Postcolonial Modernism and the Camera Eye: Eliot Elisofon's Photographs of African Art

Abstract

Postcolonial Modernism and the Camera Eye:Eliot Elisofon's Photographs of African Art Emily Hyde (bio) 1959: The Atlantic magazine devotes its April issue to "Africa South of the Sahara." Articles on the politics of decolonization frame a large number of contributions on art and culture. A short story by Chinua Achebe appears alongside the work of Nadine Gordimer, Tom Mboya, Léon Damas, Léopold Sédar-Senghor, Amos Tutuola, and David Diop. "The Sacrificial Egg" is Achebe's first story published in the United States, and its timing supports the US release of his novel Things Fall Apart. Unlike that classic novel, the story begins in a recognizably modern Nigeria, with a young clerk named Julius Obi sitting alone in a colonial shipping office, gazing at his typewriter. But The Atlantic upstages this narrative by suspending a dark ovoid shape with curling horns above the title and author information, its square eye sockets emptying out onto a yellow block of color on the page behind it (fig. 1). It is a photograph of an Ogoni mask, and it is credited to Eliot Elisofon's 1958 book The Sculpture of Africa.1 In fact, photographs from Elisofon's book hang above all the fiction and poetry published in this issue of The Atlantic. This photograph does not, it almost goes without saying, illustrate Achebe's story, in which no mask explicitly appears, or the ethnic background of the author, which is Igbo. The connection appears to be purely visual: the mask is egg-shaped. Elisofon's photographs of African art appeared on the pages of American magazines throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, and as these photographs circulated in the mass media they illustrated two different histories. First, they were intended to enhance American understanding of the African continent, its [End Page 607] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Chinua Achebe, "The Sacrificial Egg," The Atlantic 203, no. 4 (1959): 61. From The Atlantic. © 1959 The Atlantic Monthly Group, LLC. All rights reserved. Used under license. history, and its peoples during the era of decolonization. But because Elisofon also reanimated early-twentieth-century ideas of modernist primitivism, his photographs simultaneously illustrated modernism's midcentury institutionalization in the United States. Understanding Elisofon's photographs in this period thus requires historicizing them on the news-driven pages of LIFE, The Atlantic, and THINK (IBM's in-house magazine). As Serge Guilbaut has memorably put it, New York stole the idea of modern art from Paris in this period, and Eliosofon's photographs of African art were part of this appropriation: against the backdrop of African decolonization, they reenacted modernist primitivism for American consumption in the mass media.2 As a result, though they appear to be very much of their midcentury time period, Elisofon's photographs [End Page 608] in fact counteract the progressive temporality underlying American reporting on the emergence of new, independent nations in Africa and their relation to the ascendant global power of the United States. On the whole, then, this article is about tangled temporalities: there are multiple pasts in the midcentury present of Elisofon's photographs; there is an inexorable sense of progress alongside clear evidence of stasis; there is repetition to the point of anachronism; yet there is very little of that form of temporality we call the future. For example, the photograph of the Ogoni mask that illustrated Achebe's story in The Atlantic was doubly anachronistic. Denying contemporaneity to Julius Obi and his typewriter, this primitivizing illustration is a throwback to a premodern African past, but only by way of early twentieth-century European modernism.3 Elisofon hits the double beat of this retrogressive temporality in his lengthy illustrated essay, "African Sculpture," which immediately precedes Achebe's story. There he argues that only wan imitations of traditional African art forms were currently being made, in 1959, mostly for tourists.4 But he also argues that traditional African art is only recognizable as Art because of its discovery by early twentieth-century modernist painters in Paris. Modernist primitivism relies on an origin story set in 1907, when Picasso encountered African masks at the Trocadéro Ethnography Museum in Paris, then renounced...