Roots and Routes of African Photographic Practices

Abstract

This chapter briefly examines the spread and adaptation of photography in West and Central Africa, in other words the trajectories of photographers and photographic practices in time and space. The first part focuses on the period from about 1870 to 1910, when images by African pioneer photographers greatly contributed to the way in which Europeans and Americans imagined Africa, and at the same time served the needs of globally linked African elites in coastal communities from Sierra Leone to present-day Gabon. The second part explores local appropriations of the medium, that is, the vernacularization and democratization of photographic practices from the 1930s into the 1980s. In the form of a case study, it examines the biographies of several photographers who worked in the town of Fumban, the capital of the Bamum kingdom in Cameroon.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.