Abstract
Jennifer Bajorek’s Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa introduces itself as telling ‘a history that has, in a sense, already been written – in photographs’ (p. 1). A respected translator of Jacques Derrida, Bajorek deconstructs the ever-changing lives of photographs in the cities of Dakar, Saint-Louis, Porto-Novo, and Cotonou to reconnect contemporary Senegalese and Beninese populations to an archive that few, if any, have delved into. Despite this lack of scholarship on the subject, Bajorek renders visible, even at times tangible, the socio-political changes photographers captured and catalyzed.
Bajorek contributes to a recent push by art historians focusing on African photography to destabilize modernist narratives by going back into an omitted archive and challenging any communal ‘aesthetics of resistance or of liberation’ (p. 62). Her dialogic focus here is on the non-fixity of photography and, more broadly speaking, the production of meaning in West Africa. Relying heavily on Olu Oguibe’s philosophy of photography summarized as ‘the image in the picture is not inert, only temporarily contained’ and Tina Campt’s ‘haptic image’, Bajorek shares with the reader the indefinite possibilities offered by collected, neglected, unsold, or even trashed studio portraits that photographers produced in the cities listed above. As she explains, these portraits taken by Doudou Diop, Oumar Ly, Benoît Adjovi, El Hadj Adama Sylla, Guilbril André Diop, and many other unknown photographers worked as key factors to expand the existing spaces of political imaginations. Significantly, Bajorek uses them as entry points into a ‘vision of what will succeed modernity while still fighting against its reminiscences’ (p. 31). She works through a process of re-viewing what these photographs could have meant within larger political spectrums, that is, through and with a decolonial lens.
Part one of the book, ‘What Makes a Popular Photography?’, addresses the rise in popularity of photography both as a technological medium and as a social field. In a thorough investigation predating decolonization (from the end of World War II to 1960), Bajorek reveals the project of Agfa, a Belgian–German photography corporation, to grow their market in West Africa, more specifically in Afrique-Occidentale Francaise (AOF). The greater availability of photographic materials saw a rise in amateur photographers willing to professionalize their practices while also competing against established professionals. Meanwhile, many West Africans were influenced by French movies and desired their portraits to be taken by these same photographers ‘in an angle’ (p. 61), quickly becoming an expression of agency displaying dynamism and trendiness. This interest in photography arose from the French colonial system’s requirement to document identity, which was a critical use of technology for colonizing purposes. Concurrently, Bajorek recounts the timely history of how vaccination procedures performed by the French government were linked to the artistic practice where needles were reused to color photographs, contributing to new forms of political resistance through the appropriation of colonial technologies (p. 102).
Bajorek’s aim in this first part is to re-analyze the use of photography as a new medium while also considering its popularization through print. For example, ‘getting married by photo’ became a popular practice while also developing into a site of ‘being seen being seen’, to use Krista Thompson’s words (2015: 189). Studio portraits made a larger impact on the population while also growing on a national level with the introduction of Bingo, a magazine celebrating curated and reader-submitted photographs, which helped close the gap between photography (which often was regarded as an artistic luxury) and the general population. The camera, its cheap developing process, and increased chances of being published in a widely-read magazine all contributed to this mediation which grew into a tool for political upheaval and revolt.
In the second part of the book, Bajorek unveils the theoretical underpinnings of the book’s subtitle. ‘Decolonial imagination’ and ‘political photography’ work symbiotically to question the social and political significations of what it meant to navigate colonial systems in a pre-and post-decolonial world. ‘Political photography’ became the instrument that activist youth used to share their views on contemporary situations, while including their personal relationship with the country they both loved and reprimanded. These spatially and temporally discontinuous experiences of belonging that characterized ‘political photography’ are rendered visible in both individual portraits shot by studio photographers and political advertising sponsored by the state (p. 29). Propagandist practices spread continentally as Bajorek underlines the desire of Mobutu’s (Zaire’s political leader at the time) to be photographed while on presidential duty, marking the importance of photography in these early stages while challenging its ethics.
Bajorek’s ‘unfixing’ occurs through her crucial archival work relating these photographs to surviving populations that participated in independence movements while making material traces converse with contemporary subjects. Her methodology, which includes careful and numerous interviews, paired with a deep understanding of Senegalese and Beninese socio-political history, reminds an attentive reader of psychoanalytical techniques to deal with traumatic experiences. Karima Lazali, a clinical psychologist working in both Algeria and France, has noticed the need for the individual to go through a process of repairing personal histories, mostly through visual supplements, in order to heal colonial wounds (Lazali, 2018). Bajorek works through similar historical weavings by re-viewing and re-searching to renew generational bonds lost in colonial disentanglements.
Constructing a decolonial imaginary through photography has worked and still works as world-remaking. Even though Bajorek gives priority to the social and historical narratives catalyzed by the photographic revolution in West Africa, she still investigates how its inhabitants conceived of alternative communal futures through visual representation. In her concluding chapters, she evaluates how the uses of commercial, photojournalistic, and bureaucratic photographic practices all contributed both to the undoing of colonial state apparatuses and to the shaping of decolonial African futures. In doing so, she posits the inapplicability of Western photographic theories to a West African context due to the historical remnants left by the colonial project, a position largely accepted amongst contemporary African art historians. Moreover, it is a welcome addition to see Bajorek assess her own positionality in the final chapter by foregrounding the ramifications her methodological choices can have on contemporary populations as well as her privileged position as a scholar with access to these archives.
Despite Bajorek’s attempt at explaining the attractiveness of angled photographs and the use of props and backdrops, she does not delve deeply into the stylistic choices made by sitters or into treating studio photographs as historical traces of an affected past changing presents. Ripped, scratched, and burned film prints clearly illustrate Bajorek’s thesis that photographs and photographic practices used by African photographers, their subjects, and their publics to remake colonial histories and legacies gave rise not simply to an African ‘image’ of colonial modernity, but of a distinctly African vision of what had already begun to succeed that modernity. (p. 31)
Their physical imperfections memorialize their historical trajectories and become renewed subjects of vision requiring alternative interpretations. The tools of political activism that these photographs became through their recontextualization must be treated, I believe, as such, rather than merely accepting their faith as only being temporal reminiscences of a shared past. Unfixing and refixing their stories must work through both a visual reinterpretation of what these images have become and a historical redefinition of what they might mean. At times, Bajorek heavily relied on the latter, while neglecting the former, which can be counterintuitive to many art historical methodologies.
Nevertheless, Bajorek’s timely study beautifully puts into action the recent needs for [re:]entanglements in the field of African art at large, recalling Paul Basu’s (2016) anthropological restitution project. Despite not engaging in a resolution process, Bajorek, and Basu for that matter, work through and with archival documents and contemporary populations to better understand together what coloniality meant, what it takes to overcome it, and what has come out of centuries of violence. For Bajorek, studying photographs taken during the colonial era before independence involves a critical dialogue between the colonizer and the colonized while also requiring an astute discussion of gender. She magnificently demonstrates that, despite photographs being largely produced by men, a considerable part of their success depended on the involvement of their wives and female colleagues to process and print them. Bajorek engages families and communities to listen to stories and, as she unexpectedly discovered, most of these stories are carried into the future by women.
In the concluding chapter, Bajorek suggests that ‘the ambivalent role that we, as foreign researchers and scholars, play in these initiatives is not likely to change soon. Yet every risk that our research presents for recolonization is, at the same time, a chance for decolonial work’ (p. 260). The photographs she examines, handles, and reads have within them an audience yet to come. Beninese and Senegalese cultural productions, at least photography, which attend to a colonial past not only involve the work of re-memory and return, but also contain within them an anticipatory urgency looking forward to the future. Bajorek’s anthropological transcription enacts Jacques Derrida’s (1996: 56) concerns on translation ‘where a given formal “quantity” always fails to restore the singular event of the original, that is, to let it be forgotten once recorded, to carry away its number, the prosodic shadow of its quantum’. The singularity of the photograph will never replace lost meanings; however, its prosodic shadow will always match its quantum. In other words, Bajorek’s study will not bring back history itself, but can illuminate historical obscurities in the lives of West Africans subjugated to colonial rule, which makes this book an admirable and truly essential contribution to contemporary Beninese and Senegalese populations.