Photography and Decolonial Imagination

The idea of a photographic image as “unfixed” is intriguing, full of possibility. Jennifer Bajorek takes this idea as her starting point for reading a range of historic images—studio portraits, popular magazines (Bingo specifically), advertisements, photojournalism, bureaucratic ID cards, and political photography, from the West African countries of Senegal and Benin. All these images are both beautiful and beautifully laid out in her monograph. The book is at the same time a fruitful project committed to decolonizing knowledge production around what old photographs produced during the second half of the longue dur ee of the 20th century can potentially mean, say and imagine for their subjects and for subsequent viewers (including those persons in the images, their future descendants and a global “we”) in the here-and-now of the 21st century. It is a form of ethnographic play in the image archive, and theory-making from and grounded in West Africa, two exciting endeavors that Bajorek urges scholars of African photography to participate in, and rightly so. The book includes small acts of decolonization, for example, that of changing West to “west” Africa (xiii), since the former is associated with the AOF (l’AfriqueOccidentale française), the French colonial administration that included Senegal, Benin, and six other colonies, which ended in 1960. Such writerly steps make possible a kind of sustained anticolonial reading and gesture to the potential of photography to do the hard work of decolonization. Bajorek smartly suggests (18) that a second “scramble for Africa” is currently taking place, more than a century after the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 (also known as the West Africa Conference), an event that saw rival colonial powers carving out niches across the subcontinent; only this time around it is curators and collectors swooping in to grab up and discover unknown African collections and artists to sell on the international art market. This second scramble for Africa then makes the urgency of visual research like hers that much more timely and important for self-determined decolonial preservation. The archive of images Bajorek unearths showcases human vulnerability at its sensorial best; emergent themes of belonging, affiliation, worldliness, and affect are just a sample few that help render the democratic power of this set of arresting (and mostly black-and-white) images produced at the tapered end of colonialism and through to the cusp and aftermath of colonial independence (1950s–80s). Photographs also effect change, a point not lost on Bajorek for