In 2013, the names of Malian portrait photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibé may be familiar to the art-viewing public in Europe and the United States, but this was not always the case. In fact, it was a little over twenty years ago that Keita’s studio portraits were first shown in the United States in the Museum for African Art’s exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (1991). The timing of that appearance coincided with significant intellectual shifts taking place in the study of African art, and subsequently the field of African photography grew as an area of scholarly pursuit. Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive; African Photography from The Walther Collection, edited by U.K.-based art historian Tamar Garb, and Portraiture and Photography in Africa, edited by U.S. art historians John Peffer and Elisabeth L. Cameron, are two of the latest contributions to this pursuit. These publications are necessary and significant for they read against the grain of conventionalized histories of photography in Africa with detailed research and provocative arguments that expand an understanding of portraiture on the continent.

The essays in Distance and Desire respond to photographs in the Walther Collection that were displayed at its New York gallery space in three related exhibitions: Santu Mofokeng and A. M. Duggan-Cronin (September 12–November 17, 2012), Contemporary Reconfigurations (November 30, 2012–March 9, 2013), and Poetics and Politics (March 22–May 18, 2013). A symposium sponsored by the Walther Collection, “Encounters with the African Archive,” took place on November 10, 2012, during which scholars addressed the themes of these exhibitions. The collection and the impetus for the exhibitions and symposium are discussed in the volume’s foreword by Artur Walther and in the conversation between Walther and Garb that opens the book. Garb’s introductory essay further establishes the themes and issues at play throughout Distance and Desire. It asks: What can we find when we engage with a photographic archive? What do archives reveal about representational strategies, subjectivity, the intertwining of past and present, memory, or desire?

Distance and Desire is organized into two sections, “Poetics and Politics” and “Contemporary Configurations.” While the first section offers seven essays dealing with historical material, the second offers only five. That there is not a balance in the number of essays in each section may be indicative of the state of writing about contemporary African photographic practices. More scholarly work needs to be done in this area, as much of the writing on African photography continues to look at historical practices, as is also the case in the Peffer and Cameron collection. Similarly, the essays in Distance and Desire are of uneven length, and the shorter ones raised issues that would have benefited from more extended exploration. Nonetheless, Garb has pulled together authors from Europe, Africa, and the United States, thereby giving readers access to perspectives from myriad sites and backgrounds. With contributors including historians of art and photography, anthropologists, literary theorists, artists, and activists, the volume is rich with ideas.

“Poetics and Politics” explores the various narratives that frame the historical archive of postcards, cartes de visite, albums, and ethnographic studies. Opening this section is Elizabeth Edwards’s essay, “Looking at Photographs: Between Contemplation, Curiosity, and Gaze.” In it she challenges the privileging of “the gaze” in photographic discourse, whereby the ideological power relations associated with looking (and being looked at) foreclose other ways of understanding the interactions that produced European images of Africans in the nineteenth century. She offers “curiosity” as an alternative concept by which to consider those experiences; doing so blurs strict notions of exploitation and objectification, while opening up more complicated readings. Although not explicitly engaging with Edwards’s notion of curiosity, the authors in the essays that follow participate in a similar project of nuancing understandings of the information available within an archive. Three of the authors take up the complexities of Zulu identity and its photographic construction, demonstrating that such identity is not fixed, easy, or homogenous. Whether analyzing cartes de visite depicting laborers in the diamond mines in the Kimberly region (Garb); presenting a close reading of the poses, dress, and demeanors of two Zulu mothers that appear in several postcards (Christraud Geary); or assessing the use of clothing to construct notions of “normative” ideas of Zuluness as a “pictorial encounter” (Hlonipha Mokoena), the authors adeptly reread photographic archives, arguing for the agency of the photographic subjects in the production of the photographs. Erin Haney’s essay takes up a similar argument, extending it to the interactions between photographers and photographed subjects in southern Africa more broadly. Her attention to dress as expressive of modern, urban identities by black subjects is a topic also taken up in Isolde Breilmaier’s essay on studios in Mombassa in Portraiture and Photography.

This is not the only concern that Distance and Desire shares with Cameron and Peffer’s volume; the significance of aesthetics is another. In the first section of Distance and Desire, for example, Michael Godby’s analysis of A. M. Duggan-Cronin’s photographs proposes that their aesthetics underwrote ideological frameworks of racial apartheid policies, while Cheryl Finley examines photo albums in terms of mnemonic aesthetics, so that through them viewers access cultural beliefs, social constructions, and mediate memory. The work of remembering and forgetting is also at the heart of Rowland Abíόdún’s essay in Portraiture and Photography, which discusses formal portraiture aesthetics in relation to Yoruba àkό effigy figures. Aesthetics again form the unifying motif in Liam Buckley’s contribution to that volume; in it he argues for attending to notions of beauty to understand the experience of post-coloniality in The Gambia.

Like Buckley’s essay, which challenges scholars to think about the contemporary photographic archives in expansive ways, the authors of the essays assembled by Garb for the “Contemporary Configurations” section of Distance and Desire reflect on how historical photographs impact viewers in the present, including artists who engage with these images. Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, through the work of Carrie Mae Weems, and Jennifer Bajorek, in a discussion of Santu Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album, suggest ways that artists employ historical archives to reimagine the past, question identities, or contest colonial ideologies. Gabi Ngcobo’s (too) short essay also serves as a challenge to inherited and conventionalized narratives of the black body, but focuses specifically on queer identity in the work of several contemporary photographers. Chika Okeke-Agulu’s call to rethink the interpretation of Samuel Fosso’s 1970s self-portraits in relation to both earlier self-portraits by the artist and other studio portraits he produced in the 1970s is refreshingly insightful, as it places Fosso’s work in the larger context of his overall photographic production, rather than isolating the self-portraiture with which the “West” has been so enamored. This last section concludes with an essay that serves, in part, as a counterbalance to Garb’s introduction to the volume and Edward’s reflections on photography. Awam Amkpa reflects on issues of representation and subjectivity through a reading of many photographs in the Walther Collection, photographs that other authors have discussed as well, providing a useful overview.

While Distance and Desire focuses on southern African photographic production, due to the emphasis of the Walther Collection on this locale, Portraiture and Photography addresses exclusively West, Central, and East Africa. The absence of South Africa in the latter volume was initially surprising to this reader given Peffer’s expertise and previous publications in this area. After reading the volume it became clear that an essay dealing with photographic production in southern or northern Africa would have detracted from the collected essays’ strong geographic focus.

Portraiture and Photography is divided into three sections of four essays each—titled “Exchange,” “Social Lives,” and “Traditions”—and therefore feels more balanced than Distance and Desire. As Peffer notes in his introduction, each section is organized chronologically, and no one section of Portraiture and Photography seems more important than another. The editors have brought together an excellent group of scholars, though they represent less geographic diversity than the contributors to Garb’s anthology, with only two based outside of North America. As the foreword by Raoul Birnbaum explains, this anthology also grew out of a symposium. Like Distance and Desire, Portraiture and Photography is richly illustrated, and the images are each clearly labeled. The illustrations, however, are not specifically called out in the essays—an unfortunate choice, probably made by the press, as it causes the reader much frustration.

The first three essays in the “Exchange” section deal with aspects of studio portraiture, primarily in West Africa; each demonstrates, through careful study of individual photographers, the broad dialogues taking place geographically. Whereas Jürg Schneider’s reflections on an Atlantic visualscape provide insight into the ways in which photographic studios linked the economies of Europe and Africa, Érika Nimis’s study underscores the impact of Yoruba studios in Francophone countries and thus their widespread influence on what she refers to as the “golden age” of portraiture (1960–80). Haney’s contribution focuses attention on interactions between African photographers and viewers in establishing a larger culture of engagement with photographs as images and objects. While Cameron’s essay also looks at the exchange that occurs between photographer and photographic subject in portraiture, her contribution fits less neatly with the other three, not only because of its focus on Central Africa but because she also reflects on portraits she herself took in the field. These differences notwithstanding, her essay underscores the many ways in which portraits demonstrate Africans using photographs to “see each other,” as Peffer notes in the introduction; these sentiments are echoed by Mokoean’s essay, among others in Distance and Desire, as well as in Z. S. Strother’s contribution to Portraiture and Photography.

Strother’s essay opens the second section, “Social Lives,” which presents case studies that explore the evolving biographies of images and ideas. Strother traces, for example, the historical development of the idea that “a photograph steals the soul.” She takes up this task to shed light on the difficulties that people can have understanding photographic practices outside their own culture. The other authors in this section offer detailed studies that examine the production and consumption of portraits in relation to the Bamum elite in Cameroon from 1902–40 (Christraud Geary); in Mombasa from the 1940s (Isolde Brielmaier); and in postcolonial and post-coup The Gambia (Buckley). Despite being firmly grounded in particular geographic locales, their work offers significant insights into how portraits can be used as tools for articulating history, maintaining or shifting power (through the control of images or aesthetics), and constructing identities (royal, urban, cosmopolitan, modern) more generally.

Given my own scholarly interests in the circulation of objects and the multiple meanings that objects accumulate in the various contexts they inhabit, along with my leanings toward contemporary art, I fully expected to get the most out of the first two sections of Portraiture and Photography. While I found these sections highly informative and thought provoking, I ultimately enjoyed the final section, “Traditions,” the most. Here, the essays explored the ways in which other cultural forms have informed portrait photography. This is where Abíόdún explores the intricate relationship between funerary effigy and photographic portraiture. Jean Borgatti offers a discussion of portraiture more generally, suggesting the many ways that photography fits into and expands roles filled by others cultural forms of portraiture. Till Förster’s piece is a fitting close to the volume for it asks big questions about images and the productions of cultural imageries, nicely though not explicitly weaving together the themes and issues raised in other essays. His nuanced discussion of ancestral sculpture, video, and cell phone images gives insight into the ways in which portraiture “brings the individual and the social together” (434). The ability to express this dual function visually and immediately is, after all, what largely draws audiences to the photographs of Keita and Sidibé. We know we are looking at individuals, yet we understand we are also tapping into the social life of Mali in the mid-twentieth century. Candace Keller explains Keita and Sidibé’s ability to express this so well by situating their work in local aesthetics and theories of social action—badenya and fadenya—which balance social cooperation with individuality.

Portraiture and Photography and Distance and Desire gather together top-notch authors to reflect on and challenge received knowledge about colonial photographic archives, and to push scholarship in the field of portraiture photography in Africa in new and exciting directions. They provide intellectual stimulus through new insights, new data, and new voices. Because of the strong focus on South Africa in Distance and Desire, and the fact that much has been published in academic circles on South African photography, experts in the field of African photography may not come away with as much from the volume as a more general audience or college student would. In fact, I am looking forward to using them in courses for both undergraduate and graduate students, those that focus solely on African photography as well as in my survey and thematically oriented upper-division courses. These thought-provoking anthologies confirm that the field of African portraiture is a young field of inquiry and that there are many possible directions for other scholars to follow. For example, while Okeke-Agulu makes a compelling argument to contextualize Fosso’s work in relation to his studio portraits, he did not delve into those studio portraits as fully as could be done. Similarly Cameron ends her essay with the observation: “Everyone [of the local population] who sees the field photographs understands that the intended audience is outside their visual experience” (171). This begs the question of how to make field photographs within the realm of the visual experience of local populations. That question takes us outside of the realm of portraiture and asks us to think about photography and Africa more broadly.