Photography in Africa has long had a dual role as a tool of explorers and colonial officials and as a new “modern” object that slowly worked its way into the daily lives of many African peoples. It has been used extensively to document fieldwork in Africa, and in turn the photograph as a material image has become an important topic of study. Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives, a collection of essays edited by Richard Vokes, is a valuable addition to the growing library of books about photography in Africa—which also includes Erin Haney’s Photography and Africa (London: Reaktion Books, 2010) (click here for review) and Okwui Enwezor’s Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (Steidl: Göttingen, 2006)—because it focuses simultaneously on the ethnographic process, the resulting archive, and the work of the ethnographer in examining the photographic image in an African context.

Vokes organizes the volume’s essays into three parts, moving from an analysis of how anthropologists and ethnographers have used photography over time to an analysis of the political and social functions of photographic processes and images in different parts of Africa. In the first part, “Photography and the Ethnographic Encounter,” the reader is challenged to think critically about the practice of ethnography and the vast photographic archive that ethnographic research creates. Together these essays form the strongest section in the book because of the way they complement and build upon each other with respect to their topics and time frames.

Christopher Morton focuses on the archive of the famous E. E. Evans-Pritchard, comparing his photographs of the Azande and Nuer and trying to explain why the images, taken in neighboring areas and around the same time, are distinct. He argues that the dissimilar colonial experiences of the Azande and the Nuer resulted in different encounters with modernity, which in turn produced relationships between the peoples and the ethnographer with a camera that were unalike. The photograph becomes a joint production between the fieldworker, in this case Evans-Pritchard, and the object of study, whether the Nuer or Azande, while the photograph itself becomes a “cultural hybrid” (52).

Moving from Evans-Pritchard’s extensive archive of images built during a lifetime of research to one roll of film that documents a single event, Chris Wingfield explores Max Gluckman’s use of photographs in reconstructing and analyzing the events surrounding the opening of the bridge at the Malungwana drift. Wingfield’s main concern is with identifying Gluckman’s “symmetrical” analysis that revealed the presence and importance of Europeans in Zulu society, but in the process he reveals Gluckman’s use of photography. Wingfield argues that although Gluckman’s The Bridge focuses on the Zulu participation in the ceremony, he himself attended as a European, standing with the other European participants. While the photographs he took are snapshots in the truest sense, he revealed his own interests by photographing mainly the Zulu participants and not the Europeans. As part of this argument, Wingfield includes a nice comparison between Gluckman’s photographs and those taken by other European participants, proving that, even on his day off, Gluckman could not stop being an ethnographer. Later, Gluckman used the photographs as field notes to analyze the event, perhaps because he had taken so few real notes.

The second two essays—by Neil Carrier and Kimo Quaintance and by Judith Aston and Wendy James—bring the discussion back to the African subjects who were photographed and pose the following questions: What access to “their” images should photographed subjects have? What happens when those images are returned to the photographed community? In very similar processes to those of Evans-Pritchard and Gluckman, Paul and Pat Baxter, who conducted fieldwork among the Baramo in Kenya in 1951 and 1952, used photography to supplement field notes and to illustrate the thesis Paul Baxter later wrote. In 2010, Carrier and a group of students took Baxter’s photographs, in both hard copy and digital formats, back to the communities in which they had been originally taken. Carrier and Quaintance report on this fieldwork experiment, the goal of which was to repatriate the images and to build new bridges between source communities and academia.

Aston and James, in “Memories of a Blue Nile Home: The Photographic Moment and Multimedia Linkage,” examine the changes in how anthropologists use technology and how the resulting media are received and used by the source community. What I found most interesting is how Aston and James have collaborated in making James’s fieldwork photography available to the Uduk-speaking people on the border of Sudan and Ethiopia through the website Voices from the Blue Nile, which focuses on the “resilience and optimism” of the Uduk peoples and which makes available photographs, recordings, and video made by James and other contributors. Because there is no translation provided in the audio or video recordings, my impression is that the intended audience of this site is the Uduk people.

In the second part of the book, “Picturing the Nation: Photography, Memory and Resistance,” the four essays are only loosely bound together by politics and nation-building, and thus do not cohere as well as the essays in the first section. Haney looks at how family photographic archives, especially those of the Lutterodt family in Accra, allow alternate histories to be forged. These family archives sidestep institutions and politics and therefore represent a more popular or vernacular past. These photographs become the mnemonic for oral histories that recount interactions of all kinds. Haney suggests that photographs can be at the same time ephemeral and like the hydra that grows multiple new heads for each that is destroyed. Members of the family re-photograph the old photograph so that, when the original is gone, a life history of the original photograph and of the family remains present.

In contrast to the family archives that create alternative histories, Katrien Pype examines the creation of officially sanctioned histories through a discussion of the political billboards in Kinshasa between 2009 and 2010, during which time many political actors were positioning themselves for the 2011 elections. Joseph Kabila, Congo’s president and a primary subject on the billboards, has always had a fractious relationship with the Kinois (residents of Kinshasa), Pype explains, and attempted to use political billboards to create a positive image as a president building the country. Kabila’s prominent billboards were placed in public areas and could be easily seen, while images of opposition leaders were often confined to private compounds that could only be glimpsed or imagined. This contrast between the seen and the imagined plays a major role in the visual culture of Congolese politics.

The title of the book’s third section, “The Social Life of Photographs,” serves as a catchall for essays that explore what Vokes terms “the vernacular mode,” or images in nonpolitical contexts; this section includes the only essay to directly address issues of gender and one of the best contributions to the book, Heike Behrend’s “The Terror of the Feast.” Behrend traces the photographs of feasts in Mombassa, especially weddings, with a special focus on issues of globalization and religion. She is interested in how photographic images flourish and how they are obliterated. Behrend explains how photography became part of the conspicuous display of wealth during weddings, which she labels “potlatches,” referring to the ruinous feasting of some of the First Nations in Western Canada. With the move to more conservative forms of Islam, women have become more hidden from the public eye; Behrend discusses how women are nonetheless made visible by photography. To deal with this contradiction, women have taken control of when and where photography is allowed during weddings and ultimately who is allowed to see the resulting images. In this way, and much to the displeasure of their husbands, women became independent of the male gaze and invented their own representations designed to please other women.

Vokes lists what he considers to be the major contributions of the book: its examination of the anthropological archive, its exploration of the relationships between photography and “statecraft,” and its acknowledgment of the role of the photograph in social change (23). What I found distinctive about this collection of essays, however, was its examination of the ethnographic encounter and the process of obtaining photographs on the one hand, and its attention to the evolution of photographic technologies on the other. In his introduction Vokes points out the importance of considering the physical photograph itself and the work that it does as it is taken, displayed, and circulated. Throughout the volume, it becomes obvious that photographs cannot be controlled. The idea that photographs can take on new lives becomes especially important when they migrate to the internet, where their reproduction and dissemination become seemingly limitless. This shift to a digital format is an unacknowledged theme in the first section of the book. Many of the essays highlight, for example, the fact that photographs preserve memory, especially as they move into digital archives, but they do not last forever. This is evident in Pype’s story of political marches destroying political billboards and in Behrend’s discussion of photographs becoming more restricted in Islamic weddings.

With its focus on photography as both a process and product of ethnography, Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives has much to offer to scholars in many disciplines, including anthropology, history, and art history. It is certain to be used widely, moreover, as a textbook in courses that address African photography. As a historian of art and visual culture, I found that the book provoked me to think more critically about my own research and archive of images, specifically about my use of photographs to process data and to illustrate publications and my obligation to provide my research hosts in Zambia and Congo with access to images.