Sissy Helff, Stefanie Michels (eds.) Global Photographies Image | Volume 76 Sissy Helff, Stefanie Michels (eds.) Global Photographies Memory – History – Archives An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-3-8394-3006-4. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommer- cial-NoDerivs 4.0 (BY-NC-ND) which means that the text may be used for non- commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To create an adaptation, translation, or derivative of the original work and for commercial use, further permission is required and can be obtained by contac- ting [email protected] © 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Na- tionalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Sally Waterman, PastPresent No. 6, 2005, courtesy of the artist Proofread and typeset by Yagmur Karakis Printed by docupoint GmbH, Magdeburg Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3006-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3006-4 Table of Contents Preface Sissy Helff/Stefanie Michels | 7 Re-framing Photography – Some Thoughts Stefanie Michels | 9 African Photography in the Atlantic Visualscape Moving Photographers – Circulating Images Jürg Schneider | 19 Elective Affinities? History and Photography Jens Jäger | 39 How to use Colonial Photography in Sub-Saharan Africa for Educational and Academic Purposes The case of Togo Kokou Azamede | 57 Presentness, Memory, and History: Thabiso Sekgala, “Homeland” Marie-Hélène Gutberlet | 69 On the Circulation of Colonial Pictures Polyphony and Fragmentation Hans Peter Hahn | 89 Portraits of Distant Worlds Frobenius’ Pictorial Archive and its Legacy Richard Kuba | 109 Reflexions on the Photographic Archive in the Humanities Margrit Prussat | 133 Re-imagining the Family Album through Literary Adaptation Sally Waterman | 155 Public Rites/Private Memories Reconciling the Social and Individual in Wedding Photography Jens Ruchatz | 177 Contributors | 205 Preface At the beginning of a journey you are never the same person as at the end. A stimulating conference held in Frankfurt/M. in 2012 set the stage for this project – at the time we were interested in the question “How does memory enter photography?” From the start there was a strong international presence and interest in the global dimensions of photography – including papers con- tributed from scholars and curators from Africa. The dialogue continued and intensified in joint research seminars in Vienna, Frankfurt and Heidelberg. These were followed by other collaborative efforts, including a workshop in Dakar in 2014 organized by Kokou Azamede and Sissy Helff and a student- led joint research project on colonial photography in Togo by Kokou Aza- mede and Stefanie Michels, with an exhibition in Lomé in 2016. Ideas are not enough to produce a book – it needs dedicated work and funds. Our many thanks therefore go to the contributors for whom it proved a much longer road than initially intended – thank you for bearing with us. The as- sistance of Tatjana Poletajew and, in the final phase of the project, of Yagmur Karakis was most valuable. Their patience and meticulous work with the or- dering, formatting and referencing of the manuscripts and photographs were fundamental to completing the book. Yagmur Karakis also added valuable comments on the content. We also appreciate the suggestions of Frank Jones regarding English language usage, structure and style. Annika Linnemann of transcript supported the project in all its phases. Funding was provided by the Anton-Betz-Stiftung, Düsseldorf and the ZIAF (Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Afrikaforschung, Frankfurt/M.). The initial conference and subsequent meetings were also funded by ZIAF as well as by the Gesellschaft der Freunde und Förderer der Universität Frankfurt and the 8 | PREFACE Kelm-Stiftung, Frankfurt, the Cluster of Excellence Normative Orders at the University of Frankfurt. It was co-organized by Astrid Erll, Sissy Helff, Stefanie Michels and John Nassari and supported by the Frankfurt Memory Studies of the Forschungszentrum Historische Geisteswissenschaften and the Chair New English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Frankfurt. Sissy Helff and Stefanie Michels, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf, November 2017 Re-framing Photography – Some Thoughts STEFANIE MICHELS Conventional historiography on photography stresses its evolution as a story of technological progress. Histories of photography, even “world histories of photography”, have long lacked a global perspective. A global narrative of photography would thus have to not only include these neglected regions but would also alter the conventional narratives. Research in this area is currently booming and what is being uncovered are stories of connection beyond west- ern exceptionalism. Central in this research is the discovery and use of pho- tographic archives outside of Europe (Morton/Newbury 2015; Lydon 2005; Pinney/Peterson 2003). Photography never belonged solely to the West nor was the idea of creating a likeness of a thing or person an exclusively western or modern notion. As a technology photography was easily integrated into visual practices that had preceded it in all world regions. In nineteenth cen- tury Cameroon grassfields, for example, the idea of the portrait of an im- portant person – male or female – was realized in three dimensional portraits (Brain 1971). In time photography was added to funerary practices and co- existed for several decades until solely assuming this social function. In East Asia photography entered a visual culture in which “dissonant seeing” (Fu- kuoka 2011) was practiced long before photography came about. In Meiji Japan, older Tokugawa visual practices and photography were easily inte- grated (cf. ibid.). In 1925 a camera was developed in China that could create photographs in the pictorial tradition of panorama paintings and thus inte- grated bi-ocular visual practices with photography (cf. ibid.; Gu 2015: 165 f.). Only a couple of months after the announcement of the technical process of daguerreotyping in Paris in 1839, the ottoman-egyptian Pasha Mehmet Ali 10 | MICHELS decided to portray the ancient port of Alexandria with this technique, thus making a strong claim as to the role Egypt was to play in the geopolitical situation of the time. France and Britain were getting more and more in- volved in military campaigns against opponents to their vision of world order in which markets were open to their products and industries in other countries than their own should remain unprotected (Haney 2010). By the 1850s there were professional photographers and photographic studios operational on all continents – including black American, Chinese, Japanese, West African or Armenian photographers, to name but a few to illustrate their diverse back- grounds (cf. Sheehan/Zervigón 2015). The customers of these photographers were just as diverse and this draws attention to the fact that the histories of photographies within world regions and of the colonial gaze are intertwined. In West Africa for example, African or black photographers, served the wishes of African customers as well as European ones and vice versa (also Geary 2004; Tatsitsa 2015). At no point was photography only the privilege of Europeans. This point is empirically and forcefully argued by Jürg Schnei- der in this volume. Schneider’s point on African professional photographers working for heterogeneous customers – West African families and individu- als as well as European colonial officials – is enforced by Hans Hahn and his contribution on the photographic work of the African photographer Acolatse in Togo. Acolatse knew how to produce pictures suitable for the colonial needs of the German colonial commanders and used his skill for the promo- tion of his business as a professional photographer. In China and Japan sim- ilar processes have been described (cf. Gu 2015).1 It took only five years until the production of tourist photographs from Japan had been taken over by Japanese photographers (Hight 2002). The histories of these photographers also remind us how productive and concrete Latour’s ideas of connections are in producing a global history that is more than diffuse flows. What historians are unearthing in the archives are stories that need to be added to the history of photography. While the way this history was told was not wrong, it was incomplete, to borrow from Chimamanda Adichies famed speech of 2009.2 By being incomplete it constructed a hegemonic story of 1 The Chinese Photographer Afong Lei is even mentioned in Naomi Rosenblum (2008: 73). 2 Retrievable here: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_ of_a_single_story (last download, 09.06.2017). RE-FRAMING PHOTOGRAPHY | 11 the West and reduced all other world regions to objects of western gazes. Not to say that there was no colonial gaze, yes, there was, but it was not the only way photography was used, it was never uncontested