Portrait Photography in Senegal: Using Local Case Studies from Saint Louis and Podor, 1839–1970
2015; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 48; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/afar_a_00236
ISSN1937-2108
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Identity and Heritage
ResumoThis research investigates contrasting contexts of portrait photography at different periods in Senegalese history, demonstrating some of the range of photographic practices that developed within particular cultural milieus at different historical moments. The intention is to consider differing case studies of photographic practice, situated and shaped within processes of enculturation and trajectories, rather than offer a “scissor-paste” (Belting 1997:3) history of photography in Senegal. The photographic medium was appropriated and used by African photographers in what is now Senegal as early as the 1850s and developed in ways that were culturally specific contingent on local, regional, and international intersections. My aim is to move away from dominant Western models that accord photographic trajectories worldwide to a universalist European or North American interpretation and thereby incorporate such trajectories as part of that canon, highlighting Senegalese photographic configurations that have elements similar to Europe yet also differ. The basis of this research is a series of recorded interviews and photographs that I gathered in Senegal in June and July 2013. The sheer marginality of African photography in the discipline of history means that oral testimony takes on a special value, allowing access to such “hidden histories” (Thomson 1998:585).The last three decades have seen a growing interest in African photography;1 however, it is problematic that much of this literature has appeared in exhibition catalogues of contemporary photography from Africa that tend to acknowledge a need for alternative historical approaches but still veer towards universal humanist interpretations (Cameron and Peffer 2013:4). Erin Haney (2010:17) has argued that this was perhaps because the majority of the authors and curators have not engaged in substantial on-the-ground research, which is crucial to understanding the imagery's locally derived cultural perspectives or specific historical and social contexts. Instead, the works have been placed in Western exhibition spaces, labelled as “fine art,” and recontextualized.2 This is most apparent in the treatment of twentieth-century West African studio photography, focusing on individual photographers and identifying them as the “first African photographers.” The classic example is the so-called discovery of Malian photographers such as Seydou Keïta (1921–2002) and Malick Sidibé (b. 1935) by French art curators who considered commercial photographers to be potential “artists” if they had some form of archive that could be activated in a new context. Much of this literature has two orientations. One seeks to identify a universalist canon of great photographs that accommodates African photography; the other emphasizes a material history of photography linked to sociopolitical conditions. This gives rise to an unstable tension between approaches that seek to identify an African canon that can be fitted into a conventional framing of art or photographic history, counterpointed by an alternative approach that seeks an ethnography of photography.It is difficult to fully acknowledge the depth of photographic history—particularly its early history—in many parts of Africa; Senegal is no exception. Researching early African photographic practices is problematic due to the lack of accessible or even extant early source material, the lack of historical research conducted around the subject, and the difficulty of identifying photographers. Adama Sylla, a photographer active in Saint-Louis from the 1950s and the former curator of the photographic collections of the Centre de Recherches et de Documentation du Senegal (CRDS), stressed that “the state archives, private archives, and family photo albums are complementary,” and all three aspects are essential to any concrete analysis or historical finds.3 When I visited the CRDS in Saint-Louis, Fatima Fall, the director of the archives, explained how difficult conservation has been due to the hot, humid climate, insects, and lack of funding for proper equipment.4 When she started working at the archives in 1994, she found boxes of photographs “ruined or near ruin” and since then has worked on a major restoration project attempting to digitize and reorganize the 34,000 images.5 Many early images have been destroyed or lost, both accidentally and deliberately. Additionally, the first generation of people able to remember the early photographers has passed away. It is also worth considering whether preservation is a universal concern.Knowledge of technological developments is rather patchy for the African continent. However, it is worth noting as a backdrop before moving on to the particular case studies in Senegal. Photographic technologies arrived in Africa shortly after the invention of the daguerreotype was made public by the French government in 1839. We find the daguerreotype in Mehmet's court in Egypt in that very year and in the royal courts of Abyssinia a few years later (Matt 2002:14). None of these early daguerreotypes themselves appear to have survived, but in some instances posterity has favored these early images and reproduced them in different formats, such as aquatints, expensive travel books, or souvenir albums produced in the Near East and Europe (Haney 2010:14). The use of the daguerreotype was commercialized by both Africans and Europeans in urban settlements up and down the African coast, and although the majority of their production was in studios, most seem to have also made extensive forays into urban hinterlands (Vokes 2012:5). It is true that those who first contributed to the spread of the new technology were European traders, explorers, and missionaries, who either used a camera themselves or possessed photographic images that were accessible to Africans (Cameron and Peffer 2013:39). Photographs were frequently taken by French and British naval officers, and the missionary societies recognized photography's potential very quickly, such that photography was used by Western agents to construct a seemingly dense catalogue of knowledge about Africa.Africans themselves were quick to appropriate the technology and work as photographers, seeking clients among the African and European populations residing in the coastal economic centers who were able to pay cash. However, Nicolas Monti (1987:7) notes that, in comparison to European photographers of Africa, “photographic documents taken by native photographers are relatively rare” in the available archives. It is perhaps more fitting to say that, prior to independence, the representations of Africa's social realities available in the West were the works of European photographers, which thereby obscured the existence of work by African photographers who were active in the colonies as early as the 1850s. African contributions have been largely overlooked as a result of the fragility of the photographic record, but since the 1890s, evidence has surfaced of consumption of photographs by local black working- and middle-class populations. Santu Mofokeng (2013) has demonstrated, in his brief study of family albums among black South Africans, that by the late nineteenth century, photography was already popular in South Africa. As studies of early photography continue, it is now certain that West African coastal towns are remarkable sites for some of the earliest African-run studios on the continent and sustained local patronage from the 1850s (Haney 2010:24). Slowly, many West African studios that were presumed to be European-owned are now being reconsidered and properly attributed. In West Africa, renowned studios such as those of, for example, Dionysius Leomy, the Lutterodt family, and Neils Walwin Holm thrived in Freetown, Accra, and Lagos, respectively, and by the late nineteenth century popular photo studios had sprung up in most major cities across the rest of the continent.6 With respect to Senegal, Hickling (2014) registered the presence of both European and African photographers and suggested Bonnevide as the first permanent—as opposed to itinerant—studio established at Saint-Louis.7Investigating early photographic development in Senegal led me to Saint-Louis to visit the CRDS, the major national photographic archive of Senegal. Saint-Louis is a historically and politically important city, as it was the first French chartered company on the Atlantic coast of Africa in 1659 and was the political capital of the colony and of French West Africa until 1902.8 From 1920–1957, it also served as the capital of the neighboring colony of Mauritania before falling into decline due to the transfer of the capital to Dakar. L'Institut Fondamental D'Afrique Noire Senegal-Mauritanie was opened in 1943 by the French and served as the photographic archive for both Mauritania and Senegal under the name of IFAN until 1962, when Mauritania withdrew its collection following independence. In 1962, the Saint-Louis branch of this institution changed its name to Le Centre de Recherches et de Documentation du Sénégal (CRDS) and became an autonomous entity.Saint-Louis was established in 1650 as a fortified outpost for mercantile trade at the mouth of the Senegal River and Atlantic Ocean. The island was in a geographically strategic position and was used as a commercial outlet for the French throughout the Atlantic slave trade and “legitimate” trade that shortly followed (Jones 2012:324). By the mid-nineteenth century, Saint-Louis was already a bustling city with an active commercial, administrative, and social life and had developed as a major West African port of call. From the late seventeenth century, a mixed-race (métis) merchant community had started to develop, characterized by the signares women who were famed for their wealth and social mobility. By the nineteenth century they had “formed a nucleus of civic and commercial life” (Jones 2012:325). A large proportion of the métis families in the capital were property owners and made up a distinctly urban class that was characterized by elegance and beauty.9 In such a cosmopolitan environment, it is not surprising that photography took root quite early, and Saint-Louis was the site of some of the earliest examples of African-run studios. Recent research suggests that commercial daguerreotypists worked there as early as the 1850s, and the wealth of the city drew in other photographers, such as the African American Augustus Washington in 1860, followed shortly afterwards by Decampe in 1861 (Viditz-Ward 1998:35). Other early photographers established in Saint-Louis included Bonnevide, Hautefeuille, Louis Hostalier, and Pierre Tacher; many studios and their archives were absorbed into later generations of studios under new partnerships. Portraits by J.P Decker, a Gambian photographer who emerged from Freetown but travelled all around French West Africa, are in the Saint-Louis collection, which further affirms that the city hosted a number of African and French photographers and postcard printers (Viditz-Ward 1998:35). The majority of early photography seems to have been portraits or documentation of ceremonies. Early photographic technologies were complex and required large equipment. Each mirror-like image realized in daguerreotype was completely unique and nonreproducible. Senegal was also prolifically represented in the postcard form that emerged in the 1890s. Worth mentioning is the photographer and publisher François Edmond Fortier (1862–1928), who produced over 8,200 postcards of Senegal, depicting landscapes, architecture, political events, colonial projects, ethnic groups, and women.Ismaila Camara, a full-time archivist at the CRDS, explained that one of the problems he faces with studio portraits from 1900 to the 1940s in Saint-Louis is determining whether they were taken by French or Senegalese photographers.10 As photographers of both backgrounds were working in such close contact, it can be very difficult to notice stylistic differences or distinctions. This is especially the case in Saint-Louis due to the métis community (see Chapuis 1999:62–63). For example, we know Figure 1 was taken by the French photographer Louis Hostalier, who was working in Saint-Louis from the 1890s onwards (Hickling 2014). We also know that Figure 2 was taken by a Senegalese photographer working in Saint-Louis around the same time, because one of the subjects is still alive and confirmed it.11 The compositions are remarkably similar and the poses are more or less the same. The adults in both the photographs are seated on chairs or benches and have their hands placed flat on their knees, revealing their feminine wrists and chunky silver bracelets. The subjects are rigid and the photograph captures their bodies front on, with their legs hip-width apart. Both have calm yet neutral expressions. To set the scene and display a certain amount of wealth, a vase is strategically placed in both of the frames. Clearly, one of the photographers’ main concerns was the composition of the photograph, and they directed the posing and ultimate framing of the photographs, so it is interesting that both the Senegalese photographer and the French photographer used the same composition. Undoubtedly, they must have regularly seen each other's work and exchanged ideas and technology, if only through encountering the demands of similar patrons (Bigham 1999). Both the photographs are of very wealthy people. Ismaila Camara explained that the patterned fabric they each reveal by lifting the outer layer of their m'boubou—the long, flowing garment worn by women in West Africa—was extremely luxurious and would have been worn especially for the photograph to symbolize their high status. Camara speculated that they were probably both from families that were involved in the colonial project, perhaps middlemen in Arabic gum trade.12Due to the peculiarities of Saint-Louis's history—namely the wealth of the city and the unusual prominence of a métis community—up until the end of World War II, European and African photographic practices were remarkably intertwined. This is not to argue against the fact that the colonizer and the colonized have historically used the camera for distinctly different methods of expression and representation; it is rather intended to move away from a narrative that simply juxtaposes local and imperial photographies.Photography's introduction in Senegal was never simply an importation of a foreign technology: photographic technologies were continually adapted and transformed in ways that suited local Senegalese and their cosmopolitan frames of perception and usefulness. It is important to look at the characteristics deemed useful or appealing by photographers, artists, and their consumers in specific localities, as they are as much about underlying local shared aesthetic criteria as they are about particularities of political and historical context. Looking at specific case studies illustrates localized sets of ideas and practices that differ from the Western model of photography as well as the medium's localized reception and implementation. Photography's ubiquity means that the medium was taken up in more extensive creative and social practices through a process of enculturation. In parallel to one of John Tagg's main arguments in The Burden of Representation, it reminds us to avoid isolating photography too much, as “its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work” (1988:63).An iconic Senegalese creative trajectory to consider is the wealth of imagery generated from a single photograph that has spawned a visual culture of devotion. Roberts and Roberts (2003) have written extensively on the one surviving photograph of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, a Muslim Sufi leader of the Mouride Brotherhood in Senegal who lived from 1853 to 1927. In 1913, the only known photograph of Bamba was taken in the town of Djourbel, Senegal, where he was placed under house arrest by the French colonial authorities after a long exile as an alleged political agitator. The negative is lost but the photograph has become one of the most reproduced images in Senegal and is central to Mouride visual culture, which compromises a wide range of popular expression: “from devotional icons to murals, advertising images to apotropaic drawings that protect and heal, cosmological architecture to idiosyncratic attire, illustrated Web sites to souvenirs for tourists” (Roberts and Roberts 2003:21).One of the interesting features of all these reproductions is that the efficacy accorded to the images underscores the irrelevance of photographic reproduction via the original negative. The saint's 1913 photograph has taken on a life of its own and Pinney (2011:8) has argued that one must be willing to “move away from the insular security” of Euro-American conventional wisdom concerning photography in order to grasp Mouride visual culture as Mourides themselves consider and practice it. The seemingly “accidental” or irrelevant details of a photograph of Amadou Bamba taken on a sweltering day of 1913 should not be trivialized or rendered insignificant. Roberts and Roberts (2003:23) argue that, from a Mouride point of view, the 1913 portrait is full of ambiguities that seem to increase rather than hinder its connotative spiritual powers. Similar to other Sufi brotherhoods, Mourides believe that all aspects of existence, including photographs, have a “secret side” called batin. Mourides hold that images of Amadou Bamba and his family are active sources of potency and power. The images offer prosperity, protection, benevolence, healing, and the reversal of misfortune. Therefore the idea of a photographic image's immediacy and fidelity does not seem to apply here. In the West, verisimilitude has often been considered central to a photograph, but Haney (2010:126) argued that what is considered to be truthful in a representation often turns out to be a rather circumscribed. It may also be that the link to the photographic moment is in some ways as important as the photograph itself. The portrait has been reproduced on an enormous scale in so many different mediums, yet the image's strength and efficiency is in no way lessened. Roberts and Roberts (2003:43) described it as “the visual catalyst for an exploration of artistic imagery during the past twenty years.”Another interesting adaptation of photographic imagery was the development of Senegalese painting traditions that were appropriated or enabled by photography's growing popularity. The scarcity and difficulty of reproducing photographic images gave rise to two very distinct painting styles that show the innovative ways that image reproduction worked in a local context. Senegalese sous-verre13 painting dates back to the late nineteenth century but had its domestic peak in Senegal between the 1920s and the 1960s (Bouttiaux-Ndiaye 1994:9). The reverse-glass painting technique seems to have spread from the Maghreb to Senegal, but there is also a possibility that it may have come from the Near East, through Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca (Bouttiaux-Ndiaye 1994:10). The rapid development of sous-verre painting was initially spurred on by the Muslim devotional images introduced by Moroccan, Lebanese, and Syrian merchants in the form of inexpensive chromolithographs. In November 1911, these came to the attention of William Ponty, the Governor of French West Africa, who banned chromoliths as he feared they could aid the expansion of Islam within the colony. He argued that the prints encouraged interest in Islam and decided that all work displaying a “hostile character” towards the civilizing work of the colonial administration should be destroyed (Bouttiaux-Ndiaye 1994:14). In Senegal, it was mechanically made images and photographs that encouraged the development of sous-verre, because chromoliths were illegal and photography was still a very expensive process.Sous-verre techniques were often combined with photography. Some of the earliest sous-verre painters worked on the back of the protective glass on old photographs, adding decorative motifs such as animals or flowers to enhance or revamp the old black-and-white photographs. Later, artists’ inspiration was drawn directly from the style of studio portrait photographs, often capturing popular poses (Diouf 2013:76). Mama Casset: Les Precurseurs de la Photographie au Senegal, 1950 (Cassat and Seye 1994) shows the link between glass paintings by artist Gora Mbengue (1931–1988) that were based on Mama Casset's accomplished studio portraits. Sous-verre was also used as a way of enlarging images for better public view, thus depicting both actual and idealized portraits. Looking at the development of the medium and its links to photography not only shows local aesthetic ideals but reveals the sociohistorical conditions that allowed it to flourish.At the CRDS I came across numerous photographs of well-dressed women in rooms surrounded by photographs, which I was told was the xoymet practice. By the 1940s, xoymet had made portraiture a fundamental part of bridal transfers in Saint-Louis.14 On her wedding night, a woman would be carried to her new husband's home, and his bedroom would be temporarily filled with photographic portraits borrowed from relatives, neighbors, and friends. El Hadj Adama Sylla, a photographer active in Saint-Louis from the 1950s and the former curator of the photographic collections of the CRDS, stated that the images were hung in the house throughout the wedding ceremony, which usually lasted between three to five days.15 These images served as the wife's introduction to the new community and social networks that she was entering into within a new patrilineage and compound. Adama Sylla said that in Wolof, the practice is described as a sort of “temporary exhibition.”16 The bride would then be photographed in front of the hanging photographs in various poses and changes of outfits (Figs. 3–4). From at least the early 1930s through to the 1960s, this would be a crucial element of the rites of passage of weddings in the locale of Saint-Louis. Because it was a public event, the donors offered their most aesthetically pleasing images to the new wife as a mode of self-presentation within this context. Fatima Fall, director of the CRDS, commented on the social implications of being photographed surrounded by photographs on the bride's wedding night. She was quick to link it to class and status:Clearly these images not only have iconic importance but also inscribe social practices. They show the bride and the onlookers that they are surrounded by people and visually present popular support for the marriage. They serve as an example of how photography, in this case portraiture, through a process of enculturation, has not only been integrated into social practices but, in this case, also constitutes it as a temporary assemblage shaped around local demands. Curiously, xoymet was a practice that only lasted for about thirty years, and no-one that I asked was quite sure why its popularity diminished. Adama Sylla's response was rather vague: “Nope, it no longer happens, we now have wedding ceremonies like everywhere else.”18 Perhaps technical advances and the widespread availability of photographs meant they no longer implied a high social standing.The period of Senegal's decolonization and its official independence in 1960 was not a period of “new-born Africanity” (Enwezor 1996:31) but a time of sociopolitical resurrection, reassessment, and transformation, and this case study focuses on the trajectory of the photographer Oumar Ly (Fig. 5). The 1960s–70s have often been called the “golden age” of studio photography in West Africa (Cameron and Peffer 2013:13). During the first decade of independence, Senegalese of all classes embraced self-representation through photography as never before. By the 1960s, Mama Casset, Salla Casset, Messei Gaye, and Oumar Ly had already established studios in Dakar, Saint-Louis, and Podor that catered to both the elite and the masses. These images documented an important milieu in the negotiated space that bridged the gap between colonial and postcolonial identity, informed by the changes wrought by modernization and urbanization projects of the newly independent nation state. Here I focus on Oumar Ly's images and his experience as a photographer in colonial and postcolonial Senegal, revealing important documents of a social history of the twentieth century that capture modernization and change from a subaltern perspective.Oumar Ly was born in 1943 in Podor, close to the Mauritanian border, where he has lived and worked his whole life. After a short primary education, followed by several years of education at the Qur'anic school, he began working for his family, who cultivated vegetables. He started selling them to the French military based around Fort Faidherbe,19 and it was there that he saw his first camera. Fascinated by the technology, he saved up his money and bought a Kodak camera, which he began to use. After eighteen months in the army in Dakar, he returned to Podor to pursue a career in photography. The famous pioneers of Senegalese photography were mainly based in bustling urban centers such Saint-Louis (Meissa Gaye) or in Dakar (Mama Casset), whereas the region of the Fleuve in the interior was still a rural area. In conversation, Oumar Ly said he opened the first photography studio in Podor in 1963 (Le Thiofy Studio, which is still functioning today).20 The studio was immensely popular, and he recalls there being queues around the building nearly every day throughout the 1960s.21 The studio became a space to view the latest fashions, trends, and technologies. In short, it embodied an individual and collective sense of participation in local modernities.He has kept the majority of his negatives and has essentially created a photographic record of the region, amassing more than 5,000 shots over a period of forty years. His portraits are specific descriptions of individuals and simultaneously provide inscriptions of changing social identities and practices in the independence era. The majority are full frontal poses of individuals or group shots in the Le Thiofy Studio, but they expose as much as they hide from view through complex yet sophisticated representations (Figs. 6–7). On the surface, these portraits are not to be considered as “factual” portrayals of their subjects, but they assert specific claims about self-representation (Figs. 8–9). Oumar Ly's archive contains character studies from a cross-section of Podor that register complex negotiations of individual desires, aspirations, and identities. Oguibe makes the interesting point that the family album was deemed a very important document to show the generations to come and thus, through the studio, individuals were presented with the opportunity to photograph and freeze their likeness in a particular preferred state, which became the generic, perennial register of their identity (Matt 2002:14). The archivist at the CRDS commented on the importance of family albums in Senegal: “It's still the done thing when someone comes to your home to show them your family album with supporting dialogue. An important aspect of getting your portrait taken has always been for the family history and the personal archive.”22Until very recently, Oumar Ly was considered a professional who made a living out of fellow-citizens’ wish to be portrayed and was therefore deemed to exist outside of Western ideas of art. He was a service provider whose job and purpose was to convey in a pictorial form what his subjects wanted to communicate, and he had to provide the most suitable setting to do so. The two backdrops in his studio have not changed since the 1960s and 1970s; on one wall is a plane facing Europe and on the opposite wall is a painting of Mecca. Both of the backdrops were commissioned by Oumar Ly, and when asked about the choice of imagery he responded:His backdrops perpetuate an illusionist framing found in much early studio photography, but by using imagery of the postmodern era. His inclusion of Mecca and the plane heading to Europe gives the people of Podor a window to the world.In the 1960s and 1970s, a photographer like Oumar Ly was in demand for a wide range of work. By the 1960s, having an identity card was essential for citizens of Senegal, and professional photographers in the country were still hard to come by (Figs. 9–10). There was a great demand for passport photographs following independence and all the ensuing electoral processes. Oumar Ly recalled being asked by both the Senegalese and Mauritanian authorities to accompany them to different villages and take the citizens’ photographs (Figs. 10–12). He would take the photographs with the “box camera,” a handmade wooden chamber fitted with just a lens and no diaphragm stop or shutter speed. Traveling deep into the interior of the country, he became a key actor in the government's process of visually recording its citizens. He remembered peoples’ skepticism and unwillingness to be photographed and demonstrated that his role often entailed negotiation and persuasion.One particularly poignant story that he recollected was when the government asked him to go to villages in the desert in Mauritania in 1963 to take identity photographs. He recalled being with several policemen, who would enter the villages and demand that everyone come out of their homes to be photographed, at times rather unwillingly. When they reached the village where the marabout lived, the police refused to enter:Oumar Ly remembered wondering how he would get around this issue and after a while responded by saying, “Father, to go to Mecca you will need a passport or an identity card. Do you not want to go to Mecca?”25 Confused, the marabout asked Oumar Ly to repeat himself, and after much deliberation he agreed and allowed the whole village to be photographed.What this demonstrates is the ongoing influence of local religious authorities even in the postcolonial context, where state apparatuses were invested with superior technologies and legal powers. Photography was not always a medium that people readily accepted and Oumar Ly put the marabout's initial unwillingness to be photographed down to “he was an old guy, things were changing.”26 Therefore, this response to technology could be interpreted as a resistance to new forms of postcolonial nation-state governance or an unwillingness to accept the changes in social structure caused by rapid urbanization and modernity. An interesting comparison can be made with Cornelius Azaglo's identity photographs in the 1960s in Côte d'Ivoire (Werner 2001).Another interesting and amusing story that Oumar Ly told me was “the mystery of the scented photograph.” In the early 1960s, not long after his studio had opened, he recalled a client coming to collect the prints of her portrait that had been shot the week before. He could see her waiting in the entrance of the studio, so he quickly went to his dark room to collect the prints that were in an envelope for her to take home. She was happy with the images and put them in the bag and left the studio. About twenty minutes later, the woman came running back into the studio in a manner that Oumar Ly described as “totally hysterical.” She said,” ‘My photograph smells! Is this one of your new inventions, a scented photograph? Is that what you are creating in the dark room at the back of your studio?” Oumar Ly was rather baffled by this but in his relaxed and playful manner just said, “Yes—that is a scented photograph!” It was not until that evening that he managed to work out what the woman was referring to. He had sprayed himself with some cologne just before putting the photographs in the envelope. Not long afterwards, the woman arrived, and droplets must have fallen onto the photographs. This was an amusing encounter and her sincerity shocked him. Oumar Ly then told me that for the next few months he had people coming regularly asking for a scented photo. Some people even came from as far as Thies, a town roughly 350 kilometers away from Oumar Ly's studio in Podor, in search of a perfumed photograph. The demand was so high that Oumar Ly decided to offer the scented photograph as a service, with each photograph hand-sprayed with his scent Kiki 54.27 This narrative underscores the materiality of the photograph, which in this instance invoked an additional olfactory sensory experience, and the ways in which an inventive photographer continuously responded to popular demands.28 Oumar Ly's stories of the marabout and the scented photograph also demonstrate the photographer's role as a mediator and negotiator. He was the advocate of this technology, and so played an important part in its integration, acceptance, and development within local communities. He had not only to put people at ease when photographing them, but to be pragmatic if he met with resistance. He was offering a service that had to be continually reimagined and redesigned to suit local tastes and specifics. Moreover, as a historical actor, he mediated the utilization of the medium by both the state and the population from independence up to the present day.I have attempted here to outline particular case studies and examples of the vast array of uses, developments, and interpretations of photography in Senegal throughout the last century. By looking at the development of photography in Senegal and in Saint-Louis from 1839 to the 1950s, it is clear that Senegalese photographers were working alongside European photographers from the very start of the medium's introduction to the continent. They were quick to appropriate the medium and there are obvious similarities with the practice of French photographers, which were particularly apparent in the cosmopolitan town of Saint-Louis. The vast array of surviving French colonial photography that dominates the CRDS archives, frequently in postcard form, should not be ignored and offers a dialectic between Senegalese and French photography in the early twentieth century. Looking at particular local case studies in Saint-Louis highlights how the photographic medium was used to consolidate localized sets of ideas and practices and how the photographic image and experience participated in constituting local social histories. This is particularly apparent with the xoymet practice, which implemented new social networks and hierarchies for the incoming wife, thereby constituting key elements of the bride's integration into another patrilineage. Oumar Ly's production as a studio photographer and subsequent state photographer not only reveals his creative interventions in image making, but also its materialities through which the local constructions of photography are developed, even when relatively ephemeral such as the “scented” photograph.
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