Negatives of Independence: (Dis)locating Freedom in the Photographic Portrait

Jennifer Bajorek
Rhetoric Department

This paper sets out from a reading of the work of well-known studio portraitist Seydou Keïta (active Bamako, French Sudan/Mali, 1948-1962) and devotes specific attention to the claims that have been made for Keïta’s photographic portraits as documenting the coming of independence to West Africa. Through close readings of several of Keïta’s photographs as well as through key critical and theoretical texts, I explore the connections posited, in these interpretations, between self-fashioning or self-determination in front of the camera and the expression of a desire for political self-determination, paying particular attention to claims that have been made, in connection with these photographs, for their depiction of the desire for freedom. What might it mean to conceive of freedom as visible or legible on the human person or face? The paper is drawn from a larger comparative study of the photographic portrait focused on the relationships between photography, national identity, and democracy entitled Negatives of Independence: Locating Freedom in the Photographic Portrait. I devote specific attention to the West African scene, beginning with the pre-independence studio tradition and extending into the present, where this tradition has both informed, and been transformed by, contemporary art practice and by documentary and photojournalism. My interest in the portrait stems from its double status as an image-making and a political technology, yoking aesthetic and ethico-political principles and structures of representation. West Africa is a key site for thinking this relationship both because of the extraordinary richness of its studio tradition and because the portrait’s close connections to notions of national and class identity, social mobility, and political representation are here mediated, I argue, by photography.