It is evident that, as the study of photography in Africa opens up, many other fascinating topics will emerge. Photographs by Africans, of Africans, and of African arts in and out of context will come to receive the fuller attention they deserve (Cole and Ross 1985a:28).
In the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, the repositioning of photographs as art rather than as documents relying on mechanical reproduction coincided with the growing appreciation of objects from Africa, which moved from being perceived solely as ethnographica and artifacts into the domain of art. Beyond these parallel histories, photography and African art have been intertwined in other ways, for photographic representations of objects from the African continent in print media helped legitimize them as artistic expressions. At the same time, photographs taken in Africa illustrated explorers', ethnographic, missionary, and governmental publications and provided evidence, that is, glimpses of the...