Visual Archives and the Affectivity of Photography: The Self-Portraiture of Dakar based Photographer Omar Victor Diop

Abstract

Photographs are not only a form of visual culture, they are also objects of material culture that elicit emotional and visceral responses from those who produce and possess them. Consider the performative self portraiture of photographer, Omar Victor Diop. Diop re-casts baroque era oil portrait paintings of Africans in Europe in a digital format to express his ambivalence about African migration. The contexts that shape Diop's work include his professional formation in advertising and corporate communications and that he is based in Senegal, a country whose economy is dependent on overseas migration. Thus I ask, is fine art like advertising and in Diop's view, how does the latter relate to migration? Diop's work draws on techniques of affect in advertising while at the same time embedding a critique of the power of affect in a consumer driven social world. In his work, the worlds of advertising and portrait photography appear as not so distant. Both present life not as it is, but as one imagines it to be. In focusing on the affectivity of photography, my work compliments recent interventions in the field of visual anthropology that have considered peoples' expressive, oral, and haptic relation to photographs past and present. This paper is drawn from my book project, Portrait Photography in Senegal, which considers the early global history of photography in Senegal, mid century studio photography, and work by recent artists that responds to the visual archive of images of and by Africans. My work engages larger issues in the humanities; to read ethnographic work is to develop empathy, to learn from the past, and to understand how meaning is created.