© Cover of the book 'Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa'. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. ID-card photograph of an unidentified woman. Photograph: Joseph Moïse Agbodjélou. Porto-Novo, Benin, 1970s. Courtsey of Léonce Agbodjélou

You are the author of a book published in 2020, Unfixed. It is about African photography and decolonization… Can you explain how you started the research behind it?

Jennifer Bajorek (JB): In 1999, I was living in Paris, and I saw some photographs by Seydou Keïta in an art gallery. I was already interested in photography, but this was my first encounter with studio portraits from Africa. When I saw Keïta’s photographs, and when I read the emergent critical discourse, something opened up. On the one hand, these images sharpened questions I had already been asking. What is the relationship between photography and freedom? Is there an essential relationship between them? But they also raised new questions. What was happening in Bamako at the time that Keïta took these photographs? What traces live on, in these photographs, of these events? That was the beginning.

In 2007, I found myself in Dakar, and it became possible to ask these questions in West Africa. In Senegal, I was introduced to a family with a phenomenal photography collection, spanning the decades immediately pre- and post-independence. On that same trip, I met several photographers of the independence generation (Keïta’s generation), or their descendants. In Saint-Louis, I met El Hadj Adama Sylla and I met André Diop, the son of photographer Doudou Diop. I also met and started talking to photographers and artists of a younger generation, including Bouna Medoune Seye, who, although he was living in Paris, happened to be in Dakar then. In addition to being a photographer and filmmaker in his own right, Bouna was a keeper, in the rich sense, of the archives of several significant independence-era photographers in Senegal. (He recently passed away.) I found that we were all asking the same questions—about the meaning and legacies of these photographs, about the hopes and desires that had motivated their production, about the hopes and dreams that live on in them. Through many return trips over the years, these conversations continued, which is how the research actually took place.

© Benoît Adjovi, Cotonou, Benin, 1970s. Double portrait, men in matching white suits and sunglasses. This photograph belongs to a larger class of “twin” image, common in West Africa, in which twin relationships, whether biological or spiritual, are evoked.

Can you define what de-colonial signifies for you? How can it be used to describe African photography?

JB: To me, the first thing that the word “decolonial” signifies or does is it starts to disentangle the history of photography from that of colonial modernity. This is, in a way, a modest gesture, but also a difficult one, since photography has been understood, from its inception, as something deeply entangled with modernity, particularly in the West. This means that photography has also been understood as deeply entangled with coloniality. This is all incontestable, since modernity and coloniality are two sides of the same coin. But this understanding of photography, which dominates in the scholarly literature and in popular consciousness, is much too limited.

© Benoît Adjovi, Cotonou, Benin, 1970s. Portrait of a man before a wax­-print textile backdrop. This particular textile is a variation on a well­-known pattern.

Part of what I try to do in Unfixed is remind readers that there are many other histories of photography that don’t fit with and actively unsettle this understanding—which is culturally specific and often downright Eurocentric. In the introduction, I argue that notions of mechanical reproducibility, the impulse towards technical perfection of representation, or even the idea of “the image” as two-dimensional representation, all of which have been so central to photography’s Euro-American histories, are often irrelevant to its histories in the rest of the world. In many parts in West Africa, for example, photographs can have a spiritual or religious significance that is directly antithetical to Enlightenment ideologies. Photographs are used in twin ceremonies or in other vaudoun (indigenous religious) ceremonies. They are used to narrate pre-colonial histories. Or they are used, proleptically, to show us things about the future. Here, photography is not a “pencil of nature,” nor is it a nostalgic fixation on some pre-existing truth. It is a proliferating set of possibilities, an engine of imagination. This is where it becomes interesting to ask about photography and decolonization. For me, this is the second thing that the word “decolonial” indicates: this reorientation away from colonial modernity, towards what comes after it.

What was political photography in Africa?

JB: There is a political dimension of this temporality, and people exploited it. This is not just an abstract philosophical idea. In the years just before and after independence, many people in West Africa associated photography with the sense of a new era dawning. This is explicit, you find it everywhere: in fiction, in memoirs, in cinema. Not surprisingly, photographers felt it, too, and several of the photographers I talked to described their experiences of a kind of heightened historical consciousness that they associated with the medium. In keeping with the temporal complexities of the decolonial impulse, this consciousness was not just retrospective. It is as if they were trying to photograph, not so much the coming of independence—in the sense of some arrival that was assured, or that had already been achieved and could be retrospectively documented—but the very fact of its being on the horizon. When it is turned towards this horizon, photography is always at least potentially political.

© Zinsou Cosme Dossa, Porto-Novo, Benin, late 1950s/early 1960s

I also use the term “political photography” in the book to refer, more concretely, to a class of images that photographers I interviewed referred to as “la photographie des choses politiques.” In this sense, it is also a genre descriptor referring to documentary, photojournalism, and reportage. In the AOF (Afrique Occidentale Française) throughout the French colonial period, documentary practice was dominated by the French. In fact, the colonial administration, working together with French businessmen and to promote French commercial interests, created and maintained a French monopoly in both administrative commissions and in photojournalism. When this monopoly loosened, which it did surprisingly rapidly in the 1950s, “political photography” began to be practiced more widely by African photographers. This Africanization of documentary and state-sponsored genres plays a major role in the book, and it is also part of what I try to theorize under the heading of decolonial imagination in the book’s second half.

In your book, you talk about a journal, Bingo, that presented a new face of African photography, starting from the 1950s. This media was used to develop a new image of modern Africa, by way of its leaders, thinkers, fashion, and so on. There’s a pan-African idea of global black consciousness. Can you explain to us the role of photography in this journal and the importance of it, politically speaking, too?

JB: Bingo is an incredible resource for research on photography in the AOF, and really for rethinking the medium’s history globally. As you say, the magazine was invested in developing a “new image” of Africa, and this was explicit from the beginning. But what is more interesting is how the editors wound up seeking out and creating this new image. From the very first issue, in 1953, they actively solicited photographs from their readers, and they basically wound up crowd-sourcing a significant number of the images they published. I strongly suspect that the initial idea was to target amateur photographers, but this was not successful, and most of the photographs that were published were not actually photographs that had been taken by the magazine’s readers. Rather, they were portraits that had been taken of readers by photographers working in commercial studio settings.

© Bingo (September 1954)

So Bingo is or becomes this very dynamic, organic, and inclusive archive of photography across the region at this moment. We see studio portraits that were taken in more than a dozen cities in the AOF, as well as photographs that were sent in by West African readers, often soldiers stationed in other parts of the French empire, in Casablanca, Hanoi, the Antilles. This imperial and transcolonial reach expands the parameters of the magazine’s public—and the corresponding visual discourse of that public—to a scope that was, already, in the early 1950s, self-consciously African and global. In addition, Bingo presents us with captions, exchanges of letters, and editorial discussions of photographs giving us access to readers’ interpretations of their photographs. There is also a critical mass of advertisements (for cameras, films, papers, studios) that situate and inform the published photographic material.

© Bingo (March 1953)

To be clear, Bingo’s discourse is not initially an anti-colonial discourse, and it is never a radical discourse, but it is a discourse centering black people’s experiences under French empire. To “illustrate” the French empire from a vantage point that is distinctly black and African—this is, to me, politically important, even subversive, in that it centers African perspectives on colonial and imperial belonging. There is even an explicit discourse about black beauty. (An early issue invites readers to participate in the collective project of chronicling, in words and images, “the immortal beauty of black Africa.”) This is all unfolding in a complex dialogue with French colonial culture. There are limitations, to be sure. This is a capitalist business venture, and the magazine is essentially there to sell products. But from the standpoint of intervening in the global image ecology, it is fascinating and visually, still today, very powerful.

© Bingo (May 1957)

In the post-independence period, the magazine expands its parameters still further to include a large number of references to black American culture, even as pan-African sentiment on the continent is gaining momentum. Profiles of Muhammed Ali, features on police brutality in the US (there was a story about the challenges of being a black cop in the US that was published in 1970), a cover featuring a photograph of Malcolm X (“America’s Lumumba”), advertisements urging readers to “buy African,” articles on African political leaders highlighting their support for the Non-Aligned Movement—all of this is there. This is a pan-African conversation. What interests me most is that photography is the principal language of this conversation. Throughout all of these changes, readers continue to send in their own pictures and express a desire to see them published alongside these other photographs.

What is your formal and curatorial formation?

JB: I have had too many formal formations! My PhD was in literature and philosophy. I studied at the University of California, Irvine, where I went to study with the famous French philosophers. This formation has been really important to my research on photography, but not always in the ways that people expect. For one thing, it gave me the French language skills that have been totally essential to my research in West Africa. Too many researchers working on photography fail to grasp the significance of language—and this has really narrowed the field. This formation also helped me to understand French colonialism in a very particular way, in a kind of decentered way. (Jacques Derrida, who was one of my teachers, was an Algerian Jew who had a complex relationship to French colonialism.) It was also a very generous formation, in terms of learning how to do research. No question was ever too big, and we read absolutely everything.

Today, this formation gets a bad rap, but we read absolutely everything, and we learned to be meticulous, to take the time it took. This kind of patience is, obviously, much more elusive today. It is also, I think, even more elusive in the art world, to whose rhythms art history and photography history are typically linked. These formations send people chasing after images or objects, and this emphasis on acquisition and accumulation encourages speed. That said, despite the patience that was instilled in us, there was also a kind of hubris to my graduate school training. This approach is built on a foundation that is overly textual and bibliocentric, often explicitly Eurocentric: it is premised on this idea that everything ever worth knowing or thinking could be found in a book. My research on photography in West Africa has, in many ways, been a direct response to this way of thinking about the world.

3PA: West African Image Lab. April 22-25, 2014. Porto-Novo, Benin. Photograph: Caroline Lacey. © Resolution Photo 3PA (Préservation du Patrimoine Photographique Africain): West African Image Lab was an intensive four-day workshop on photographic preservation organized by Resolution and an international team of photograph conservation professionals held in Porto-Novo, Benin, April 22-25, 2014. 3PA provided technical training in photographic preservation and basic preservation resources to museum and archive professionals, curators, and others looking after significant photography collections in Africa. The workshop also included a younger generation of photographers and artists who use both archival and contemporary photographs in their work. In addition, 3PA opened a dialogue on the future of African photography collections and created opportunities for professional networking. Twenty participants represented collections in nine different countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.

3PA: West African Image Lab. April 22-25, 2014. Porto-Novo, Benin. Photograph: Caroline Lacey. © Resolution Photo

I had several further formal formations, after I moved to London in 2007, and, in West Africa, while doing the research. The British system has (for whatever reason) favored anthropological and ethnographic approaches to photography, particularly in Africa. A lot has been written about the differences between anthropological and art historical approaches in African art. These are big debates. But as an American working in Britain but doing research in French colonial space (from a position in an art school!), I had the luxury of being an outsider, and I didn’t need to get involved in them. I could experiment methodologically, in conversation with some very well-known and generous scholars, and participate in the parts of those conversations that I felt were most compelling, and leave the rest. My African colleagues—including, particularly, Fatima Fall (in Senegal) and Franck Ogou (in Benin), who accompanied me through critical moments in my research in West African collections—also trained me in significant ways, as did the photographers and other interlocutors. They certainly deserve credit in terms of having exercised a direct influence on the research.

I learned to curate while in London, with a focus on contemporary African art. I have never curated (in the sense of exhibition-making or presenting for a public exhibition) historical photographs from Africa for a Western audience. This has been totally deliberate on my part. The conditions for this type of exhibition simply have not been there, and it has not seemed easy to create them. For the presentation of contemporary art, the conditions are very different, and I have loved working in that space. It is a very rare curator who can negotiate between those two spaces.

A lot of photographic archives have disappeared or been sold to collectors all over the world. How huge is the loss for the history of African photography?

JB: The loss is huge. The rate at which vintage prints and negatives are leaving the continent has, if not accelerated, then at least remained constant since the vogue for “African photography” on the art market started in the late 1990s. This is not a concern that I or other researchers in the “international scholarly community” have invented. It’s a very real, very immediate concern for African collection-keepers, curators, and cultural heritage professionals. I cannot tell you the number of times that someone is giving me a name, a phone number, telling me whose collection might interest me and then, two minutes later, this same person is telling me that all of the negatives left for France two weeks ago with Curator X, or do I know Curator Y, who took off with this other photographer’s archive 10 years ago, and do I think we should believe what Curator Y says about their return?

These conversations unfold in a very complex, very ambiguous, and very dynamic context, geopolitically, economically. On the one hand, people want to see the value of their collections acknowledged, and they want to benefit economically as well as culturally. They have every right. They want their photographs and collections to be seen, by the world, and international interest has brought unimagined opportunities for circulation and exposure. On the other hand, these opportunities are embedded in uneven power relations, and they come with a lot of risk. A lot of exchanges have ended badly, and sales that were negotiated in good faith or what seemed to be auspicious conditions have not actually brought the benefits that people had hoped they would. From the standpoint of research and knowledge production, the consequences of this ongoing exportation have been equally dire, and I write about these at various junctures in the book.

In the final chapter, I write about some really exciting initiatives that have been undertaken by a new generation of collection-keepers, curators, and cultural heritage professionals in Africa who have been able to reframe the terms of their engagement with the market, or who are working with international partners in new ways. These projects, which cannot repair archival loss or depletion, are nonetheless a powerful response to it and, to my mind, represent a new phase of work, one that offers all kinds of possibilities. I’m very excited about these possibilities, and I absolutely cannot wait to see them realized.

© Jennifer Bajorek. Work table during interviews in the courtyard of photographer Benoît Adjovi's home in Cotonou, Benin.

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Jennifer Bajorek