Date of document publication: 2024-01-01
Digital Benin received over 900 photographs from institutions worldwide. These are currently under review by our working group 'Approaching Colonial Photographs with Care'. The group’s aim is to produce a guide for critical cataloguing and the creation of an ethical guidance resource for access to these photographs. It consists of experts in Benin City and the Diaspora, and is working with Dr. Temi Odumosu, who wrote the following initial outline of the reasoning and decision to form a group that will work in the upcoming project phase on accessibility formats for the photographs.
A text by Dr. Temi Odumosu (University of Washington, Information School)
The following text was commissioned by Digital Benin, to develop recommendations or initial ethical guidelines for handling and sharing colonial photographs on this platform. Specifically, photographs produced by British and other European colonial actors, that document the desecration and looting of 1897, the Benin Royal palace and community (including private shrines and altars), and the journey of the Bronzes out of Nigeria after looting. Digital Benin intends to gather these photographs from museum and library collections around the world, many of whom have already provided digital access in varying degrees. The critical questions posed were: Should we share this material on the platform alongside the Benin treasures? And if so, how can this be done in the most careful and sensitive way for all concerned? After considering the issues involved in re-presenting this difficult material in the context of restitution, this text shifted focus from a prescriptive set of guidelines, to instead providing an ethical pause at the threshold of action – meaning an opportunity to think out loud about what is at stake, and identify the ways in which colonial content sharing implicates all of us in a complicated form of historical redress. As a publicly available document, this text also opens the conversation to a larger global room of concerned critical friends.
There are two well-known aphorisms about photography that I heard a lot in my upbringing within the Yoruba immigrant community in Britain, and which are well used around the Afro-Diasporic world. One, is that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, and the second is that during the colonial period, when my parents grew up in Nigeria, it was believed that photography could “steal your soul”. Although the wider culture in the West tends to laugh off the idea of soul stealing as hearsay, listening to elders describe parental warnings about British behaviors in segregated Lagos, and express discomfort with images travelling beyond their control, their concerns make sense; and they contextualize historical citations recording African awareness that something unexplainable happens when you are duplicated through images. For example, writing in her travel journals with husband Louis Agassiz in 1865, about the process of taking ethnographic photographs to document the “racial” makeup of Rio de Janeiro, Elizabeth Agassiz (1869: 276-277) writes:
‘There is a prevalent superstition among the Indians and Negroes [read: Africans] that a portrait absorbs into itself something of the vitality of the sitter, and that any one is liable to die shortly after his picture is taken. This notion is so deeply rooted that it has been no easy matter to overcome it.’
The common narrative presented from the colonizer’s racializing perspective is one of naïve technophobia, but I advocate for a reframing. We need to elevate and take seriously African insights into the work that images do, and consider their refusals to being captured (taken, stolen, claimed, violated) by an external eye as an anti-colonial strategy. This is especially the case when we think about their refusals as a part of the broader framework of colonial knowledge production, and more acutely when we center them in our efforts to grapple with difficult images today.
It is true that photographic “pictures” are a layered form of storytelling, and convey much about location, time, and setting, what people wear, treasured and everyday objects, or human faces. They also communicate about social interactions and values. But as we are coming to viscerally understand in our performative age of Instagram everything, photographs also obscure information, hide things, and manipulate the viewer. Because of the straight lines and frames around their edges (physical and digital), they can make situations seem fixed and stable when they were much more complicated. In a colonial setting, who and what appears in the printed photograph, is only one aspect of the documented situation – a selected glimpse into a world being perceived by a particular mindset and roving mechanical eye. This means that whoever controls the photographic technology, determines the gaze and how things appear. In Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie’s poetic reflections on Native sovereignty in ethnographic photography, she also recalls protectiveness around image-taking in her Seminole, Muskogee, and Diné communities, that may have been framed as superstition or shyness, but which instead articulated nuanced perspectives on privacy. Tsinhnahjinnie (2003: 41) further explains:
‘Because of the preoccupation with survival, Native people became the subject rather than the observer. The subject of judgmental images as viewed by the foreigner—images worth a thousand words. As long as the words were in English.’
What appears in these “judgmental” colonial pictures also depends on the reasons for their making. For example, when photographs are taken as official recorded “evidence”, in contrast to when they assist in the recollection of personal memories. Furthermore, these pictures are communicating to particular audiences (some intended and others less easy to define) – such as family and loved ones, administrators, peer colleagues, an academic field, as well as the unknown but palpable future viewer. Thus, through power languages, colonial pictures do “speak” of the moment, but they also speak ahead. In this process of symbolic communication there are ethical tensions because we cannot fully be sure whether people intended for their images to last as long as they have done. Furthermore, we know little about terms of consent, how and under what conditions it was given by those represented, and when it was completely disregarded. Did the thousands of unnamed Africans and other subjects of the colonial gaze, want their images to travel beyond the community and be reproduced in perpetuity? What did those colonial photographers offer or promise in exchange for the capturing of likeness? Was there a rationale given for the image work being done? We cannot assume that there was not a negotiation, especially if we observe how quickly Nigerian photographers coopted the medium for their own representational means, such as the case of Benin court photographer Chief Solomon Osagie Alonge, who was producing images after the British invasion from the 1930’s (Staples et al. 2017).
Colonial image work is not straightforward and full of contradictions. If you look closely at those represented in the archive, there are moments when the subtle awareness that an appearance will travel (that the camera needs to be faced), produces what Teju Cole poignantly describes as “some contravention” - an infringement, a transgression - such as the one he identifies in an 1899 photograph of Oba Ademuyewo Fidipote. In this formal group portrait, the Ijebu king’s beaded crown has unusually been parted to reveal two-thirds his face, whilst surrounded by his court and accompanied by the British governor of Lagos, who takes the central position in the visual composition. Looking closely at the image, Cole (2021: 154) observes:
‘The dozens of men seated on the ground in front of him are visibly alarmed. Many have turned their bodies away from the oba, and several are positioned toward the camera, not in order to look at the camera but in order to avoid looking at the exposed radiance of their king.’
Cole’s example demonstrates that when we think we already know what a colonial photograph tells at first glance, we are taking short cuts. And it is the absence of information required to sensitize (and slow down) our engagements with these images that makes our current use of this material in a digital environment even more precarious. Like it or not, we are implicated in an ongoing and intrusive colonial power practice that claimed the right to know, to look, and to take, often without permission.
Digital Benin is now tasked with a challenging goal: to make available in one place a collection of photographic images that evidence British and other European colonial entanglements in Nigeria and show the painful desecration and extraction of the Benin royal treasures. This means that the photographs are contested and potentially distressing, in the sense that they represent (and enact) violence, theft, appropriation, racialization, dissemination and sale of cultural property, and exhibition in European and American museums. There are photographs documenting plundered sites and destroyed buildings, as well as colonial representatives posturing for the camera. There are also photographs of Benin chiefs, royal family, and community members, who are now considered ancestors in the Edo worldview. Shrines and other protected spaces, religious sacrifices, and human remains also feature in the photographs, and these should also be considered a major “contravention” to local laws and customs - in the most literal sense, these are images we are not meant to see. Additionally, there are photographs of the Benin bronzes dispersed in new museum contexts, in crowded cabinets, as well as in private homes. There are also illustrations (some hand drawn), which act similarly as documentary evidence but with a dose of creative license. And all are accompanied by descriptive practices (labels, notes, and inscriptions) that are presented as “neutral” technical language, but which also tell difficult stories.
Brought together in a unique digital setting, from collections around the world, this colonial photography resource would be an important evidence-base for restitution, and therefore provide an opportunity for historical reckoning assisted by engagement with images. However, this is not the same kind of reckoning as the one involved in reconnecting with the Benin bronzes themselves. Particularly when communicating about human-to-human contact, the photographs are strange, awkward, precarious, complicated, disturbing, and depressing; with an atmosphere and material quality that is quite difficult to describe. On the one hand they seem familiar, in the sense that they replicate visual strategies used in other colonial settings. For example, they enact an indecent exposure of bodies with an ethnographic eye and reveal cultural practices that are hard to understand (or even believe) without proper context. But on the other hand, the photographs indicate something distinct, about how Edo people and culture were perceived by the British and other Europeans, which means that they also communicate into the complicated post-colonial present quite intently.
Some of the photographic material that Digital Benin wants to share is already available online through specific museum and library websites, as well as in aggregate digital repositories such as Europeana.eu. Some material is being specifically digitized for inclusion in Digital Benin. A cluster of images are widely used for communication purposes within the open commons by way of independent circulation on blogs, online journalism, and social media. Some of these independent images are credited back to collections, but the vast majority are not, indicating how they have been used as illustrative backdrops, rather than important documents in their own right. There are one or two familiar images seen regularly online that have been used to depict the 1897 looting, such as Reginald Granville’s photograph of British soldiers posing amidst a sea of bronze plaques in the royal compound. But gathered here on Digital Benin, it will be the first time that the full series of images from this period are seen together by the general viewing public – in one place, as contextual information, and en masse.
How can we be responsible stewards and witnesses of colonial histories? What does it take to do this contentious work in a digital environment? The first aspect, explored in the discussion above, is to address the violence involved in being a viewer or spectator of colonial photography in the present day. This means properly understanding the context, and how power was practiced in that setting. It also means paying attention to what is being communicated and transferred to us from the image, including their effects on our overall wellbeing. Concurrently we need to consider all the ways in which we are involved in, and reproduce, inequalities in the very act of looking back at these photographs, and by extension in the decisions we make in our showing, telling, and sharing. In this sense we must continue to ask: Who is being harmed here? And how am I/are we implicated? Some useful concepts by photography scholars thinking deeply about practices for ethical engagement, include:
Digital Benin is an intentionally curated collection space, and in gathering this photographic corpus together there is an opportunity for recontextualization. However, we must keep in mind that it is in the aftermath of multiple catastrophes and ongoing breaches in care. When Western cultural heritage institutions initially digitized Benin collections, there was no consultation process with the Benin community to determine how photographs representing ancestors, elders, and sacred sites would be shared or described. This reveals yet another layer of ethical issues about forms of digital recordkeeping, for example in metadata (titles, keywords, descriptions), file formatting, and accessibility guidelines.
In short, thinking through the layers of ethical considerations required to undo past harms places us in a stalemate with colonial power structures. We will need to accept that whatever we do, it is already too late.
The sensitive image sharing being proposed by Digital Benin is fraught with challenges, but the next steps most certainly require leadership and decision making about representation from the Benin royal palace, elders, and wider community. This is to mitigate historical oversights and assumptions made regarding the content of these images, and importantly to enable the community itself to approach these photographs in new ways for the purpose of cultural advocacy and healing.
The three main phases of ethical consideration, initially recommended are the following:
Keywords
Nigeria, Benin Kingdom, Edo, 1897, ancestors, sacred sites, photography, colonialism, racialization, ethics of care, representation, sensitive content, image moderation
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