REVIEW ESSAY: PICTURING BENIN: WHERE INSIDERS’ AND OUTSIDERS’ LENSES CONVERGE AND DIVERGE

WEST AFRICA REVIEW

ISSN: 1525-4488

Issue 10 (2007)

Simon Adetona Akindes

Van Gelder, A. (ed). (2005). Life & Afterlife in Benin. London, New York: Phaidon Press. Preface by Alex Van Gelder. 137 pp. Introduction by Thomas Seelig. Life and Afterlife in Bénin by Okwui Enwezor. Photographs by Benoît Adjovi, Jean Agbétagbo, Joseph Moïse Agbodjélou, Bouraima Akodji, Léon Ayékomi, Christophe Mahoukpé, Sébastien Méhinto aka Pigeon, Edouard Méhomé, Camille Tchawlassou. Maps. Biographies. Hardcover.

Penn, I. (2004). Photographs of Dahomey. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers. 80 pp. Introduction by Anne Wilkes Tucker. A Quest for Beauty in Dahomey text by Jacques Maquet. Notes from the writings of Melville J. and Frances S Herkovitz. Hardcover.

Rondeau, G. (2004). Voyages au Bénin. Gemenos, France: Editions de l’Arganier. No page numbers (approximately 206 pages) Preface by Florent Couao-Zotti. Introduction by Gérard Rondeau. Map. Biogaraphy of photographed people. Paper.

If the living takes the past upon themselves, if the past becomes an integral part of the process of people making their own history, then all photographs would reacquire a living context, they would continue to exist in time, instead of being arrested moments. It is just possible that photography is the prophecy of a human memory yet to be socially and politically achieved.
-- John Berger, About Looking p. 57.

Europeans imagined Africa and its peoples long before they started plying its coasts, and centuries before Nicéphore Niepce invented photography in 1816. The images of Africa were positive until the early Middle Ages, then they progressively became negative, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries at the height of European imperialism, although the 16th and 17th centuries saw a combination of positive and negative images (Nederveen, 1992). In the 20th century, the advent and popularity of television and mass media, including the Internet boom certainly have provided Africans with a few opportunities to project their own images, but denigrating and distorting images continue, unabated and unstoppable. Over time, the European image of the African has evolved from that of the savage brute, demon, close to nature and pagan to the simple-minded savage and eternal childish jester who never matures. S/he is incapable of governing her/himself, is genetically or culturally corrupt, ready to kill his or her own, promiscuous, and carries diseases.

Photographs and movies have been the visual foundation of the Atlantic slave trade; they have constructed racism and justified the inhumane treatment Africans have suffered in the “New World,” but also at home in the hands of ruthlessly savage colonizers such as King Leopold II of Belgium who enslaved and committed horrendous acts of barbarity against the Congolese. They have helped validate Biblical events such as the curse of Ham. They have served to rationalize Apartheid and have strengthened the conviction that inferior beings, heathens, pagans are unworthy of humanity, deserve neglecting, ignoring, and in extreme cases, exterminating, for the advent of a better human race, or deserve being “civilized” by all means necessary. This dehumanizing representation of Africa has continued into our times with photographs of raging civil wars, urban violence and poverty that have inundated Western media since about the 1983 Ethiopian famine.

Therefore, a book collection of photographs about any place in Africa awakens intriguing, contradicting and sometimes violent sentiments: what is being shown again? Being aware of such images, having grown up in Benin where I witnessed another form of humanity, and being an amateur photographer myself, I was intensely and feverishly curious to explore the three authors’ attempts to render Benin. How different are the photographs from one another and from traditional “ethnographic” images? In what political context were they produced? What was the relationship between the photographer and his or her subjects? Berger (1980, p. 58) reminds us that “the task of an alternative photography is to incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory.” A photo is an attempt to remember a scene in which one participated. It is a recording act of an event in which a tripartite relationship occurred between the subject/object, the photographer, and the viewer already present in the head of the photographer.

After reading and “viewing” the three books, I emerged with my own sense of ignorance of a place I thought I knew very well. I am now convinced that the traditional western gaze of the other, and specifically of Benin/Africa, has a stubborn longevity, can sometimes overlap or fuse with the local gaze, but is gradually changing. I rediscovered Benin, its myths and “realities,” but also a problematic place grappling with its colonial and post-independence wounds, and forging an extremely complex and fascinating identity. The photographs also heightened the internal contradictions in me.

Photographs of Dahomey (Benin since 1975)

First, the assemblage of photographs in Irving Penn Photographs of Dahomey is unsettling: five photographs of bare-breasted young girls dressed in local outfits, a photograph of two preteen bare-breasted Pila-Pila (an ethnic group) girls with “tribal makeup,” a picture of seven bare-chested children posing in a studio, two photographs of peoples fishing and being transported in their pirogues, an old Methuselah, and seventeen figures of Legba shrines. The book can be roughly divided in two parts, the people/nature section on the one hand, and the Legba shrines section on the other hand. Anthropologists Melville J. and Frances S. Herkovits—famous researchers and connoisseurs of Dahomean culture—and Jacques Maquet have written narratives to provide a context. The texts reveal the meaning behind the photographs; however, they do not explain the selection of poses, compositions and attitudes. They sometimes sound superimposed on the photographs. For instance, the Legba shrine narratives were written before the photographs were actually taken, which produces at times an unexpected sense of disconnection, rather than a rich context for informed interpretation. I had the strange feeling that because some photographs were strong representations of traditional clichés, the editor of the book was more concerned about softening that image than about explaining.

In spite of its caricatures and artificiality, Photographs of Dahomey remains a beautiful book, a witness to a time and its prevailing way of thinking and looking at Africa. Dahomey’s fresh emergence from direct French rule, the readership of Vogue, a glamour magazine, the little knowledge the well-known American photographer had of the place itself constitute important factors in the production of the photographs. What does a stranger/foreigner see? What does a stranger/foreigner record? The portraits, the people are made beautiful for the occasion and the landscape is captured in its most gorgeous appearance. Nevertheless, the most striking photographs are the Legba shrines (also on the cover). The Legba are deities, often placed at the entrance of houses, compounds or villages to protect against evil. They are represented with clay figurines on which palm oil, blood from animal offerings, corn flour as well as other foods and eggs are poured. That their number is high by comparison with other photographs is certainly reflective of what the photographer chose to see and to show, but it also responds to the expectations of an audience that had long been conditioned to seek Africa in exotic ways.

Irving Penn, the photographer, who was 88 at the time of the publication of the book in 2004, is reputed in the U.S.A. for fashion photography. He “constructed” these photographs in 1967 at the age of 51, at a time he actually knew little about Benin. He was encouraged by Vogue’s editor of the book to make a trip down to Dahomey to take photographs for Vogue, the fashion magazine. Penn Irving recounts that he had to seek the protection of local authorities to take some of the photographs. The shooting was staged in a makeshift studio. As he relates,

In a spirit of warm hospitality, the chief led us to the little island studio where we were to work. The young people of the village were lined up outside. I walked among them and chose those I wanted to photograph, roughly composing each picture in my mind as I went… I could feel each of them growing in stature as I worked with them. We had, of course, no language together, but I don’t remember the lack. (Irving, p. 11)

In this case, the camera and the one-way stage construction became the languages of communication. The result of this “expedition-exploration” is a series of striking anthropological photographs, aimed at entertaining Western viewers, probably by supplying them with what they already knew, but as beautifully exotic as possible, as Vogue is a mainstream magazine. Hence the photographs display a strict discipline in composition and attention to detail. The relationship between the photographed and the photographer is ephemeral and superficial, and lacks reciprocity and connection. Despite their young age, the subjects, are very serious, poised, and seem conscious of their future role as women (Irving, pp. 15, 17, 19). They do not smile as if they had been instructed no to do so, or it may be that they were overwhelmed by the camera, the white photographer and the whole experience.

Any of these photographs could easily reverberate colonial images of naked Africans in nature or Christian images of pagan practices. The terms “tribe” and “tribal” appear a few times, for instance in the expression “tribal makeup?” (Irving, p. 12). Makeup can be described, but labeling it “tribal” does not explain what it is, obliterates its aesthetic quality and removes the individual’s imagination from the process. Although “tribe” is often used to describe African societies, the term is improper and ethnic groups cannot be described as such. Photographs, whether taken or built, cannot be separated from the person behind the camera because he or she selects what to take depending on his or her audience and, very importantly, on the objective pursued. The photographs do not necessarily reflect Jacques Maquet’s comments and descriptions written in 1967 (joie de vivre, fulfillment, freedom). They are beautifully composed, especially the studio ones, but most of them correspond to a certain image of Africans: close to nature, with fetishes they worship, a very colonial and partial portrayal of the people. John Irving was “a reporter to the rest of the world” and not “a recorder for those involved in the events photographed.”

What is most illuminating in the book is not the photographs but the narratives, the stories by Jacques Maquet about Dahomey and the stories about Legba recounted by the Dahomeyans themselves. It is really a book that should be entitled “Narratives of Dahomey.” The text is the context, and, only to a certain extent, explains the visual. It is difficult not to see the stereotypical in the collection of photographs.

Life and Afterlife in Benin

The second book, Life and Afterlife in Benin, explores many different layers of the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer, the outsider and the insider in the politics of presentation/depiction and representation. The editor, Alex Van Gelder, collected and presented photographs that were taken in the late 1960s and early 1970s (almost at the same time as Dahomey photographs) by Beninese photographers about their own people, in urban settings. They are mostly portraits of rarely more than three people per photograph. Some are studio photographs whereas others were taken sur le vif. They represent a wider range of human activities, even though most focus on religion, both local and those brought over from Europe (Alex Van Gelder, 2005, pp. 66, 67, 75, 85, 112, 113, 115, 117), and are related to life and death rituals: religious ceremonies and funerals. The mix gives the reader a false or innocent impression that they are a random collection. However, can a collection that involves a conscious selection be random and neutral? The inclusion of photographs of criminals, robbers and muggers commissioned by the police surprises and unsettles the viewer/reader. Why and for what purposes were these particular photographs selected for inclusion? Is it simply to portray all dimensions of life? I personally happen to know one of criminals. If I were a thief, I would not like to be recorded in a photography book.

Salvaging and archiving photographs commissioned by individuals and (extended) families themselves about their own place and people command respect and is of prime necessity, especially in an environment where individuals are not used to carefully and actively preserving physical memories of past events. Beyond preservation, the motive that presided over the selection does not seem clear. What motivated the photographers themselves to take some of the photographs? The culture of photography in Benin is mostly commercial, even today. Given the price of materials, the individual photographer who possesses his or her own studio does not often take photographs for the sake of recording events. Rather, it is because someone will pay for it. Therefore the photographer simply executes what the subject wants, with a view of satisfying or inflating his or her ego. In the process, recording takes place and reveals an aspect of a phenomenon, a trait, an attitude or a glimpse of political or social consciousness. For instance, only two or three of the subjects in the book smile, and in situations in which one would expect a smile (religious celebrations, communion (pp. 24, 30, 39, 88), wedding (pp. 49, 105), love (p. 87), friendship (pp. 110, 121) one gets a frown. Whose choice was it to present the photographs to the world? The subjects? The photographers themselves? Or Alex Van Gelder? Is this similarity with Penn’s subjects enough to conclude that Dahomeyans do not like to smile or live and die without expressing their joy? In my personal lived experience, they do smile and they dance, even in situations of death. However, as Rondeau mentions at the beginning of the third book, “la dent rit, mais quant au secret interieur, il est different” [the tooth smiles, but the internal secret is different]. Or maybe, the effort was intended to counter the colonial cliché that Africans naively and abundantly smile, even when they should be angry, an image corresponding to that of the “bon sauvage.”

Another frequent appearance is adolescents and young adults, especially girls, wearing bras or/and underwear only (Alex Van Gelder, 2005, pp. 17, 31, 71, 87, 109, 110, 121). The photographs were mostly staged postures, in a studio or against an internal wall, indicating a degree of shared privacy or intimacy? Was this a common practice among photographers? What relationship existed between the girls and the photographers? The context is absent. Then why is it shown here? As a sign of times? Or to show what types of underwear was in fashion? That is the charm and the problem with photographs. John Berger (1980, p. 63) points out,

There is never a single approach to something remembered. . . . Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparable way; that is to say, they must mark and leave open diverse approaches. A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.

This “radial system” is the missing link in this book.

Contrary to Penn’s collection whose photographs were shot in the same period (late 1960s and early 1970s) and committed, tangible traces of colonial presence appear in this collection, and in some cases, in a very problematic manner. For instance, the presence of a white couple is unexpected, especially in the man’s appearance as a masked blackface minstrel. In the United States, minstrel shows, as popular forms of art, were actually intended to denigrate runaway blacks after the abolition of slavery. They were an exercise against Emancipation and they allowed white people to ridicule blacks with wide white lips on a blackened face, especially in “sundown towns” across the United States (Loewen, p. 303). That this is replicated in Africa is not surprising. The white couple is even wearing African-style outfits, in a customization exercise. The photograph, essentially racist in nature as the woman is wearing a mask that depicts a non-European with raffia and a typical non-European nose, is a testimony of the transcontinental sport of denigrating the Other. Was the portrayal deliberate or accidental? The collector may simply be showing the state of mind at the time. The photographer may have been ignorant of the historical context of blackfaced minstrels, but he recorded the event. The couple can hardly be acquitted: they are replicating racist attitudes still prevalent in those times.

Other images indicative of colonial times provide a powerful interpretative discourse: the gendarme properly dressed in his official attire, a symbol of power, (Alex Van Gelder, 2005, p. 36-37) and another one (Alex Van Gelder, 2005, pp. 52-53) wearing tight khaki shorts and shirt and torn stockings, the same black shoes without laces, a different hat and caught halfway posing. The latter’s lack of confidence and rags demonstrate the gap between those who are and those who want to be, a permanent psychological tension of colonial life.

The two girls lying down side by side on the studio’s floor, bare-breasted and holding flowers represent another intriguing picture (Alex Van Gelder, 2005, pp. 120-121). They are both wearing a Christian cross. Are these photographs the beginning of a cultural revolution meant to liberate women or the tentative beginning of pornography, or simply a post-modern composition? Here again, the context will have been a powerful explanation.

Also intriguing is the wedding picture of a pre-teenage couple on page 105 (Alex Van Gelder, 2005). The girl, about nine or ten years old, is wearing a local style fashionable attire and a veil with beads, and the boy, maybe a couple of years older is wearing a suit, a tie and girls’ shoes. They do not belong to the higher echelons of the society, but the question of what they symbolize remains unresolved. We tend to see with our emotions or our knowledge, rather than with our eyes. One can speculate profusely because they are isolated in a studio.

More symbols of modernization appear in Life and Afterlife in Benin. Behaviors and practices such as Christian ceremonies mark this collection. The “inevitable” naked breast, an anti-Christian and anti-puritanical symbol of debauchery, is present also (Alex Van Gelder, 2005, p. 121). The question is why the photographs, for the girls or for the photographer? Photographs of girls wearing underwear and bras (Alex Van Gelder, 2005, p. 110) underwear, a tee-shirt and a wig (Alex Van Gelder, 2005, p. 71) reflect both a truncated and awkward modernity and a notion of aesthetics that is being redefined and is in mutation.

In Life and Afterlife in Benin, the connection between the photographer and the subject is certainly stronger, but it is not devoid of prejudices and misconceptions historically defined by colonization and the visual trauma that black peoples were and are still subjected to today. As a result, their views of themselves are distorted or adhere to colonial visual clichés. Frantz Fanon’s documentation of this process of “voluntary” alienation in Black Skin, White Masks, as well as Albert Memmi’s description of the colonized in The Colonizer and the Colonized are still valid theoretical frameworks in grasping the psychological impact of colonialism, and the relationship between industrialized and non-industrialized nations.

Life and Afterlife in Benin’s collection is complex. The connection between the photographer and the photographed, the sharing of cultural spaces, the reciprocal nature of the depiction —even though no subject is called by their name as in Rondeau’s book— the composition and the capture of the images give the viewer/observer a renewed and practical sense of ownership. The book starts depicting the complexity and richness of life with a glimpse of history and power conveyed by portraits, postures, clothing, activities, and the relationship between the subjects and the photographers. The photographs have plenty of afterlife, but little of the exuberance of life and “joie de vivre” that characterize Benin. Life and Afterlife in Benin demonstrates that both insiders and outsiders must make a cathartic and traumatic effort to free themselves from the weight of history.

Voyages au Bénin

Voyages au Bénin introduces a different and refreshing approach to picturing the Other. The temporal gap between the photographs in this book and the other two is thirty to thirty-five years. Presented like a photo album with no page numbers and handwritten as well as typed captions, with sometimes as many as eight photographs on a single page, the collection is a record of the author’s trip across the country and his silent or live encounters with people, places and events. The project was sponsored by the French Cultural Center in Benin as well as the French Embassy and other local banks and businesses. The photographer is French. None of these photographs were taken or built in a studio. The context is already different from those of Vogue magazine and Life and Afterlife where the context for taking the picture is not explained.

A little more than half of the book (no page numbers) is a random collection of sepia photographs capturing universal aspects of everyday life, buildings, religious ceremonies, leisure, commercial, and economic activities, and transportation, but also the unusual, the unexpected and the exotic.

The other half comprises photographs of artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers the photographer had met during his travels, and who have told him their stories and understanding of Bénin, their Bénin. It is unfortunate that the artists’ musings and ruminations about their own countries did not appear in the book which is also a tribute to them. Instead, the photographer has included his own handwritten notes as a form of caption, and each picture is framed as if it is an old sepia filmstrip. Their presence confers to the book a warmer feel, and creates an unbreakable connection between the collection, the country (even the official and private buildings), the homes and the photographer. The reader feels it immediately, especially if s/he visited Bénin in the past decade or so. Some of these artists appear in their shops (like Cyprien Tokoudagba among his sculpted pieces) in a concert, on stage, in their homes or in action somewhere else.

This book is more the work of someone who has had an intense stay in Bénin, who did not need protection from authorities to take photographs, and who certainly did not need to pay people to pose. In his photographs the subjects were the least aware that they were being seen, which conferred to their appearance a greater sense of natural authenticity and normalcy. He was recording their acts and gestures, not for the camera, not primarily for an audience of outsiders, but probably for the people themselves. Voyages au Bénin signals new developments in the way Africa is portrayed, a departure from anthropological pictures, a more authentic, genuine way of looking, seeing, and ultimately connecting with people, searching for the universal rather than the peculiar and the exotic.

These are times when new images on the Internet and on television, recycle and reform old representations of Otherness. At a time when the Arab, the Native and the Black are still camped in images of savagery, lack of civilization, closeness to nature (in many European countries spectators sing monkey-chant or throw banana peels at black soccer players when black players receive the ball), it is suitable to ask oneself where these three books fit. They are certainly far from traditional colonial images but do they defeat or negate them? The authors avoid open political statements. They are professionals who, as professed in their introductions, concern themselves with beauty (Irving) and communicating pride and dignity than with the political implication of their art. Nevertheless, Voyages au Bénin cultivates an approach radically different from that of the other two books. David Levi Strauss (2003, p. 8) asserts that

when one, anyone, tries to represent someone else, to ‘take their picture’ or ‘tell their story,’ they run headlong into a minefield of real political problems. The first question is: what right have I to represent you? Every photograph of this kind must be a negotiation, a complex act of communication. As with all such acts, the likelihood of such success is extremely remote, but does that mean it shouldn’t be attempted? A documentary practice that tries to avoid the difficulties of such communication is not worthy of the name.

To a certain extent, it was attempted in these books. All the three authors have taken the risk of portraying Benin and her people. Alex Van Gelder did not take the photographs, but out of what he collected, he selected the ones he wanted us to see about Benin. The three books, especially when considered together, give a better idea of what the people are like and how they live, even though the photographs do not, by themselves, provide a historical understanding of the country. They are fixated moments. Each one, read/viewed individually may provide a partial understanding, but surely a limited one, especially for uncritical and unquestioning viewers/readers.

These books do display photographs taken in Benin, by Beninese photographers as well as a French and an American photographer. What is the difference? What makes the Beninese gaze different from the American or the French? Given the history of colonization with its ideological corollary of total superiority, it is inconceivable that the photographs and their selection could have taken place entirely outside the colonized/colonizer’s framework. That is precisely why the colonized gaze rejoins the colonizer’s gaze. Fortunately Life and Afterlife in Benin and Photographs of Dahomey do not belong in the same category. Nevertheless, all subjects in Life and Afterlife in Benin do not smile, which is not a genuine portrayal of people in Benin. The selection in Life and Afterlife in Benin is sometimes problematic. Was it as if Alex was taking the photographs himself?

What and whose memory do these photographs appeal to? What previous knowledge do they refer to? It makes a lot of sense for the photographer if he is an insider who may have been an active participant in the event. It certainly makes less sense to the stranger or intruder (the photographer and the camera itself) who, because of the distance or the indifference between him and the event, was physically present but actually absent because of his ignorance of the milieu, and/or his voluntary to focus exclusively on the artistic dimension of the pictures. What sense does a photo make for readers/viewers who were not at the scene, do not know anything about the context, the history and have no emotional connection with what they see? What sense does it make to readers/viewers who, precisely because they are so disconnected, can provide a different perspective of what is recorded, for the benefit of subjects who, do not see or complacently refuse to see what outsiders have recorded? Photographic recording is good and useful, especially for the people directly implicated in the event. Nevertheless, it is laden with risks, the risks of not being understood, or the risks that the record is manipulated, re-interpreted, abused by the photographer himself or herself or the viewer/user.

References

Berger, J. (1980). About looking. New York : Pantheon Books.

Berger, J. (1980). Ways of seeing. New York: The Viking Press.

Loewen, J. (2005). Sundown towns: A hidden dimension of American racism. New York: The New Press.

Memmi, A. (1965). Translated by Howard Greenfeld. The colonizer and the colonized. New York: Orion Press

Fanon, F. (1967).Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press.

Levi Strauss, L. (2003). Between the eyes: Essays on photography and politics. New York: Aperture.

Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (1992). White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven, London: Yale University Press.

Citation Format:

Simon Adetona Akindes. “‘Review Essay: Picturing Benin: Where Insiders’ and Outsiders’ Lenses Converge and Diverge” West Africa Review: Issue 10, 2007.