Brushing against the grain – a summary and a story

 

George Mahashe

Over the past three months, I have attended a workshop and a conference centred on photographs and the archive, where I have presented my archive-related projects. These two events focused primarily on the status, role and implications of the preservation of historic photographic documents today. They also facilitated an interesting debate on the move towards the idea of vernacular photography and its role in offsetting the bias associated with institutional archives.

Vernacular photography refers to the category within photography that does not yield to, or is not susceptible to the boundaries imposed by genre or institutionalised norms created by academics, historians or other professional interests. It relates directly to the modes created by the wider population in reaction to the available technologies and needs, independent of the elite’s interpretation of such technologies. (See: Batchen, G. 2002. Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. Cambridge: MIT Press)

From my point of view, both events emerged out of a now-popular drive to digitise colonial archives as a way of making them more accessible to a larger international community. This drive is often accompanied by a recasting of the archive as a contemporary object, through art intervention and the production of reflexive histories. Overall, this drive appears, at least to me, to be a platform for exporting European innovations in archives, while simultaneously taking custody of previously-colonised societies’ archives in the name of skills development, preservation and maintaining international standards. I have observed this to have the effect of stamping out such communities’ existing or emergent archival practices, which are seen as inefficient. 

A summary 
The workshop was held in Dakar, Senegal between 25 and 29 November, 2014, under the name Photographs of 19th and 20th Century Africa: Changing perspectives and object histories in school textbooks and digital archives. It focused on the role of archived photographs in teaching, questioning whether a methodology could be devised to limit the problematic nature of the photograph and its resistance to a stable meaning and interpretation. The workshop was arranged through collaboration between Goethe University in Germany and the University of Lomé in Togo, and was the culmination of a series of projects aimed at maximising the use of historic archives linking the two countries. 

Titled Validating Visual Heritage in Africa: Historical Photographs and the Role of the Archive, the conference was held in Buea, Cameroon between 27 and 29 January, 2015, and focused largely on photographs as source documents in the production of history (social, political and cultural), looking at ways to maximise access and preservation. It explored different ways of addressing issues that arise in critically dealing with photographs and their contexts in distinct fields of activity, disciplines and archival settings. Organised by the NPO African Photography Initiatives in collaboration with the Universities of Buea, Cameroon and Basel, Switzerland, it marked the conclusion of a digitisation project of the Buea Press Photo Archives (BPPA) located in Buea, a former German colony.

The two events had many things in common, among them, the reinforcement of a resolution for a full-steam-ahead approach to the digitisation project. Also, the usual lip service was paid to the equal inclusion of the artist and other marginalised players, within the process of making photographic archives more inclusive and accessible to the wider public. This manifested through an emphasis on the researchability of the archive ─ the permanent conversion of a collection into an archive, through the addition of comprehensive metadata. This call for researchability is fortified by a commitment to the preservation of the original document for posterity, which is, essentially, the removal of the object from public circulation, replacing it with a digital fragment or a key word. 

While there are always squabbles and disagreements about approaches to photographs and the archive, all factions at these events were in agreement about the importance of digitisation and correct preservation procedures. The division was only evident when it came to ideas about the ways in which, and for whom, the archive should be made user friendly ─ the academic or the wider public. From this debate, a few positions emerged. 

One was a division between those who insisted that everything must be archived consistently and logically, and those of the opinion that the continuation of the consistent and logical approach is the very reason public archives cannot develop as a public resources, because such an approach assumes that everyone is interested in engaging archives logically. 

Of all the positions put forward, my favourite manifested when one of the scholars presenting at the Dakar workshop strongly refused to be questioned as if at an inquisition. This was a protest against the insistence on the question-and-answer approach of scholarship, which does not respect the role of expression in knowledge production. The scholar was reacting to an expectation, by some members of the delegation, that art should answer questions or conform to a particular interpretation, or at the least attest to subscribe to a particular theoretical position. This challenge to the question-and-answer approach also highlighted the problems of a metadata approach to archives, which requires one to have questions or a keyword in order to access a digital archive.

Image: George Mahashe, Dakar, 2014.

A story
It was during a late Sunday night’s drive in peak traffic, between Douala and Buea, that a fellow practice-based PhD student and I spoke at length about the incompatibilities of artistic practice and the idea of a PhD. This conversation eventually led to a story about an almost-stolen negative and the idea of contingency within artistic practice. The story, recounted by a Dutch researcher who had been collecting ‘vernacular’ photographs throughout West Africa, tells of how African archives are in danger and need to be secured and better preserved. 

On one of her field trips to West Africa, she had had an encounter wherein a photographer told a young man helping with a collection that a negative depicting his mother, within the collection, had been taken while she was pregnant with him. The young man then tried to steal the negative. ‘Luckily’, the researcher saw this happening and called him out. She offered to digitise the negative for him instead and he agreed to that arrangement, putting the negative back in the collection. The researcher went on to publish a book on the collection of photographs, reconstituting it as an archival resource, available internationally, so that it might possibly lead others (researchers and/or the young man’s descendants) to the archive. 

The idea of a stolen negative, which is a real problem in a lot of archives, draws my attention to an air of entitlement and exclusive custodianship of archives, by researchers or practitioners in the archive, particularly within the scramble for vernacular photographic archives. The idea worried me immensely that the researchers would rather have had the photographic document preserved in the archive, where they and this imagined public (that likes to wade through complicated library protocols) would always have access to it, instead of having it out there mingling and being at the mercy of the public. 

Do the researchers have such a noble cause that they have a larger right to that negative than the person depicted in the negative, especially seeing as that negative was commissioned and paid for by his mother? And if digitisation were the answer, why then does the researcher not keep the digital copy and let the young man run off with the original negative? Why insist on the negative being exactly where you know it to be?

Frustrated by such questions, I went on to imagine what would have happened if the young man had successfully stolen the negative. At this point in my life, I no longer believe that things (objects, history, culture etc.) can get lost, or that the loss of an artefact means the loss of what that artefact signifies. I have come to understand that things don’t get lost; they just move out of my reach, which, in itself, is a temporary situation. 

As I fantasised about the negative being successfully stolen, I began to imagine that the negative would be drawn into another collection, where it would be archived, perhaps via the young man’s family album. In this album, it would become contaminated with other stories, layered by the young man’s family and descendants, where it would contribute to the world in other, not yet imagined, ways. 

In a less hopeful vein, I imagined that the young man would lose it in a taxi, where a stranger would later find it, and draw it into other histories. Maybe the stranger develops an interest in photography as he/she tries to convert the negative into a photograph, leading to a rejuvenation of analogue photography in the region. Or maybe the descendants of the young man or stranger neglect it, and it deteriorates, leaving a void. 

One way or the other, the existing record of the image in the original collection, a reference number or maybe a ground sheet, could lead a future researcher on a quest to find out what happened to the negative. This could go on to facilitate a more inclusive history, as the researcher would have to account for the loss and the life this negative accumulates during its travels. It would be a story about the young man and his family, and not a story about some European collector and the uses it has been put to, for a European audience.

I am drawn towards indulging such fantasies, because throughout the two conferences I kept hearing a call for the archive to change, to be more contemporary and to serve communities other than those of the European scholar or the African bureaucrat. I heard calls for alternative histories about Africa, histories that are written from the South and reflect the interests of the South. But I am astonished at the stubbornness with which the South clings to the antiquated approach to knowledge. This is a stubborn rejection of an integrated contemporary archive, in favour of a metadata archive, only useful to a handful of professionals with keywords and arguments to prove.

During the conference and workshop, I realised that I was getting more nourishment from conversations over beer and casual street-grilled fish in Buea’s clerks’ quarter district, or from the 4am chat in a rickety taxicab, as a group of us drove towards the hotel from La Francophonie concert in downtown Dakar than from the official proceedings. 

There is a schizophrenic tendency in the characters that come to these workshops and conferences. At the conference table we hold our cards close and resort to the boring, logical but uninformative presentation, which makes me wonder why we don’t just email the papers to each other and skim read them at our leisure. At the beer table there is risk, there is concession to the inadequacy of efforts to solve problems and an interest in alternative, unqualified solutions. It is these moments that draw me to these events. For me, I always look forward to the last day of the event, when everybody is so exhausted and gatvol of the taxicabs and the heat that they stop mincing their words and say what they mean. It is at this point that the conference begins for me.

A parting note
If you ever bump into me, do ask me about the debates and fights at the Goethe Institute, Buea, where some German ‘experts’ tried to sell some 1930s German infomercials (films) about Cameroon as a way of historicising Germans’ conception of Cameroonians. The irritation brought on by the experts’ contextualisation of the films led to some questions and comments by some people in attendance as to whether the Germans were perhaps trying to come back to Cameroon, and were using the archive as a way of testing the people’s temperature.