Paper short abstract:

This paper explores hand-coloured photographic portraiture, a widely popular practice in apartheid South Africa.The exchange and transformation of images allowed the construction of identity and re-presentation of relationships in the context of the systematic separation of families and communities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores disruption and affect in photographic images created in contexts of human absence and loss. The paper was instigated by the discovery of an unsorted collection of materials, left behind after the closing of a Johannesburg studio which had specialised in hand-coloured photographic portraiture, through the second half of the 20th century. The portraits were based on small personal photos, often taken from "passbooks" (apartheid documents of rigid control, carried by all black South Africans). 

The genre allowed subjects to re-present themselves through imagined attire or constructed juxtapositions, to perform personae that subverted the original coercive purpose. Framed on walls, these images became proxies for absent heads of families, evidence of kinship, or of ownership of property. The routes of portrait "salesmen" between Johannesburg and distant rural areas of South Africa, reveal the constant movement of images beneath the radar of officialdom.

In light of the vast scale of this practice, what deep-seated needs did it appear to address? How were its (fairly fixed) conventions assigned meanings? Migrant labour and "homelands" policies, entailing the forced dismantling of families and communities and exacerbating the loss of women's agency and rights, emerge as vital in understanding the genre. How was this system of social engineering privately disrupted and alternative imaginaries posited? In attempting to analyse the specific contribution of these portraits to the construction, re-construction, and resilience entailed in asserting identity under apartheid, we interrogate, too, the original source photographs, their physical/material nature, use, meaning and circulation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at late 19th century Cape Town prison photographs of Kgosi Galeshewe, a Bathlaping political leader, in the context of contemporary memory studies in Southern Africa. It explores the place of photography in mediating affective responses to the presence and absence of the dead.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at late 19th and early 20th century Cape colonial prison photographs. The collection consists of albums that assemble 7000 portrait photographs of men imprisoned at the Breakwater Convict Station in Cape Town. The albums were produced in the context of attempts to reform and professionalise the colonial penal system, and they mirror the place photography held in such initiatives as a 'scientific' and 'modern' image form and medium. As an archival collection, these photographs can be read as both the result of colonial criminal identification practices and as examples of colonial regimes of knowledge production through which bodies were marked along the lines of race, gender, ethnicity and nationality.

While keeping in mind this institutional and epistemological background, the paper engages some of the photographs in this collection within the framework of South African memory studies and in view of a scholarly discussion on the work of the dead. I am interested in exploring how photographs of late 19th century convicts, and especially the portraits of Kgosi Galeshewe, a late 19th century Bathlaping political leader, configure and mediate the presence and absence of the dead, and how they can be understood as visual and material forms through which we are being summoned by the past. This will help propose ways to reconcile the colder comportment of historians towards the past, with the affective language and expressive cultural registers embraced by those who care for the ancestral and long for the presence of those who are no more.

Paper short abstract:

Addressing the genre of portrait photography in daily published Nigerian newspapers, this paper discusses bifurcation between perceived moral disruptions and self-fashioning as mechanisms of affective connections.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the affections associated with photographs published in Nigerian newspaper in the 1940s and 1950s which readers discussed frequently. These discussions demonstrate how publics became emotionalised about photographs and how conventions of morally acceptable depictions changed. As such, photographs 'moved' and created affective connections with readers.

From the 1940s onwards, Nigerian newspapers printed photographs, especially portrait and campaign photographs, regularly. While some newspapers, such as the West African Pilot, advocated anticolonial nationalism, the controversies about photographs illuminate the dynamics of spaces beyond the colonial versus anticolonial paradigm. The focus on the affective connections of the genre of portrait photography also reveals bifurcation between self-fashioning and discussions about acceptable moral behaviour. In addition, the materiality of the photographs was subject to global processes of circulation which affected the perceived meaning of the photographs. By addressing the relationship between affective connections and perceptions of disruptions caused by printing photographs, this paper provides a historical analytical contribution to contemporary debates, reaching beyond the nexus between materiality (Edwards 2012) and archives (Morton & Newbury 2015).

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I examine how young women living in Yaounde use photographs to foster intimate relationships. I argue that the ways in which printed and digital photographs are used articulate different visual economies of affect.

Paper long abstract:

Young women 'stuck in the compound' are limited in calling for male desire through their various dress styles. Luckily visual calls for attention can be extended through photographs. Thus, via android phone young woman photograph their dress styles, edit and display them online on social networks in order to solicit desire often among men living abroad, at times without leaving one's bed.

If young women aim to solicit male desire through display of digital images, the involvement of photographs in construction of intimate relationships is far from new. Printed black and white photographs, usually of young men, traveled from cities to villages at the height of the urban-to-rural migration in Cameroon, as a part of marriage negotiations. As material objects, printed photographs entered exchange relationships between families and maintained importance of physical attraction for stable marriage between those to marry, even in polygamy. Crucially, as material objects that could be gifted, printed photographs articulated visual economy of affect where material and affective aspects are interweaved.

Yet young women most often display digital images, which entangle material and affective aspects in a different way. Young women thicken their digital images adding layers of attractiveness as they edit their photographs to lure men online. Digital online display also encourages frequent updates and surveillance of others heightening young women's competition on the digital marriage market. Digital displays articulate a new visual economy of affect that combines ideologies of romantic love and market capitalism in which young women act as 'entrepreneurs of love'.

Paper short abstract:

Why and how do rebels take photographs, and how do they wish to represent themselves? This presentation will reflect on these questions, based on photographs taken by commanders from the Lord's Resistance Army between 2001 and 2004, and by tracing the portrayed actors.

Paper long abstract:

Why and how do rebels take photographs, and which functions do photos serve within a rebel movement? This is the central question of my presentation, which will reflect on my book project and exhibition 'Rebel Lives. The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) from the inside.' This project is mainly based on photographs taken by commanders from the Lord's Resistance Army between 2001 and 2004, and which I have been collecting over a number of years. Based on fieldwork among the (surviving) portrayed rebels which were traced and identified, this presentation will deal with issues of representation and functionality of these photos, on both an individual- and group-level. The project therefore is not only a visual record of the everydayness of living in a violent rebel movement, but allows to reflect on broader issues: one the one hand, these photographs allow individual rebels to (self) represent themselves in ways which are not different from non-militarized environments - emphasising issues such as masculinity or femininity, and so on. On the other hand, these photographs are not only a form representation, but also reflect and entrench wider power structures within the rebel movement. Concretely, they serve a variety of other functions, which are not only military, but also as a tool of (positive and negative) socialisation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the material circumstances of a medical photographic archive is linked to its scientific and anthropological meanings, and it reflects on ways in which the dissemination of information and networks of exchange were enhanced by the multiple formats photographs were presented.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers a medical photographic archive by examining its shifting material circumstances, entangled meanings and the tensions that arise following an encounter with the collection by an indigenous artist. The collection relates to Dr Hugh Stannus (1877-1957), who was a colonial medical officer in Malawi and is currently housed at the Weston Library at the University of Oxford. The images were taken between 1905 and 1910 and are related to discourses around colonialism, power and the importation of biomedicine during the early 20th century. The paper will argue that photographs moved in a predetermined path of circulation among scientific and colonial networks, and that their affective tone was determined by their material forms enabling the images to be legible to a specific audience. The material performances afforded to the photographs such as labelling, trimming, arrangement in albums, evidence of use and wear, and copying for publishing created scientific and anthropological meanings.

Part of the collection was recently included in an artistic intervention by a Malawian fine artist, entitled the African Cowboy. For this series of artworks, historical photographs are juxtaposed with images from the American West to produce a digital composite image that interweaves discordant contexts, social relationships chronologically and aesthetically. The artworks defy anthropological connections and raise questions for the colonial photographic archive- specifically about how it is understood, translated and who should use historical photographs and for what? Importantly, this case exemplifies the complex ethical and political dimensions of what artistic reappropriation can accomplish and make possible.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks into the history of migratory biographies of people of the zongo (Accra) as constructed and narrated through personal and family photographic archives, thereby taking these archives as material objects opening and discontinuing complex webs of affective relations.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic research with various families of the 'zongos' of Accra, this paper looks into the history of migratory biographies as constructed and narrated through personal and family photo archives and their material trajectories. These personal photographic archives are usually kept in a rubber bag and show condensed migratory biographies of family members who traveled from neighboring West-African countries, and of others who are still in the countries of origin but who are remembered through their images. The 'zongo' is a predominantly Muslim Hausaphone neighborhood of people from all over West-Africa who settled in Ghana. Through the (material) exchange and storage of photos between often dispersed family members, social and affective ties are constructed, remembered and reconfirmed. New connections between kin and friends are made as well, through the swapping of photographs of one another, including relatives abroad. As such personal photo archives not only reflect one's family's biographic history, but also act as sites of affective relations across borders and oceans.

In this paper I open up the archive of the wife of a Mossi chief, of the daughter of a Togolese border trader and of an extremely mobile 'hustler'. I interweave the indexical value of their archives with their material historicity, thereby taking photo archives as material objects and archives of affect. I propound that the photos not only construct histories of migration and belonging, but also stand for possibilities of renewed social connections and future mobility when stored and exchanged within complex webs of affective relations.

Paper short abstract:

My paper focuses on mobile photography among West African asylum seekers in Italy. It analyses the production and (non) circulation of digital images in social media, in connection with forced migrants' fears, concerns and aspirations.

Paper long abstract:

My paper focuses on mobile photography among West African asylum seekers in Italy. It analyses the production and (non) circulation of digital images in social media, in connection with forced migrants' fears, concerns and aspirations. The question of visibility - who sees what - is crucial to these migrants' lives in reception centers. Surveillance by case workers and police is part of their daily experience, in the form of the "myopticon", described by Whyte (2011). Another aspect of visibility regards the relationships between people living in the same reception centers. Migrants struggle to control what fellow occupants know (and see) about them to avoid gossiping, which can dangerously trigger witchcraft. Similarly, they need to communicate with families back home, balancing display and concealment. Their families expect pictures of their new life (mostly via Whatsapp and Facebook). Migrants wish to hide their precarious life conditions, and also to resist showing themselves as too well-off since they fear remittance requests. My presentation will insert mobile photography into this wider scenario, considering how it can create both ruptures and connections. In particular, I will examine migrants' attempts at controlling the circulation of pictures among different audiences, their strategies to manage multiple social media profiles, and their preoccupations with storing pictures of themselves in other people's phones. This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in the Torino area in 2017-18, utilizing the anthropological methods of on- and off-line participant observation and qualitative interviews.