Bringing art up to date: Photographic modernities in time

Erin Haney
National Museum of African Art,
Smithsonian Institution

Photography is the first of the modern arts that circled the globe. In west African urban centers, it was early photographers more than any other kind of artist who fashioned and transplanted new ideas about pictorial imagery within the Atlantic/west African visual sphere. In establishing new portraiture conventions, creating images that framed landscape and cities, political events and things esoteric, photographers transformed public notions of self-presentation, and with this, ideas about recording, depiction, and the nature of images that move across space and time. Some photographers did this while traversing emerging ethnic and national boundaries, and the extent and effect of this pan-west African visual corpus has yet to be reckoned with. Photography’s constraints have been acknowledged: daguerreotypes’ singularity, souvenir images circuits, and the loss of archives have all shaped the role of personal and public imagery in crucial ways, and have in some cases spurred on photography’s melding with other creative media such as painting, printmaking, sculpture, textiles, and etc. At the same time, the essentially modern photographic visual language has been developed and adjusted by local publics, who adjust them in a number of ways to fine-tune or even transform the formal and conceptual terms of representation.

Idea of the photography’s usefulness as mass repro: dags, printing, souvenir images and their tracks
The tracks of itinerant photographers and their connections in entrepots
The establishment of Ideas of portraiture conventions—by photographers? already in place in entrepots?
Photography as tool of realism and purveyor of ideas across distances-anamaboe. This was just at time when photographers would have started to circulate souvenir images?
Adjustment by many- Audience and photographer
“Idealogies of formal and conceptual representation”:
Photography and artistic modernisms?
Idea of renewal and photographic impermanence.

Portraiture, landscape, houses, beauty images, exile portraits

Conceiving the photographic act activity