The poor condition of a collection of colonial photographs currently housed in the National Archives of The Gambia is the subject of a variety of competing discourses and practices concerning the preservation of colonial visual culture. At issue is the question of who has the right to look after the artifacts of material culture as they inevitably expire. I suggest that the discourse surrounding decaying colonial photographs is a lover's discourse. The decay causes controversy because it reminds us of our feelings for, and intimacy with, colonial culture and asks that we imagine ways of finally letting go.

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In photo-elicitation studies of colonial imagery, photographs are seen as repositories of historical data. This article examines the author’s experience of photo-elicitation in the postcolonial context of The Gambia, West Africa. Here, Gambian viewers responded to the aesthetic and compositional details of colonial photographs rather than their historical content. This attention to the surface of the photograph and its aesthetic qualities suggests a disconnection or distraction from the colonial history depicted in the images. This photo-elicitation does not engage or resolve a historical relationship with the colonial past. Rather, it reveals an engagement with elements of the photograph in which the visual legacies of colonialism—identification, representation, memorialization—remain absent. The absence of acknowledged connections to the past calls into question the ability of the photograph to represent the colonial past or its subjects to the viewer. In Gambian viewers’ preoccupation with aesthetic details, the photograph becomes a crafted object, rather than a link to colonial subordination. This calls into question the efficacy of photo-elicitation to demonstrate reactions to colonialism that move beyond Eurocentric frameworks.

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