ARHT337

Since the 19th century photography has been used by colonials, missionaries, anthropologists, and tourists to gender, racialize, and otherwise take the measure of the African continent. It has also been used to make things sacred and to commemorate ancestors in modern traditional contexts. Photography has more recently been used by African artists to imagine alternatives to these historical uses of images. This course examines each of these historical contexts, in order to better understand both the changing place of Africa in the world's imagination, and the uses in Africa itself of photo-based imagery.