Intersecting Archives: Intertextuality and the Early West African Photographer

This paper examines practices of intertextuality in the dispersion of images by some selected early West African photographers¹ who utilized dry plate technologies in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. There is a burgeoning literature on early African photographers but little attention has been devoted to their dialectical relations with each other or the modes of intertextuality that operated between photographers. Photography was at the center of the visual fabrication of localized West African modernities and imaginaries² during the second half of the nineteenth century. The technology, initially patented and made publicly available in 1839 in France, was taken up in Africa from the 1840s onwards and offered innovative modes of representation (Szarkowski 1966:1–6, Rajchman 1988:88–117). Its points of entry into West Africa, as elsewhere on the continent, were multiple (Viditz-Ward 1987:510–18, Yarak 1995:9–11, Haney 2010:24–27), and initially images were...