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This Spring, buttressed between two library conferences, I was able to catch my breath for a moment to experience the exhibition, “Not All Realisms: Photography, Africa, and The Long 1960s”, at the Smart Museum of Art- University of Chicago, and I am so grateful I did. This exhibition captures the ethos of the 1960s, away from the dominant vision of the era, and juxtaposes a wider frame of reality. 1960 for many African nations (17 to be exact), marked postcolonial independence. The collection of alternative visual representation in, “Not All Realisms”, helps to expand contextually independent experiences.

Colonialism can be characterized by elements of: occupation, settlement, extraction, exploitation, hierarchy, control, patriarchy, white supremacy and militarization; which can be felt in the capturing and “taking” of a photograph. So often it is assumed the wielder of the camera is white, and the subject is a passive receptor of an imbalanced power dynamic, and invading gaze. This replicates systems of oppression and has been a powerful tool to shape public perception or collective memory.

When there’s a singular dominant narrator, institutions fall prey to a “single story”. As described by Ariella Aisha Azoulay in her book, “Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism”, she reports that since the outset of photography, it has been a means of imperial dominance. The camera is interpreted as a weapon of control, “click”, “trigger”, “shoot” and it is at this point of capture, “snap”, that a person is dissociated and isolated from historical and cultural context. This moment detaches a person, dehumanizes and supplies an object to be property, owned. We see some of the earliest popularized and copyrighted images as documents in this dehumanization process: the Mexican-American war,  the American Civil War and federally enforced displacement of North American tribal nations.

As, Azoulay asserts: “This fantasy of photographs as discrete objects that can be owned by one person or institution is part of the imperial regime that makes us believe that the photograph captures a bygone moment to which we are the latecomers.” History is relentlessly cyclical and resides in the absences and in void, in noises and silences; and gets lost in our performative mechanisms of control, commodification and scripted roles we play, still.

She warns us that imperialism will continue to reproduce these structures of wealth (found in Western archives, objects and art) and be perpetuated by a conflation of scholarship and violence unless we decolonize the world in proximity to these discrete records. As a means of rejecting access to people as raw material she encourages one to “imagine going on strike for the redistribution of photographic wealth as part of world repair, led by those communities without which such images could not exist.”.

The photographers of, “Not All Realisms: Photography, Africa, and The Long 1960s”, are made by photographers inverting the invaders tools, using the colonial origins of the camera to document a wave of postcolonial celebration for themselves. These are photographs from people embedded in the events that pre-date independence and are a part of the fabric of life, not the monoculture of scholastic art or the institution. These photographs were circulated, articulated and produced by the people who made them.

While these images are shared by the makers to prompt transnational dialogues, we do not have the right to see or know everything. The limits imposed must be defined by the communities represented or documented. This certainly extends to the archive, but cannot stop there. As Azoulay shares, “Extraction is never only about objects, it is also extraction of knowledge.”. As an archivist, I see it as our professional and social responsibly to defer to the people for who this wealth is confiscated and allow them to lead the process of repair. Without transformation of the structure that enables this violence, there will be no end to trafficked objects, bodies, histories and exploitation. It is necessary then to pay attention to the frames of the archive, art, photographs, objects and intangible information that represent what, who or how we see history and knowledge.