Silver Gelatin prints are Grey

Photography, a medium of visual representation that since it’s creation in 1839 has changed the way the world has viewed the manufactured image. Olu Oguibe’s essay entitled Photography and the Substance of the Imagery is an article which not only discusses the photographic medium but also it’s role in African cultures and its impact on the perception of those cultures in the west.

       This essay is of great interest because it highlights many of the concepts I have been grappling with throughout this research. While it does not really answer any of those questions, it has once again created another insight into the topic.

According to Oguibe photography arrived in Africa on November 16, 1839. It was the amateur photographer Horace Vernet who brought back the first images of Egypt in 1839. He solidified the presence of the camera and the photograph in Africa for both the European and the African. 

      The specific history of photography is not what is important here, it is the ramifications of the mechanism and the object (which is camera and photography) on African culture which intrigues me. From it’s very early beginning, in the hands of the European the camera was used as an exploitative tool in relation to the African. Nicolas Monti put forth the belief that it was the popular and economically sound trade of photographic images of Africa that were the very beginnings of tourism as a culture. Tourism as an activity is inherently one that must utilize the indigenous population and culture for the gain of the foreign visitor ( that statement is not meant to be viewed as entirely negative, just as using something is not always a negative action.) The concept that tourism culture was created through the use of Africa seems fitting in a relationship that historically saw one side using the other. Within the same realm of thought American photographer F.Holland Day by the turn of the nineteenth century was taking portrait style photographs of alleged ‘Nubian and Ethiopian’ chiefs, using African Americans as models. This saw the beginning of typecasting of Africans in popular culture. Oguibe uses the term ‘junglification’ of the African to describe this phenomenon. It is quite clear that the camera was very rapidly used as another tool by europeans in the ‘otherization’ of the African. 

                                                                             F.Holland Day

       But, those points have been made before, one is aware that the African has been portrayed in a specific  light throughout the history of photography. One does not even have to look that far back into the history of photography to see that. Robert Mapplethrope’s photographic images of black men is a perfect example of the exoticization (or otherization) of the black figure, and many of those were taken as recently as 1985.

Bob Love, 1979.   Title and date unknown,

R. Mapplethorpe R. Mapplethorpe

       

     Oguibe’s essay becomes all the more engaging when he begins his discussion of the photographic image in the hands of Africans. The greatest difference between the use of the photograph in Europe and Africa is the cultural relationship either culture has to an image. The following excerpt from the essay is an excellent example of the western view of photography around the turn of the 19 century:

Much has been made too in the history and criticism of photography about its indexicality or fidelity to reality. On this contemporary theorists of the medium remain as divided as its earliest commentators. For the intellectual and ruling circles of the late Enlightenment Europe, photography proffered a mathematical exactitude of reality, a reducible, a calculable mechanism for the scientific reproduction of nature. In From Painting Is Dead, Tristam Powell quotes the Victorian Lady Eastlake as remarking, “What are nine tenths of these facial maps, called photographic portraits, but accurate landmarks and measurements for loving eyes and memories to deck with beauty and animate with expression, in perfect certainty that the ground plan is founded upon fact.” Though we return to Lady Eastlake’s comment presently, it nevertheless bears within it an element of a certain naive faith in the fidelity of the photograph that would pervade not only the aristocracy in the West but even more so, and with more dangerous insidious consequences, the various institutions of science and the state. Resting on this supposed fidelity and transparency, whole disciplines came to rely upon the evidentiary potentials of the photograph, sociology appealing to it for concrete statistical purposes, anthropology for indubitable evidence of the evolutionary order of the human species, and, in extension, justification for its mission of salvage exploration outside Europe. Jurisprudence and the apparati of state control invented new systems of criminal cartography based on the consciously exaggerated faithfulness of the photographic likeness, and the fundamental right to contest institutional truth was curbed by the supposed unimpeachability of the new tool. (79)

It only seems logical to follow the last excerpt with another one, this time giving a concrete example of an African ideology on the truthfulness of an image:

This understanding fits a broader aesthetic of essence, where the image is “true” as long as efficaciously attends to the specifications of its applications within an intricate matrix of cultural expectations. Whereas our conventional qualification of such circumstances would be that the image is successful- that is to say, that it fulfills its purpose- within the aesthetic success also equates truth. In other words, the image is truthful or accurate if it fulfills its purpose. And is not restricted  to the registration or indeed the excavation of the phenomenological contours of the subject through the iconographic or iconological indexicality: it does indeed extend to the supercession of the phenomenological and the substitution of the nonmimetic. Thus an image, including the photograph, though it may not visually portray or refer to a subject, may yet be applied to the representation of that subject as long as it sufficiently encapsulates the perceived or intended attributes of that subject. (82-3)

It is within these two different ideologies and relationships to images that we can start to see why the photograph has been used so differently in the hands of Europeans and Africans.

Scientific truth and photographs are deeply intertwined with one another in western thought. It is because of this, that people were capable of portraying Africans so ‘earnestly’ even when there was little to no truth in the image made, coupled with many of the concepts examined in prior blog entries. In opposition to that, African thoughts on the photographic image do not remove the human from the action of photographing to the extreme that europeans did. The photograph and camera once introduced into Africa quickly became just another tool for image making. “ In these cultures photography is simply another process of image-making, a process of making rather than taking.” (87) ( a quote referencing the people of Ethiopia’s connection to image making).

       I chose to discuss this particular article as my final official post not because it proposed any kind of grandiose idea or head spinning view. I wanted to discuss this article because I believe it is a summation (as best as I can create) of my exploration to date on the subject of race in visual culture. The photograph not only demonstrates the action of ‘othering’ a group of people perceived as fundamentally different from us. It gives example to how a tool such as the camera can create a power relationship which enables one to have the upper hand over the other. While it is my personal belief that no one group should ever hold absolute power over another because of their differences, this article did more than to cause my morals to flinch. The discussion of the photograph also showed that those difference which are so often wrongly typecast and corner the African are based in truth. This is where I must be careful to make myself very clear, I am not making a value judgement towards or against one cultural identity. I am simply stating that through the discussion of the photograph and of both cultures relationship to that kind of image making we are allowed to see that there are fundamental differences in the way that they are both constructed. We are not the same, yet we are not absolute opposites- there is not a black and white division between cultures. It seems that I once again find myself in some kind of grey area, coming closer to a better understanding of the subject matter but constantly getting further and further away from any understanding at the same time. I suppose the same can be said of this relationship between the Africans and the Americans, it rests in a murky grey area, one which has become all the more complex the more I learn. I am uncertain as where to stop writing, so I am going to stop just as I started somewhere not at the beginning or the end but somewhere in the middle.