurai, who underscored the new role for the imagination in social life, as well as to Deborah Poole, who pointed to the photographic image as a medium which "helped to shape feelings of community and sameness among metropolitan bourgeoisie, aspiring provincial merchants, and upper- and middle class colonials scattered around the globe."

Finally, Giddens, without specifically mentioning the visual in his analysis of modernity, nevertheless develops powerful tools which help us to understand the general dynamics of globalization, and hence the heuristic concept of the Atlantic visualscape. "Disembedding mechanisms," that is, mechanisms that have lifted out the local interaction context, Giddens says, have contributed to the development of the modern world. One of these mechanisms is symbolic tokens such as money. I argue that photographs, and in particular portrait photographs, can be looked at in the same way in which money is a means of time-space distantiation within the dynamics of globalization. This close relationship between money and photographs was indeed already observed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Boston medical doctor, in an essay he wrote in 1863. "Card portraits," he said, "as everybody knows, have become the social currency, the 'green-backs' of civilization." Photographs can be equated with money since both (within an enlarged economy in the sense of Bourdieu), like all disembedding mechanisms, depend on trust. Trust, Giddens says, is vested not in individuals but in abstract capacities. In the case of money, trust is embodied in the fact that others, whom one never meets, honor the value of monetary tokens. In the case of photographs it is vested in the expectation that what a photograph shows is a piece of the real world or a real person who has been "there" in the very moment when the photograph was taken. Or, as Lady Eastlake said in the late 1850s, "[photography's] business is to give evidence of facts, as minutely and as impartially, as, to our shame, only an unreasoning machine can give." The idea of trust that people bestow on the expert system photography is also very well illustrated in Kodak's 1888 slogan, "You press the button, we do the rest."

The processes of circulation, production, and consumption of photographs run by no means unilaterally. African elites who used photographs as a medium for representation and self-portrayal purposefully let their images circulate in the Atlantic visualscape. Also, Africans themselves began to work as photographers, and Europeans had their portraits taken in studios owned by Africans.

The First African Photographers

Photography arrived in West and Central Africa shortly after its invention was officially made public by the French government in 1839. It seems that by the early 1880s it was widely known and practiced in the coastal areas and to a lesser extent in the hinterland. Those who had contributed to the spread of the new technology were white traders, explorers, and adventurers who either used a camera themselves or possessed photographic images that were accessible to Africans. Photographs were also frequently taken by French and British naval officers. This was confirmed by contemporary travelers such as the hunter Henry Astbury Leveson, Consul Richard F. Burton, and the Liverpudlian trader John Holt. Missionary societies, too, recognized photography's potential very quickly. And Africans themselves appropriated the technology and began to work as photographers, seeking clients among the African and European population living in the coastal economic centers who were interested in having their likenesses taken and could pay for it in cash.

There are still many open questions as to who the first African photographers were, what their social backgrounds were, where they learned their profession, and what their formal and aesthetic models were. Recent research has shed light on the African American Augustus Washington, who moved in the 1850s to Liberia and later ran temporary studios in Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and Senegal. Several of his daguerreotypes, which at the time were destined for the American Colonization Society, have survived in various American archives. Erin Haney writes in this volume on the history of photography in West Africa, giving a comprehensive analysis of the Lutterrodts, a widely ramified dynasty of photographers rooted in Accra (Gold Coast, now Ghana). Lutterodt family members ran fixed studios in Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Duala, and possibly Fernando Po, but they were also working itinerantly along the West African littoral. The first photographic activities of the Lutterodts, most likely of Gerhardt Lutterodt, date back to the early 1870s. Lisa Aronson and Martha Anderson are also currently working on a research project about J. A. Green, an African photographer who was active in the Niger Delta in the late nineteenth century. Some biographical details are also available for Fred Grant, a Cape Coast man whose first photographs date—as far as we know—from 1874.

Surveying the period between 1840 and 1880 we observe that the first photographs that may be dated with certainty, apart from those by Augustus Washington, were made in the late 1860s or early 1870s. I cannot confirm Vera Viditz-Ward's statement that "by the 1850s there were African and some European portrait photographers who ran permanent studios or travelled as itinerant photographers among the West African coastal towns." Actually her own hard facts refer to the year 1857 and the above-mentioned Augustus Washington. Why this phenomenon of a more or less sudden development occurred I can not yet tell. It might reflect the technological leap from the daguerreotype, a unique specimen, to photographs produced on the basis of a glass negative. The chance today of finding one copy of many (glass masters) is simply greater than that of finding a daguerreotype or an ambrotype that exists only as a single copy. Thus it is also possible that there are still many photographs from the 1850s and 1860s which we do not yet know about.

Lutterodt, Grant, Washington—those are the names of the first West and Central African photographers. We could add the name of Shadrack St. John, but apart from a few of his portraits of Sierra Leonean Krio (Creoles) we do not know much more about him. There are, however, two other early photographers for whom we have fairly detailed biographical information and whose photographs are quite well known: John Parkes Decker and Francis W. Joaque (whom I discuss below).

On November 29, 1869, a circular was sent out from the Colonial Office in London to all colonial governors requesting that photographs of the principal buildings and places of interest in the colonies be made. The views of the main public buildings in Freetown that were sent in by Governor Sir Arthur Edward Kennedy were, accordingly to Christopher Fyfe, "probably taken by J. P. Decker, a Gambian photographer." Vera Viditz-Ward was more definite, saying that it was actually Decker who took those photographs that exist in two albums in Sierra Leone and Great Britain.

Another photograph, which today is kept in the Basel Mission archives, corroborates that Decker started his career at least in 1869. However, Patricia Hickling, in her article on Senegal's early photographic history, pushed the date back some years. In the government's official Moniteur du sénégal et dépendances from January 1867, Decker, before his departure from the small island Gorée, thanked its population for their appreciation. Hence, assuming that Decker began to work at about the age of twenty, he must have been born in the late 1840s or early 1850s. We do not know whether he ran any permanent studio during his career. The last two photographs taken by Decker that I am aware of date from 1890, and were given to the Paris Société de Géographie in that same year by the Polish explorer Etienne de Szolc-Rogozinski. Decker made them during an expedition that Rogozinski and his wife undertook on Fernando Po.

During his professional career, Decker used at least three different company logos on the backs of his card-mounts. One carte-de-visite bearing the most elaborate company logo shows Bishop Samuel A. Crowther's mother, who died in October 1883. A remark in the Church Missionary Gleaner from January 1884, referring to a reproduction of this photograph and saying that the image of Bishop Crowther's mother had been taken "four or five years earlier," lets me assume that it was taken in the late 1870s.

From this short paragraph about John P. Decker, and the research experiences it reflects, it becomes obvious that the archive of the Atlantic visualscape is highly fragmented and in general very badly documented. How did this fragmentation occur? Let us have a look at the terrain. Choosing one area as an example, in the Bight of Biafra—the innermost bay of the Gulf of Guinea, which is bounded today by Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon—there were four nations claiming suzerainty over African territories during the 1880s. A fifth nation was added with the presence of the American Presbyterian Mission in Gabon, which was present in Libreville since 1842. Gabon, though nominally under French rule, and Fernando Po under Spanish rule, were both culturally influenced to a large degree through the presence of British traders and missionaries. "Gaboon is French, with a purely English trade," wrote the one-time British governor Richard F. Burton, referring to the 1860s and 1870s. English prevailed as the lingua franca of commerce in the Gabon Estuary at least until the 1880s.

Obviously these territories were not impermeable for migrant or itinerant workers such as the early photographers. There are many examples that show the openness of the borders, institutionally and geographically. Some of the photographs John P. Decker took in 1869 for the London Colonial Office found their way into the Photo Specimen Book of the Missionary Leaves Association (MLA) in the early 1870s. Traders in particular had diverse national backgrounds, even within a French or British colony or sphere of influence. There were German, French, and British traders, officials, and missionaries in Gabon, and Africans from Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. Other places, such as Lagos, Fernando Po, and Cameroon, were similar in this respect. Yet fierce competition existed between nations, as was the case in Gabon, or between denominations, as was the case on Fernando Po, where the Spanish (Catholic) government expelled the Baptists in 1858. All this had an impact on the relationship between photographers and their patrons, on what was photographed and what was not, and consequently on the production, consumption, and circulation of photographs.

This patchwork of nations, institutions, and individuals finds its repercussion in the archive of the Atlantic visualscape. Doing research on the early history of African photography means that the material one works with is scattered over several continents. There, the photographs are kept in museums, libraries, and similar institutions that are owned and run by companies, foundations, governments, or mission societies. A lot of the material is preserved in albums that belong to individuals or families, quite often the descendants of traders, missionaries, or officials. Albums and single photographs turn up—and disappear—at auctions, on flea markets, or on eBay. Within this environment archival cultures, as one could call them, matter a lot. They differ from country to country, from town to town, from institution to institution. In practice this means that one will get something between easy and full access to the photographs or no access at all, that one may have the permission to take digital photographs—just for one's own personal documentation—or not, and that the requested fee is one Euro per scan or thirty Euros. Evidently, it is sometimes not so much one's research agenda that defines what one gets to see and know but rather considerations concerning time and/or money and the person who controls access to the archives.

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Excerpted from Portraiture & Photography in Africa by John Peffer, Elisabeth L. Cameron. Copyright © 2013 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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