Rebele Events

2005-2006 Events

Portrait Photography in African Worlds: a symposium

Conference on Portrait Photography in African Worlds:  A Brief Prospectus

This conference brings together diverse scholars in African studies, who work from a range of distinctively different perspectives, to provide views of important issues that arise in the study of portrait photography.  By “portrait photography,” we mean not only discrete images of individuals, but also the wider range of circumstances leading to their production and the social lives or greater cultural contexts of such images. 

We hope that this conference (and the volume that will result from it) will be a contribution not only to African studies, but also to the broad field of history of photography.  Comprehensive histories of photography conventionally have been dominated by European and North American materials, and they ordinarily have been driven by theoretical constructs rooted in that cultural matrix.  Such works rarely take into serious, nuanced account the possibility that persons within drastically different cultural settings might live within entirely different fields of visual experience.  If these works of scholarship consider photographic practices beyond the Euro-American spheres, most commonly those practices are perceived as pallid or exotic extensions of (Western) modernity.  Through the scholarship of this conference, which builds on significant foundational work, we would like to make available a distinctive alternative to such views.

As a starting point in considering the issues at hand, we have posed a series of apparently simple questions.  In raising these questions, we recognize that there is no finite social entity called “Africa,” but rather many historically situated cultures and social conditions.  Thus, when we say “Africa” below, what we actually mean is the set of specific conditions relevant to each research study.  Further, while these questions place focus on issues of “indigenous,” some of the photographic practices cannot be divorced from colonial experience, since photographic materials and techniques were first introduced and subsequently associated with colonial powers (and in some instances were employed as a technology of control).  While in many cases the colonial connection may never be far distant, issues of “indigenous” expression remain significant.

• What might be considered “indigenous” or particular to African portrait photography?  (The field of examination includes not only photographs made by indigenous photographers, but also photographs made by colonials, assuming that the photographic subject at times might assert his or her agency in the posing process.)

• In what ways have there been reconfigurations of older traditions through this new technological medium?  This would include not only the visual content of images (such as poses), but also the social functions of images as objects, including deployment of these images in tandem with oral performance.

• What new configurations have been created within these cultural contexts?

• Turning the basic question upside down, what might be considered “non-indigenous” (that is, a foreign import), and where might there be resistance, neutrality, or enthusiastic acceptance to such elements?

The conference is co-organized by two colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz: Raoul Birnbaum, a specialist in Buddhist studies with focus on China, and Elisabeth Cameron, whose work has concentrated on central Africa.  Beyond their shared interest in these materials and the issues that they provoke, the impetus for this conference stems in part from questions raised by an outsider’s experience, Birnbaum’s engagement with two intersecting realms of photography in China.  In preparing a biographical study of the Buddhist monk Hongyi (1880-1942), he has been working with a large number of historical photographs, including a series of portraits that span Hongyi’s life from age three to his deathbed.  And in his on-going fieldwork within Buddhist monastic communities on the China mainland, he has been struck by the intricate use of photographs as a kind of social and religious currency.  While the photos in question often have documentary value, many significant currents come to visibility through these images and their social lives.  Importantly, some visual elements are directly derived from earlier traditions of representation, and some key functions appear to be continuations of very old modes of activity, here transmuted or transformed through use of a new technology.  Other functions are entirely new.  For example, in a built environment without mirrors (as is generally the case within living quarters of Chinese Buddhist monasteries), what does it mean to possess photos of oneself that might be gazed upon repeatedly?

While study of photography in China is just at the starting gate, African photography has been the subject of numerous monographic studies and analytical essays in exhibition catalogs, including several recent dissertations.  While these works have opened up the field, rich challenges posed by this material remain to be explored.  The purpose of this conference, then, is to bring together leading scholars of these materials and practices, with other Africanists who have an interest in the visual, to consider together key issues about portrait images. 

Conference Participants

Friday, February 3rd

Elisabeth Cameron, UCSC

    Welcome

Liam Buckley, James Madison University

    “Portrait Photography in a Postcolonial Age: How Beauty Tells the Truth”

John Peffer, UCSC

    “Whose Portrait? Image and Authorship in Zwelethu Mthethwa's Cape Town

    Interiors”

Candace Keller, Indiana University

    “’Visual Griots’: Identity, Invention and Style, One Aspect of the Social Role of

    Portrait Photographers in Mali”

Tobias Wendl, Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth

    “Photographic Portraiture in Ghana”

Z. S. Strother, UCLA

    Discussant

Saturday, February 4th

Raoul Birnbaum, UCSC

    Welcome

Susan Vogel, Columbia University

    Two Papers and a Film: “Malick Sidibe: Portrait of the Artist as a Portraitist”

Rowland Abiodun, Amherst College

    “Ako-graphy: Owo Portraits”

Christraud Geary, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

   “The Past in the Present: Photographic Portraiture and the Inscription of    

    Histories in the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon”

Heike Behrend, Institute of African Studies, University of Cologne

    “’To Make Strange Things Possible’: Portraits as Photomontages of the    

    Bakor Photo Studio in Lamu, Kenya”

Susan Vogel, Columbia University

    Discussant

2004-2005 Events

Student Activity: Bus trip to Bay area museums: The Mexican Museum, San Francisco; Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA), San Jose; Galería de la Raza, San Francisco

2003-2004 Events

West African Architecture: Pillars and Posts
Public lecture by Dr. LaBelle Prussin, a respected scholar of Islamic art in Africa.

Photography, Portraits, And Memoirs In 20th C. China, A Workshop
Speakers: Richard Vinograd - Stanford, Art History; Mary Scott - SFSU, Humanities/Literature; William Schaefer - UC Berkeley, East Asian Languages & Cultures; Emily Honig - UCSC, Women's Studies and History; Raoul Birnbaum - UCSC, History of Art & Visual Culture.  Program: “Photography, Shadows, and Shanghai’s Projected Past” - “The Commercial Press and the Creation of the Modern Chinese Intelligentsia” - “Self-Projections and Self-Reflections in a Chinese Buddhist World” - “Mediating Mao: Portraits and Power in 20th century China” - “Fractured Photos: The Cultural Revolution Remembered”

Chinese Writing on Paper, Silk, and Mountain Cliffs
Public Lecture entitled “Dragons Leaping at the Gate of Heaven: Form and Meaning in Chinese Calligraphy.  Speaker: Robert E. Harrist, Jr., the Jane & Leopold Swergold Professor of Chinese Art at Columbia University.

Bill Porter, author Red Pine
Bill Porter, a pre-eminent translator of Chinese Buddhist poetry under the pen name Red Pine, met with students and faculty over a two-day period.  He led seminar conversations on activities at Buddhist mountain sites, in relation to his book Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits and his translation of The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, and he gave a public lecture on issues of cultural and literary translation, most especially in relation to his translations of a sequence of poems by the famous Ming period Buddhist master Hanshan Deqing.

Student Activity:  Bus trip to Bay Area museums.

2002-2003 Events

Student Activity: Field trip to The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. Students of Art History classes toured the African galleries and had a discussion with the Africa, Oceania and Americas' curator (AOA) on museums and AOA collections.

2001-2002 Events

Guest Lecturer in Jennifer González’ class, Museum Cultures: The Politics of Display. Mieke Bal, Professor of Theory of Literature, University of Amsterdam presented:  "Presenting Art."

Student Activity: Bus trip to San Francisco museums, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Legion of Honor, and the Galerìa de la Raza.

2000-2001 Events

In collaboration with the MAH in Santa Cruz presented: "Museum, Community, World" Panel discussion with Michael Brenson, Critic and Bard College, Museum Studies "Art, Corporate Populism and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum"; Kate Warren Haynes, Collections Manager, Kingston Lacy, UK "In Trust for the Nation: Kingston Lacy"; Partha Miter, Sussex University, Art History "Colonialism and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London"

1999-2000 Events

In collaboration with MAH in Santa Cruz presented: "Inspiration of the Mission Period in California Landscape Architecture and Design." A seminar was held "Personal Edens: The Gardens and Film Sets of Florence Yoch" with Dr. Angela Blake (Huntington Library, Pasadena, CA), Assistant Professor Louise Mozingo (UC Berkeley) and Moira Kenny (Research Director, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, UC Berkeley).

1998-1999 Events

In collaboration with the MAH in Santa Cruz presented: "When Borders Migrate"
Reflections on the 150th Anniversary of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Panel: Enrique Chagoya, Artist, Rebecca Solnit, Curator, Amalia Mesa-Baines, Artist/Critic.

Symposium & Investiture of the first Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History, Catherine M. Soussloff.  Introduction was given by Dean Edward F. Houghton.  Investiture was given by Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood.  Speaker presentations: Harry Berger, Jr. (Emeritus Professor English Literature and Art History, UCSC), “Deposing the Subject of Self-Portraiture: Painter, Sitter and Patron in Rembrandt’s Silly Cavalier; ” Claire J. Farago (Associate Professor of Art History, University of Colorado at Boulder), “The Pleasure of the Image;” Donald Preziosi (Professor of Art History, UCLA and Director, UCLA Museum Studies Program), “No Art, No History;” Jacquelynn Baas (Director, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive), “The Space of Art.”

1997-1998 Event