Photographies in Africa in the digital age

Abstract

In recent years, all kinds of African photographies, both on the continent and in the diaspora, have undergone a digital ‘revolution’ (Ekine and Manji 2012). Without doubt, the key driver of this trend has been the rapid, and massive, influx to practically all African countries of ever more affordable third generation/advanced mobile phone handsets, or smartphones. Even compared with earlier technological revolutions on the continent, both the speed and the scale of this spread have been simply breathtaking. For example, the establishment of transistor radio sets – the process through which personal radios became ubiquitous across Africa – occurred over the period of at least a decade and a half (between roughly the late 1950s and the early 1970s). Similarly, the original mobile phone revolution – i.e. the process through which early generation/low functionality mobile phones went from being a source of novelty, to a domain for experimentation, to technologies that were routinized in everyday life, throughout the continent – took more than a decade to unfold (the crucial years being those between roughly 1999 and 2010) (Vokes 2018b). Against both of those earlier processes, the emergence of smartphones occurred over a much shorter timeframe. Between 2011 and mid-2015 alone, the number of smartphones being imported into Africa – the majority of them sub-US$100 Android-based systems – jumped from around 10 million units per annum to almost 100 million (Tshabalala 2015), as a result of which these devices became quickly established as a common feature of everyday life. Today, more than one-third of all mobile phones in Africa are smartphones, and this percentage is set to rise to two-thirds by 2020 (GSMA Intelligence 2017).

Digital fashionistas: young women, wealth-in-followers and matronage in Yaoundé, Cameroon

“…He used her phone as a camera, and during the session Stella walked as if she were a star on an imagined red carpet, displaying her ‘unique’ style and striking a variety of poses, as do celebrities displaying their dresses at mediatized, camera-dense events. She placed her legs and hands to accentuate the contours of her dress – poses that hark back to black-and-white photography and remain popular in studio photography today (Vokes 2019). Throughout the following week, Stella reworked and edited the images in between her household chores, during taxi rides to the market to help her aunt, and late at night.…”

Picturing Women: Identity, Power, and Photographies in Urban Nigeria

“…Increasingly, the relevance of the ethnographic context and that Photographies Other Histories (Pinney and Peterson, 2003) really do matter, is encouragingly reflected in the growth of academic peer-reviewed journal articles and books that focus on the archives, ethnography and history of photography in Africa (Haney, 2010;Peffer and Cameron, 2013;Geary, 2003;Morton and Newbury, 2015;Vokes, 2019). In this article, I hope to make a contribution in this vein as I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Nigeria (2017-2018) part of a larger multi-country project funded by the European Research Council titled 'PHOTODEMOS: Citizens of photography: the camera and the political imagination' 1 .…”

Mobile people, phones and photography: Somali visual practices in Nairobi's Eastleigh estate

“…Yet, as in all other parts of the world, photographic practice in East Africa has been revolutionized by the mobile phone. As Vokes (2019) shows, there has been a phenomenal amount of literature on mobile phones and their impact on various aspects of life in Africa, from managing finances (Morawczynski 2009) to managing sociality and intimacy (Archambault 2016). But the coming of the mobile (many cheap models of which are available throughout Africa courtesy of China) has also meant the ‘democratization’ of photography through the camera phone.…”