Christopher Morton - The African Photographic Archive

Research and curatorial strategies

First published 2015 by Bloomsbury Academic

Published 2020 by Routledge
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Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury, 2015

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This volume has its origins in a one-day workshop, Interpreting African Photographic Archives: Research and Curatorial Strategies, convened by the editors at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, on 7 December 2011. We would like to acknowledge the support of Birmingham City University and the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford, which enabled us to host so many excellent speakers at that event. It brought together academics, curators, artists and a group of research students in a number of disciplines, to consider both established and emerging themes in the research and curation of photographic archives relating to Africa. Workshop papers by Sophie Feyder, Erin Haney (with Jennifer Bajorek as co-author), Christopher Morton, Darren Newbury, John Peffer, Christoph Rippe, Andrea Stultiens and David Zeitlyn have been revised for publication here and joined by essays from Heike Behrend, Patricia Hayes and Richard Yokes, all of whom have worked extensively on African photographic collections. The workshop was closed by a stimulating afterword by Elizabeth Edwards who reflected on the key themes that emerged from the day's discussion.

The workshop itself was convened to complement the exhibition People Apart: Cape Town Survey 1952. Photographs by Bryan Heseltine, which was curated by Newbury at the Pitt Rivers Museum and ran from 19 July 2011, until 8 January 2012. It seemed to us that the exhibition of this fascinating collection - that had recently come to light as a result of the research process - raised a series of critical questions about the role of the researcher in driving debates about, and setting the research and curatorial agenda for, African photographic collections. The workshop sought to widen such reflexive issues outwards to then consider expanded notions of the African photographic archive, from institutional collections to private and personal assemblages, as well as the ways in which researchers and artists are curating local reengagements with photographic archives as part of their work. We would like to thank all of the participants for their enthusiasm for this project and for their forbearance in bringing its results to publication.

Finally, we wish to express our thanks to all those institutions and individuals who have kindly granted permission to reproduce a selection of the photographs that have proved such rewarding objects of enquiry.

Jennifer Bajorek is Founding Co-Director of Resolution (resolutionphoto.org) and a Research Associate in the University of Johannesburg's Research Centre Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD). Her book manuscript, How to Write a Visual History of Liberation, was recently awarded a Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Heike Behrend was Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany She has retired and lives now in Berlin. She has conducted ethnographic research in Kenya and Uganda in the field of violence, war and religion as well as in media anthropology. Since the early 1990s she has worked on photographic practices in Uganda and Kenya and has curated various exhibitions on popular photographers in Africa. Her latest book Contesting Visibility: Photographic Practices on the East African Coast was published in 2013.

Sophie Feyder is based in Brussels and currently completing a PhD in History at Leiden University Her research is an historical study of black popular photography in Johannesburg's township communities. In 2013, she co-curated the exhibition Sidetracks: Working with Two Photographic Collections at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg.

Erin Haney is Founding Co-Director of Resolution, an organization dedicated to expanding access to photography and archives in Africa (resolutionphoto. org). She publishes, curates and teaches on art, modernisms and activism and historical and contemporary photography Presently she is a Research Associate at Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), University of Johannesburg, and at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, where she is curating an online exhibition on early Indian Ocean photography

Patricia Hayes is Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape, where she directs the Visual History research project, part of which involves researching Southern African documentary photography Her publications include the co-authored The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Narnibian History (1999), shortlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, and, with John Liebenberg, Bush of Ghosts: Life and War in Namibia, 1986-90 (2010).