Jennifer Bajorek, Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa, reviewed by Yann Petit

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.