Portraiture and Photography in Africa

Elisabeth L. Cameron is Associate Professor and the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in the History of Art and Visual Culture, Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz.John Peffer is Associate Professor of Art History at Ramapo College.

Comprising twelve chapters and a significantly promising introduction, Portraiture and Photography in Africa is an indispensable addition to the scholarship on the histories of the medium. Offering a compilation of essays that build on foundational studies of Africanists like Stephen Sprague, Tobias Wendl, and others, this well-illustrated and remarkably affordable text provokingly explores the production of photographic images, their mobility across time, place, and medium, and their various receptions throughout West, Central, and East Africa.(African Arts) John Peffer and Elisabeth Cameron's volume, Portraiture and Photography in Africa, includes articles that probe the premise that photographs can represent Africa and its populations not as victims but instead as agents of change. 57.3 Dec 2014(African Studies Review) The analyses bring on-the-ground and archival research to bear on the understanding of photography within its cultural and political context in historical and contemporary Africa. Each essay is well illustrated and provides extensive citations. Upper-level students of visual culture and anthropology have model examples of scholarship in these papers.(LIBRARY JOURNAL) This valuable edited collection features essays by seasoned scholars who are professors, curators, and research associates concerned with photography's role in East and West Africa. . . . Recommended.(Choice) The editors have brought together an excellent group of scholars . . . Portraiture and Photography is richly illustrated, and the images are each clearly labeled. . . . Portraiture and Photography . . . gather[s] together top-notch authors to reflect on and challenge received knowledge about colonial photographic archives, and to push scholarship in the field of portraiture photography in Africa in new and exciting directions. [It] provide[s] intellectual stimulus through new insights, new data, and new voices.(CAA Reviews) This is a substantial volume . . . one which richly deserves to be widely read, and not just by those interested in forms of visual expression in Africa or in the history of photography. It is also highly relevant to those concerned with cross-cultural artistic expression, with the presentation of selves and the puncturing of enduring postcolonial myths of superiority . . . Indiana University Press is to be praised for producing a reasonably priced volume with high production values.(Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford)

• Foreword \ Raoul BirnbaumAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Study of Photographic Portraiture in Africa \ John PefferPart 1. Exchange1. Portrait Photography: A Visual Currency in the Atlantic Visualscape \ Jürg Schneider2. Lutterodt Family Studios and the Changing Face of Early Portrait Photographs from the Gold Coast \ Erin Haney3. Yoruba Studio Photographers in Francophone West Africa \ Érika Nimis4. The Fieldworker and the Portrait: The Social Relations of Photography \ Elisabeth L. CameronPart 2. Social Lives5. "A Photograph Steals the Soul": The History of an Idea \ Z. S. Strother6. The Past in the Present: Photographic Portraiture and the Evocation of Multiple Histories in the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon \ Christraud M. Geary7. Mombasa on Display: Photography and the Formation of an Urban Public, from the 1940s Onward \ Isolde Brielmaier8. Portrait Photography in a Postcolonial Age: How Beauty Tells the Truth \ Liam BuckleyPart 3. Traditions9. Likeness or Not: Musings on Portraiture in Canonical African Art and Its Implications for African Portrait Photography \ Jean Borgatti10. k-graphy: w Portraits \ Rowland Abdn11. Visual Griots: Identity, Aesthetics, and the Social Roles of Portrait Photographers in Mali \ Candace M. Keller12. The Intermediality of Portraiture in Northern Côte d'Ivoire \ Till FörsterContributorsIndex