The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast

Abstract

Studio portrait photographs were wildly popular in coastal eastern Africa already by the 1860s or 1870s. While this early engagement with photography very much attests to Africa’s global interconnectivity, it does not explain why it was so immediately desirable to locals, particularly since there existed no previous tradition of picture making. It emerges that, especially before the British colonial period, photographs were primarily associated with mercantile wealth, collected and displayed as exotica in one’s home. Here, photographs often communicated in ways that had to do with their ability to act as exotic things, laden with textures and surface minutiae.