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- Convenor:
-
Gregor Dobler
(Freiburg University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Images of the living and dead
- Location:
- Room 1221
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
A workshop on how to engage with and use colonial photographs. Starting from presentations on photographs and their context, the panel seeks to become a space of critical discussion: how, and how far, can colonial photographs be used in the face of (or even in the interest of) decolonial critique?
Long Abstract:
Colonial photographs of people often fascinate us. They become anchors for our attention and make us ask about the human beings whose traces they bear.
On one level, we cannot deny the photographs' reality. Once, what they show was visible through the lens of a camera. This captures our imagination and focuses our attention. Individuals who were confronted with the reality of colonialism confront us through the lens of a photographer.
On many other levels, however, the 'reality' behind the images becomes much more difficult to grasp, as the extensive literature on the pitfalls of using photographs as a historical source, particular in colonial contexts, has made amply clear. Photographs distort, silence or taint realities. Colonial photographs are always also documents of colonialism.
Reading photographs as documents of colonialism alone, however, risks to once more eliminate the perspectives of the people who confront us through them. Can we develop readings that take colonial contexts seriously and use images to deconstruct their logic - but that also see photographs as documents of people who had an independent existence?
The panel seeks to address this question in practice, serving as a laboratory of both reading photographs and criticizing our readings. 10 minute-presentations should focus on one or several photographs - on the image, its contexts, our knowledge about them; on presenters' own readings and interpretations; and on the methodological, ethical and epistemic questions linked to them. We will then jointly discuss these readings and try to develop a critical practice of interpretation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 8 June, 2022, -Gregor Dobler (Freiburg University)
Paper short abstract:
Is coloniality all there is to colonial photography, or can we find in it traces of a “resistant response” (Maria Lugones) or “the colonial difference” (Walter Mignolo)? Analyzing photographs of people in South-West Africa under German rule, I invite the audience to discuss this question.
Paper long abstract:
Colonial-era photographs from Africa are documents of colonialism and colonial ideologies. They have usually been taken by people who were on the masters’ side of the colonial divide; they are steeped in colonial ways of seeing and showing; their visual rhetoric often conforms to and support colonial narratives. Postcolonial readings of colonial photographs have again and again critiqued photographs’ coloniality. They have shown that the supposedly realistic character of photography can obscure their ideological character, and that literal readings of colonial photographs always run the danger of reproducing colonial ideologies.
Yet is coloniality all there is to colonial photography? Do we have to discard them in their entirety as documents of colonialism? Or can we also see traces of a different reality in the people they depict – traces of a “resistant response” (Maria Lugones) that, while affected by colonialism, does not completely merge with colonial ideologies? Can photographs help us to discover (as Lugones called for in the realm of gender) traces of “the colonial difference, emphatically resisting” the “epistemological habit of erasing it”?
I ask these questions through the analysis of a number of photographs of people in South-West Africa under German rule, in which colonial narratives are as present as signs of ‘resistant responses’, and invite the audience to discuss the possibilities of separating both, or at least of using photographs to keep alive our awareness of the colonial difference.
Christoph Rippe
Paper short abstract:
This presentation discusses the application of "repeat photography" to a set of "ethnographic" photographs. The latter depict a "first-fruits ceremony", produced in 1899 South Africa. Identifying the event's spatial and temporal coordinates entails both epistemological and ethical conundrums.
Paper long abstract:
"Repeat photography" is an effective research methodology that means to take a photograph from the exact same vantage point as a much older photograph. Once applied to 19th century "ethnographic" photographs in the archives of ethnological museums, the evolving tension of change regarding people and landscapes eventually creates an excess of meaning. This process renders the photographs anthropologically relevant in a new sense, by providing them with potential social impact in the present.
Anthropological studies have so far hardly dealt with related epistemological and ethical conundrums, as photographic occasions can often no longer be clearly identified. The series of photographs I wish to discuss, instead allows for a minute analysis through space and time due to a specific set of circumstances, involving a still recognisable landscape topography. The 17 photographs depict a so-called "first-fruits ceremony" (ingcubhe), taken in 1899 by the photographers of the Catholic Mariannhill Mission in the Umzimkhulu District, South Africa. Once they are brought together, the old photographs and the repeat photographs made during my research, each may assist the production of knowledge on various temporalities: their respective pasts, presents, and futures.
Instead of employing unspecific terminologies, such as "visual repatriation", I argue that it is more sensitive to think of the entire process as "reconnecting" a historical event. In order to achieve this, it is crucial to involve, next to the politics and poetics of ethnography, also the provenance and provenience of photographs.
Ana Carolina Schveitzer (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation concentrates on three photographs from German East Africa. Taken by Walter Dobbertin (1882-1961) between 1906 and 1914, these images show scenes of sisal plantation, especially labourers working on the cutting and collecting.
Paper long abstract:
Photographs from colonialism have many topics. Work scenes, sometimes erasing and sometimes presenting individuals, were also part of this visual culture of the colonial past. Although images can provide extensive information, there are also some challenges to researching this source. To address the issue of limit, this paper will engage with the idea of the photograph as an ambivalent framing (Hayes, Minkley, 2019).
This presentation concentrates on three photographs from German East Africa. Taken by Walter Dobbertin (1882-1961) between 1906 and 1914, these images show scenes of sisal plantation, especially labourers working on the cutting and collecting. The exact date the photos were taken is unknown, however tracing those images makes it possible to identify where and when they circulated.
Dobbertin was one of the few professional photographers who owned a studio in a German colony. After arriving in Dar-es-Salaam, 1903, he started to work as an assistant to Carl Vicente. After having been accused of stolen photographic supplies from Vicente, Dobbertin opened his studio. Until 1918, he was very active in German East Africa, taking and selling photographs in the colonial market and Germany.
On analysing photographs from Dobbertin, available nowadays in institutional archives, this presentation aims to engage with the topic of the circulation of colonial frames. These photos are part of a sequence but have substantial differences among them. One relevant question is: What elements do those frames on work situations share? Finally, I aim to discuss the visuality during German colonialism on tracing a producer’ trajectory.
William Lyon (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses photographs with the help of various sources to bring the complex experiences of Ovambo laborers to the fore. Individual desires, consumerism, religion, changing social status and leisure are aspects that will be explored to center Ovambo individuals in Namibian Historiography.
Paper long abstract:
In Namibian historiography, labor has taken a prominent role, especially in relation to the origins of the independence movement. However, in research focusing on the German colonial era, labor has often been analyzed through the lens of African victimhood and the predatory nature of colonial capitalism (Strassegger 1988; Clarence-Smith and Moorsom 1988; Press 2021). Photographic sources, when used at all, are often only illustrations in that context.
I draw from Global History, which examines colonial capitalism as a fluctuating realm in which African workers use new opportunities to improve their socio-economic status, as well as suffer under new methods of extraction (Bellucci and Eckert 2019). To this perspective I bring in photography to expand and deepen the analysis. Some modern Namibian historiography has explored the diverse realities of labor within the colonial capitalist sphere (Dobler 2014; McKittrick 1996; Likuwa 2021; Lyon 2021; Moore et al. 2021). However, new methods of combining visual, textual and oral sources have not been implemented in the context of Ovambo labor during German colonialism. This paper examines photos of laborers leaving, working, and returning from contract labor in the settler region of colonial Namibia between 1907 and 1914. The photos will be analyzed with the help of colonial, missionary, and business archival sources, as well as newspapers and oral histories. Individual desires, consumerism, religion, changing social status, leisure, and interpersonal relations will all be explored to bring multifaceted Ovambo experiences to the fore.