Toward Visual Paths of Dignity
Great work from researcher Jean-Philippe Dedieu on photography and African colonial past for the New York Times' photography sections, LENS:
Link: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/toward-visual-paths-of-dignity/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
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Extracts:
In 1994, I had just returned to Paris from Asia. Yet all I could think about was Africa.
I had been living in Japan for a few years, working as a trader for an investment bank and, as for any migrant, this long journey exerted a profound and lasting influence on me. In Tokyo, I had befriended West Africans who had gone there seeking a better life. We shared our common experience of estrangement, and they had helped me to appreciate not only their lives as migrant laborers, but also the histories of their home countries.
I eventually left the neurotic and highly return-oriented life of a director of an emerging markets derivatives division. Instead, I wanted to make sense of my experiences in Japan. I started to build a photography collection on the subject of Africa’s colonial past, the legacy of which was far from publicly acknowledged in France at the time. Hoping to shed light on how African diasporas shaped contemporary European history, I earned a doctorate on African migrations. These two projects were intertwined: Perceptions of ethnic and racial minorities are influenced by their visual representations.
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How Africans were shown in the pictures — especially in the early images — went a long way toward marginalizing them as “the Other.” The visual production of racial stereotypes itself was influenced by the pseudo-sciences of anthropometry and criminal anthropology that had been developed in Europe in order to compare and classify “human races.” Over the years, I found countless examples of photographs composed according to these pseudo-scientific frameworks. The Austrian explorer Richard Buchta was one of many photographers who did mug shot-like front and profile views of his subjects against a neutral background (Slide 9 and below). His images underscore his aesthetic and almost ethnographic obsession with his subjects’ haircuts, clothes and jewels, but he also pictured them in such total isolation from their political and social environment that they were reduced to mere ethnic types.
Imperial conquests were not only military enterprises but also moral enterprises, obtaining justification from stories of tribal conflict. Missionaries used photography to rally the interest and support of their congregations back home, relying on photographs, postcards and lantern slides crafted to provoke a mixture of fascination and repulsion. In Ubangi-Shari (now the Central African Republic), for example, the French missionary Father Augouard used the camera to publicize his relentless proselytism. In one photograph from my collection, he shows a man standing with Western clothes close to a seated young adolescent described as being “his slave” (below). This composition clearly illustrates the social changes that were officially advocated at the time and that African societies attempted to resist.
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African rulers were the first to consider the camera as a valuable asset in controlling their portrayal and defending their dignity. One of the most compelling illustrations of this is to be found in portraits (below) made of Aouagbe Behanzin, king of Dahomey (now Benin). An opponent of colonization, he was defeated by the French Army in 1894 and condemned to exile. In the portraits of him that I managed to gather, you can see how he succeeded in retaining his nobility until his death, posing with elegant clothes and surrounded by a large entourage, as if his power had not been totally eliminated by the imperial enterprise.
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After having collected these photographs for almost 20 years, and published both academic articles and a first book on African migrations, I can trace how stereotypes that were constructed in the imperial age continue to shape and distort contemporary Western views. While Europe is currently submerged in a tide of mounting xenophobia toward its black citizens, the issue of representation has once again become crucial, almost vital.
As for my West African friends whose stories so moved me in Tokyo, I have no news of them. I tried to find them but came up empty-handed. I learned that in the late 1990s they were expelled from Japan.
A former Fulbright fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Jean-Philippe Dedieu is a research fellow at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Specializing in African diasporas, he teaches at Boston University and Sciences Po Paris. He recently published a book, “La Parole Immigrée: Les Migrants Africains dans l’Espace Public en France, 1960-1995” (Paris, Klincksieck/Les Belles Lettres, 2012). He lives in Paris.
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