Ambivalent : photography and visibility in African history / edited by Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Hayes, Patricia, editor.

Minkley, Gary, editor.

Series:

New African histories series.

New African histories

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Visual sociology--Africa.

Visual sociology.

Photography--Social aspects--Africa--History.

Photography.

Africa--Social conditions--History.

Africa.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 351 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2019.

Summary:

"Going beyond photography as an isolated medium to engage larger questions and interlocking forms of expression and historical analysis, Ambivalent gathers a new generation of scholars based on the continent to offer an expansive frame for thinking about questions of photography and visibility in Africa. The volume presents African relationships with photography-and with visibility more generally-in ways that engage and disrupt the easy categories and genres that have characterized the field to date. Authors pose new questions concerning the instability of the identity photograph in South Africa; ethnographic photographs as potential history; humanitarian discourse from the perspective of photographic survivors of atrocity photojournalism; the nuanced passage from studio to screen in postcolonial digital portraiture; and the burgeoning visual activism in West Africa. As the contributors show, photography is itself a historical subject: it involves arrangement, financing, posture, positioning, and other kinds of work that are otherwise invisible. By moving us outside the frame of the photograph itself, by refusing to accept the photograph as the last word, this book makes photography into an engaging and important subject of historical investigation. Ambivalent's contributors bring photography into conversation with orality, travel writing, ritual, psychoanalysis, and politics, with new approaches to questions of race, time, and postcolonial and decolonial histories"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction. Africa and the Ambivalence of seeing / Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley

Ambivalent Mediations: Photographic Desire, Anxiety, and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Changed Africa / Isabelle de Rezende

Empty Photographs: Ethnography and the Lacunae of African History / Patricia Hayes

Unstable Forms: Photography, Race, and the Identity Document in South Africa / Ingrid Masondo

The Pass Photograph and the Intimate Photographic Event in South Africa / Gary Minkley

Photographic Genres and Alternate Histories of Independence in Mozambique / Drew Thompson

Photography, Mass Violence, and Survivors: The Cassinga Massacre of 1978 / Vilho Shigwedha

Images of Ambivalence: Photography in the Making of Omhedi, Northern Namibia / Napandulwe Shiweda

The Profane and the Prophetic at a South African Beach / Phindi Mnyaka

Photographing Asọ Ebì: Of Surfacism and Digitality / Okechukwu Nwafor

Boko Haram Insurgency and a New Mode of War in Nigeria / Georgge Emekea Agbo

Mirrors and Waters: The Practice and the Visual in Beninese Mami Wata Cults / Jung Ran Forte

Coda / Patricia Hayes.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780821446881

0821446886

OCLC:

1138875659