Film, Charcoal, Time: Contemporaneities in Gold Coast Photographs

Abstract

As photography was taken up in the entrepôts of nineteenth-century west Africa, among them Cape Coast and Accra, it became a primary mode of portraiture. When considered alongside colonial-era holdings in European and US archives, historical photograph collections in families in Ghana suggest that photography's emergence cannot be separated from a range of other emerging and far-reaching creative modernisms. These portraits entail aspects of ceremonial debut spectacles, political ascendancy rites, and the visuality of decorum in larger public performances. From the medium's inception, photographs have been held and kept as enduring objects; at the same time, they are the layered products of multiple formal, aesthetic, temporal and conceptual interventions in a range of media, only some of which are the work of a camera.