African Studio Photography

This is a featured article for the topic Africa.

Commercial studios were established in Cairo and, at the other end of the continent, in Cape Colony as early as the 1840s, to exploit both European demand for exotic scenes and the portrait requirements of local people. In the 1850s and 1860s others appeared in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Angola, and Zanzibar. N. Walwin Holm opened his business in Accra in 1883 and later became the first Africa-based member of the Royal Photographic Society. While some West African studios were owned by Africans from the beginning, in East and southern Africa they were founded by Europeans and Indians, the latter in East Africa introducing photographic conventions from the subcontinent that continue to influence photographic styles. In these studios, Africans worked mainly in subordinate positions, but by the 1960s were starting their own businesses and developing local African modes of representation.

The invention of the dry-plate process in 1871, and later the postcard boom, considerably increased the number of studios. By c. 1900 they existed in nearly all major African cities, and photography became a distinct profession with its own ethics and rules of apprenticeship. Studios became part of the cosmopolitan urban milieu and contributed strongly to the creation of an African modernity. As a space removed from the everyday, they allowed photographers and customers to play with various identities and, as in spirit-possession cults and masquerades, to change them. Portraiture, as a new technology of the self, became the dominant photographic mode. Most early studios in Africa followed 19th-century portrait conventions which, in Walter Benjamin's words, ‘oscillat [ed] between execution and representation, torture and throne room’. They offered formulaic pictures that enabled members of African elites—chiefs, teachers, clerks, priests—to display themselves as Westerners, appropriating Western commodities, clothes, and poses to distance themselves from traditions stigmatized as ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ by colonial society. Thus the colonial discourses that had invented hierarchical tribal and ethnic labels were subtly shifted towards stressing differences in degrees of modernity. Especially in West Africa, however, an alternative mode emerged which, by emphasizing a return to African traditions, had implicitly challenged Western cultural dominance.

The advent of electricity in the 1940s, and thus of artificial studio lighting, ushered in a golden age of black-and-white studio photography. Photography. increasingly became part of daily life, taken not only for official purposes (identity documents) but to capture special moments, ceremonies, feasts, and rites of passage, and more mundane events like the acquisition of a new hairstyle, dress, or boyfriend. In this period photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé (both Mali), Samuel Fosso (b. 1962; Central African Republic), Mama Casset (1908-92; Senegal), Francis K. Honny (b. 1914; Ghana), Omar Said Bakor (1932-93) and N. V. Parekh (b. 1923; both Kenya), and many others, localized the global media and created their own unique styles. Locally produced textiles or paintings were used as backgrounds, showing popular excursion spots, monuments, and tourist sites. Both modern African cityscapes and images of idyllic village life were represented.

Techniques for stage-managing and manipulating the photographic image became important. Concepts of realism, in Europe derived from a painted portrait tradition, were markedly different in Africa, where they were linked to other conventions in textiles, sculpture, and proverbs. For instance, textiles worn by customers, with well-known patterns referring to sayings or commemorating certain events, functioned as integral subtexts within photographs. Sometimes specific hairstyles, especially of women, contributed a silent commentary and engaged the viewer (or recipient) in a dialogue. In both East and West African studios, codified gestures emerged alluding to particular sayings and proverbs. Social relations were also expressed photographically. Groups of people—families, friends, couples—dressed in the same clothes to affirm their unity. Pregnant women were excluded, being seen as too vulnerable. Mutual avoidance by son-and mother-in-law might be visually replicated by their appearance in separate pictures.

The retouching (see finishing) of negatives also followed local aesthetic and cultural imperatives, for instance making faces round and shiny, whitening the eyes, or, as in Ghana, enhancing necks with folds of fat, evidence of wealth and beauty. Photomontage was used (in Omar Said Bakor's words) to ‘make strange things possible’, placing customers in bottles, on the moon, in radios or TVs, or confronting sitters with their doubles. In Uganda from the 1990s, young photographers began to employ photocollage techniques to recycle images from calendars, magazines, and posters and combine them with customers portraits. These collages transformed sitters into VIPs, at airports, in luxury hotels, beside the Pope or the Ugandan president, in settings of constructed global cosmopolitanism.

Even after snapshot photography became widespread in Africa, studio photographers did not aim to capture individual idiosyncrasies, but rather the idealized ‘social’ person. Studios offered illusion and wish-fulfilment that transcended any imported ‘culture of realism’. The technical revolution of the 1980s, which brought colour photography and its industrial infrastructure to Africa, precipitated a crisis. Many studios closed, and those that survived focused on tasks like the making of passport photos, the reproduction or colouring of old photos, and video production. Somewhat ironically, while African photographers, in contrast to Indian and Western ones, had not seen themselves as artists, the discovery of African studio photography by Western anthropologists and art historians in a sense ‘created’ photographer-artists who, like Keïta, Sidibé, and Philip Kwame Apagya (b. 1958), started to sign their photographs. Since the mid-1990s, through growing numbers of exhibitions abroad and strengthening market interest, African studio photography in general has increasingly become part of the international art photography scene.