SELF AND ACCESSORY IN

GAMBIAN STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHY

LIAM BUCKLEY

Fig. 1. Studio Portrait, Wellingara (photo: Segga Wadda2000)t

When the grandfather of Tierno Monenembo refused to allow his photograph to be taken it was not because the old man was scared of the soul-stealing power long attributed to cameras in exotic locales. Rather it was because the grandfather, who was already familiar with the work of powerful marabouts and sorcerers, was not at all impressed by photography: "There's nothing magical about it. It's simply shadows and light... That's the point. It it's not magic, then I'm not interested. There's no point creating an uglier
t All of the images in this article were originally in color. To see the color images go to VAR's website: http://etext.virginia.eduA/AR/gambia/photo.html

version of my nostrils and my eye-brows without being able to depict my fits of anger and my dreams!" (Monenembo 1999:206). To many, photography is not a practice that is capable of capturing, controlling, and violating a person's inner life or soul. As South African photographer Santu Mofokeng puts it, photography is a way of "chasing shadows" that never catches up with its target (Mofokeng 1999:72). The magic of the camera has nothing to do with the capacity to conjure up some imagined interior. Instead, the wonder of photography is the way it explores "the mysteries of exterior appearance" (Wendl 1999:154). that which hovers almost touching the surface of the body, the place where we are "just little more than what we really are" (Mercer 1995, cited in Pinney 1997:178). In The Gambia, West Africa, studio photographers (natalkat) agree that photographs do not portray the personality of the depicted person (kanunatal). The last time photographs portrayedy'/Mothe character, mood, or personality of a personwas around the time of Independence (1965). and the opening of the first studios in The Gambia. Today, photographers do not expect to encounter jikko. and in fact distrust anything that would have previously signified its presence. According to photographers, the flight of personality out of the studios since the end of colonial rule in The Gambia has been accompanied by the rapid influx and increase in the number of props (juuntuwaay) that clients (kiliyaan) use during sittings. These accessories belong to a category of imported goods closely associated with fashionable living, and older photographers hold them chiefly responsible for driving jikko out of the studios. In front of the camera, people currently use these things to "complete" themselves for depiction by making their surfaces or edges (kemmej) clear (Fig. 1). In this venue, the surface is a subject in its own right, not something that is to be read and cut into in order to reveal some meaning that lays hidden below. There is nothing superficial about surface here (see Miller

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1997:9). According to this concept of appearance, one's clarity is proportional to the number of things amassed and displayed within one's vicinity.1 A Gambian model of photographic depiction is not based on an ontology of surgical intrusion, nor is it driven by metaphors of intrusion, detection, capture, and interrogation. Rather, I suggest, it is an aesthetic derived from the imaginative world of adornmentof tailoring in particular, and its own structuring metaphors of cutting and layering. For the semiotician Roland Barthes, photographs marked time and the click of the camera mechanism echoed the resonance of the ticking clock: "cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing" (1981:15). In The Gambia by contrast, the sound of a camera shutter making its slice sounds more like the snip of scissors, cutting out people, clarifying their edges, and making them cutting edge. Cameras, in The Gambia, are scissors for seeing. The self enjoys no a priori privilege in Gambian studio photography. The studio is "the parliament of things" that admits only the accessorized, refusing the myth of the naked citizen (Latour 1993:142-145). The accessories evoke a self without actually defining it; they keep pace with "soul-movements" (Simmel 1971:313) of the person sitting for the camera, leaving the nature of those movements out of sight. All this, of course, is very different to the conviction that there is some link between exterior appearance and interior lifea belief that structures much of the desire and anxiety, the excitement and discomfort, that many of us feel in front of the camera. Barthes describes this tension well: "once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of "posing," I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image" (Barthes 1981:10). Sitting for the photographer, waiting for the release signaled the click of the shutter, Barthes becomes the uncertain operator of his look: I don't know how to work upon my skin from within. I decide to 'let drift' over my lips and in my eyes a faint smile which I mean to be 'indefinable'... I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know that I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but... this additional message must in

no way alter the precious essence of my individuality. (1981:11) In front of the camera and tenured in his appearance, Barthes is obliged to "imitate himself (1981:13) and he is like many of us in admitting his lack of skill in this effort. "This photograph does not look like me," we say. We have certain expectations of photography, and resent much of its product that makes us admit that even after decades of being who we are, we are still not very good at imitating ourselves. This paper has three parts: in the first I examine the relationship between persons and things that forms in the space of the studio and that appears in the "glossiness" of surface so desired by those who sit for portraits. In the second, I survey a variety of portrait styles and discuss the postcoloniality of their visual effect. Finally, I examine the model for social intimacy that emerges from Gambian studio practice.
JlKKO

The capacity of a photograph to "capture" the person of the depicted became an explicit research topic when Muntaga Jallow, a studio photographer, asked me to explain a black and white photograph of a man holding calipers over another man's head, caught in the act of taking anthropometric measurements.2 Our "formal" interview had finished and we were sitting down to eat lunch. I had brought a book on Indian photography, thinking that Muntaga would be interested in its montage photographsmontage work being popular in The Gambia, as well as India. I had not anticipated his opening the book to the colonial section. The idea that people used photography to classify and record "types" of people elicited no reaction from Muntaga. Instead it was the idea that the photographed surface of the body, its somatic spaces, could, via visual scrutiny, indicate the moral character of the person depictedthat the outside could indicate the inside (see Spencer 1992). This idea, I was told emphatically, was ludicrous. The topic arose again at a later date with a photographer who had worked as a hospital radiographer prior to opening up a studio. He smiled and pointed out that only an x-ray machine was capable of taking

Liam Buckley is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia. He is currently writing his dissertation "Colonial Negatives: Photography in The Gambia, West Africa, since Independence (1965).

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such an "insightful" photograph. This property of personhood that remains absent in studio photography is known &s jikko. It refers literally to good manners, personality, character, and comportment, considered by proverbial wisdom to be better than beaut (jikko gen a taar) (Gamble 1989:129). To lackjikko is to be nitoodi, anon-person. Jikko is dignity, visible on the exterior of the body (yaram), inspiring favorable opinions in the eyes of others. As a measure of a person's social worth Jikko is conceptually aligned on one hand with honor (jom) and standing in the public eye (suture), and on the other hand in opposition to shame (gace) and infamy (toroxte). Working in the eyes of others, jikko fosters relations of wole're, a form of very close friendship and alliance established over an extended period of reciprocity, hospitality (teranga), and a form of gifting (sargal) that makes the recipient feel "charmed," "fussed over" and honored as one would upon receiving a gift from a charming person. On the streeljikko is vulnerable to the attack of enemies (noon) who are always ready to laugh, mock, and spread gossipone should always avoid making eye-contact with such people (gome hef- literally to close one's eyelids). Walking with eyes straight ahead, the dignity of jikko allows the person the appearance of equilibrium, a certain bearing of calmjikko makes a person "cool" (see Thompson 1993). The origin of the jikko of an individual is uncertainthere is no consensus as to whether it is there with you when you are born, or whether it is formed in you after birth through interaction with others. No matter how & jikko establishes itself, there is much ambivalence as to its presence. If jikko is present at birth, it is frequently bad. The person with a birth-jikko will depend upon other people to remove it. Stories of such removal describe badly behaved children who improved in temperament as they grew older. Initiation, especially for boys, is the main period of bad birth-jikko removal. Like the birth-yikko, the jikko that forms during relations with other people is similarly suspect. The act of copying or imitation (soti) provides the medium through which jikko moves from one person into another. This would be no bad thing if donated jikko travels from a clean host. However, accounts abound of the movement of unhealthy jikko, as, for example, with the boy in a school classroom whose stutter replicated itself in a boy who sat at a nearby desk. A person can catch a bad case ofjikko. Like the feeling

of being in love Jikko is something that enters a person and leads to particular actions and thoughts. According to local accounts, jikko last appeared in Gambian studios during the days when photographers had careful hands and knew how to pose those who sat for portraits. Those who worked in the 1960s and 1970s devoted substantially more studio time to posing and dressing the sitter than their conterparts do today. The job of the photographer was to get jikko posed and arranged appropriately in order to transform it into a photographable entity (see Masquealier 1996). Ousman Njie, who ran "Taru Studio"in Bathurst in the 1960s, speaks of the time spent positioning people's hands which tend to hang without careful arrangement, directing the person's eyes to make sure they appeared well and did not reflect too much light in the photograph, and turning the person to make sure the light fell correctly on the face. The most difficult part of the body to photograph was anything above the shoulders, including the neck, where skin and muscles could look bad if not turned in a certain way. The ability to pose the sitter was of such importance to the practice of photography that it assumed its own place during job interviews. Mansong, who established the first studio system to work closely with the Korean labs of the 1980s, frequently arrived at interviews in a particularly disheveled state. He would end interviews by asking to have his picture taken, paying closest attention to how well the interviewee rearranged his clothes for the portrait. Jikko used to appear in studio portraits as long as photographers devoted the necessary time and intimacy of touch. Today, however, photographers would rather not have to handle jikko, considering it an unpredictable and volatile entity. Every interview I conducted on the capacity of a photograph to portray the character of the depicted person moved invariably to a discussion of the threatening and suspicious nature of jikko, and of the photographer's vulnerability to being attacked, beaten, and robbed by a person in possession of a misread and violent jikko. In these accounts, photographers neither know nor touch their clients. Instead they describe a world of deceit (fenn) that has "developed" since Independence around the tourist resorts, patrolled by "semester-boyfriends"Gambian men who establish short-term relationships with female tourists from Europe (see Ebron 1997; Wagner 1981: Wagner and Yamba 1986), prostitutes, drug dealers, and "foreign"

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entrepreneurs (usually stereotyped as Nigerian or Liberian). That studio photography currently does not work to portray the "self of the sitter speaks not only to the experience of change in postcolonial social relations, but also to changes in those aspects assigned importance in terms of rendering a person photographable.3 Today people are rarely photographed on their own. Rather, depicted persons (kanunatal) frequently appear in close proximity with depicted things (liinunatal). These things are studio props that belong to a category of object known as juntuwaay, a term that literally refers to those accessories that allow one to accomplish something, to arrive at a destination, to finish something, or to give something a finish. Juntuwaay might be the bicycle that takes you to work, the blow-torch that welds the metal, or the varnish that completes the carpentry job.
JUNTUWAAY

Compared with today, the studios of the 1950s were bare and quite plain. Photographers painted boards in

Fig. 2. Sahr Ellie poses in front of the backdrop of his studio "CPS Studio" in Brikama (photo: Liam Buckley 2000)

solid colors and cut sections of cloth to be hung as backdrops, built low wooden platforms to raise clients slightly, and laid patterned linoleum on the floor. At the time there were no props in the studios, although some photographers remember people trying to bring in things to hold or stand next to in their photographs: 'people would want these things and I'd say no, it's your face that people will want to see, not those things." Outside the studio, however, photographers had little control over how their clients posed. On the streets of Bathurst, a client would recognize his photographer, call him over"Taru, snap me a card" and look around for some thing with which to posea friend's bicycle, a Hercules brand perhaps, a suitcase, a pair of sunglasses, a fountain pen for the breast pocket of a jacket, or even a jacket for that matterin front of a parked car, the bandstand, a shop window. Posing with props and in front of backgrounds began on the streets and moved into the studios. Through the 1960s and in the 1970s, painted scenes depicting sailboats, beaches, sunsets, and palm trees replaced the plain backdrops (Fig. 2). Photographers began to offer items of clothing for their clients to wear for their portraits, and to set aside studio space for dressing up. Catering to the elite (and highly imageconscious) Aku population in Bathurst, Taru Studio, for example, provided dinner jackets, clip-on bow ties and spectacles (frames onlythe lenses removed to avoid glare). In the 1980s, with the establishment of the Korean-owned color lab system in the country (and indeed across West Africa), studio space grew less empty and more occupied by objects and more backdrops (Fig. 3). Studio-photography became propheavy, and the older photographers, nostalgic for studios gone by, complain that "today's backdrops are too bright, [there are] too many decorations" (Figs. 4 and 5). A "'first class studio" would have "all the facilities": beach balls, toys of all sorts, world globes, television sets, VCRs, telephones, headphones, microphones, spectacles, sun shades, a fridge, a small plastic Christmas tree about three feet tall with a stuffed toy pony on top, plastic plants, sofas with lace covers. The labs provide the studios with regularly-updated selections of backdropsscenes of knights jousting, a palmtreed beach, a windmill silhouetted at dawn, fields of tulips, a Hyundai Coupe, a castle. For those final touchups, some photographers provide a mirror, nail polish, medical soap and skin creams {crime eclaircissante),

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Fig. 3. Studio interior, New Millennium Image Hunters, Brikama (photo: Liam Buckley 2000)

Fig. 4. Muntaga Jallow (right) poses in his studio "Hollywood" in Serrekunda (photo: Liam Buckley 2000)

Fig. 5. Doudou Jeng poses in his studio, "New Millennium Image Hunters" in Brikama (photo: Liam Buckley 2000)

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shoe polish along with a brush. T-shirts bearing celebrity images and brand names have replaced items of dinner attire in terms of most the desirable clothing: Bob Marley, Lucky Dube, Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, as well as the brands of Adidas and Nike. As inanimate things, props work to animate persons and transform them into photographable subjects. Like the drum that drummed, the song that sung, and the dance that danced in Amos Tutuola's The PalmWine Drinkard (1994:221), the prop props up and holds the person out on view in the studio. Studio accessories (juntuwaay) ask that we acknowledge the agency of things in any creative process. For example, in a different context, Gambian men often sponsor and encourage women's dances even though such events are celebrations of low status and lack of restraint. They feel an acute maleness as they watch and disapprove of the display of femaleness before their eyes. On one level this looks like a clear example of autonomy encompassing dependence as its contrary, of femaleness sustaining male-ness and vice-versa, of men sponsoring displays of femininity in order to feel masculine.4 Clearly, the power of patronage lies in the sponsorship of these services (see Heath 1994:92-93). However, even though a high-ranked man might sponsor the dance event, he is not responsible for drawing out the unrestraint of the dancers. Furthermore, the male griot who provides the drum rhythm is similarly not regarded as responsible for the women's activity. Rather it is the drumstick and drum beat themselves that are responsible, that draws this service out of the women's bodies (ibid: 94). Any identification of agency as something that exists within a clearly marked individual, as something that is owned and controlled, fails to capture the dynamics at work here. Rather, attention to the social life of accessories shifts the site of agency to the very outskirts of the person to the point of contact with the accessory-thing. Indeed, in some cases, accessories exert so much will that they cause a dress to slip, a brastrap to show, a pair of someone else's slippers to enter the frame, thereby sabotaging (saboteh) the portrait.
JAMANO

the prop "fits" (japana). This newness is dispersed and refracted in the shine that occupies a territory surrounding the object, that in turn provides evidence of aesthetic superiority: "it shinesit is beautiful" (dafa melah, dafa rafei)} For a split second, long enough for the flash to fill the space in front of the camera, the studio itself becomes a refracting medium in which sitter and prop are rendered clear and focused.6 Fit for portraiture and duly accessorized, one steps in to focus and answers the call of jamano, and joins the fashionable ranks of the well-dressed and the beautiful, the zazou man, and jongama woman: The laughter announces their arrival Their faces shine The oil is still there The hair European Arab Perhaps Asian Their shoes the latest fashion The heels are too long Their gait just as in a beauty contest They hop They smile They giggle Their dress just what the Jamano wants Trousers very tight All is marked The contours are there front and back They show their bodies The breasts are bare The trousers are short We look and shake our heads This Jamano! We say. (Jaiteh 2000:28, emphasis added) Accessorized, the photographed person enters the world of jamano. Literally translated, jamano means time, period, or era (from the Arabic zamaan). Jamano is the latest generation, that which does not endure, which is fleeting, which is fashionable, which exists in the most recent time. It activates the feeling of being contemporary, and does this work in the historical present (jamanoleggi), the past (jamanolawoon) and the future (jamanonyewna). People ascribe to jamano

In photograph studios, it is the "newness" of the thing that motivates (sen bubuy ess, mo tax) the person to choose it, to pose for the camera and to see how well

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the power to activate change and to make people recognize that change is occurring: "jamano la!" it's jamanoan emphatic statement used to justify a purchase when one is accused of squandering money on a luxury item; " Jamano je ko latje" jamano asks for it a way of explaining why life today is as it is and not as it was in the past; finally, "Dujikko, jamano la," It is jamano (that changes), not jikko"describing aesthetic change over time, often occurring at the visual level on the surface of the body. Consider the following account of the 1965 crowning of N'Daye Jagne, the first "Miss Gambia" for the newly Independent state:7 It is noteworthy that the winner and the runner-up are both Woloff [sic]. The tribe produces handsome people who seem to combine the suppleness of the Fulas with the vicility of the Seres or Serahulis. One could almost describe them as an imposed breed of two outstanding tribes of the Senegambia. Added to this is the independent mannerpolite, free of self-consciousness, they are a people who expect politeness from others. The pure Woloff man who has the means thinks it infra dig for his wives to do even household chores. But Times change and we also are changed in them. (Gambia Echo 11/25/1965:2) In jamano, things are usually imported; when they exist elsewhere, their presence is known already and their arrival anticipated. They are plastic, made of lace, usually reflective or shiny, require batteries and elec-

trical power. They are found indoorsin parlors and living rooms, sometimes in bedrooms, but never in kitchens. People attribute magical qualities to some of these objects. For example, specific brands of fountain pens guarantee success to those filling out job applicationssituations where the prestige items of the formal sector such as school graduation certificatestend to fail. In Bathurst in the 1960s, boys who did exceptionally well in their exams amazed their schoolmates by claiming to have used pens fueled by magical ink. Such powers emerged around not only pens but also razor blades, shavers and bicycles in the advertising of the local illustrated press in the 1950s. Frequently the things of jamano are functionally uselessthey are broken, their batteries have run down, the utility company has cut the necessary electricity supply because someone failed to pay the bill. But that does not matter in jamanoall that matters is how something looks (joma). Watches, for example, are worn not primarily as things that have some functional utility, but as things that have an appearance.8 People appreciate jamano things tor their aesthetics rather than their function, for their surfaces rather than their interiors, for the way they look to others. Jamano, then, is a world that always has a place for the watch that has stopped working, and for last year's calendar. In commercial districts of The Gambia, the word jamano appears above one's head, naming storefronts and designating the products waiting inside. Photographers frequently use the word on the front of their

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Fig. 6. Jamano Studio, Serrekunda (photo: Liam Buckley 2000)

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studios. In Supabard, Tijan Bah runs a studio named simply Jamano" (Fig. 6). During my fieldwork. he added a logo beneath the worda sunrise with the words '"Bin Bin 2000." 'Bin Bin"'referred to the name of a popular song in Senegal that both named a dance considered fashionable in night clubs and a woman's undergarment that could be revealed during such a dance. "2000" gave the up-to-dateness of the studio a millennium feel that was apparent at many other studios: "Halifa Babacarr Sey Photo Studio Year 2000" in Talingding. "New Millenium Image Hunter" in Brikama. and "Tili" s Photo Studio 2000" in Bakau. A studio in Serrekunda took the concept of jamano to its logical conclusion, naming itself 'Mujentely Jamano," literally meaning the end of jamano, the last of jamano, or the edge of jamano. Figuratively, the name suggests the experience of occupying the most recent and contemporary of times, of moving on the wave of fashion at a point where it is always breaking, of living emphatically in the present, and being cutting edge. As a comparison. Mujentely Jamano would be the quantum experience of traveling at the speed of light, holding up a mirror and having no reflection. (Appropriately, the proprietor of '"Mujentely Jamano" had closed down the studio and moved on by the time I located it. Only the name remained on the front of the premises.)

The jamano-front of the studio is often inscribed with cartoon-like depictions of the photographer. In these poses, he works to animate and attract those who would be guided towards new sights. On a studio front in Brikama, the photographer makes a double appearance (fig. 7). Firstly, he is accessorized as one would be when posing for a portrait: he wears a watch and glasses and stands next to an obvious import iteman Uncle Sam hat. At the same time, his face with its beak or crocodile mouth, makes him resemble the masks that appear during ritual activity. Specifically, the design and coloring of his pants identifies the photographer with the mask who guides those undergoing initiation. In Wolof, this guide is called botal mbaarbotal refers to the act of Fig. 7. "Don't Hurry, Check In" (photo: Liam carrying on one's back, of taking Buckley 2000) up on one's shoulder, of protecting. Mbaar refers to the circumcision shed. During initiation, the guide sings what the initiates sing, eats what they eat, and dances the same steps. The job of the guide is to protect the initiates from witches who will try to steal the internal substance that attaches a person to the ancestors and that has the possibility of being reincarnated. The guide works to ensure that the initiates receive a revelation called xaarmbaax (Wolof). Mbaax is that into which one is initiated, one's heritage. Literally, it refers to one's bowels and entrails, to "that which is always with you, you carry it everywhere with you wherever you go." (When people explained this concept to me, they would gesFig. 8. "Souvenir" display, Wellingara (photo: ture during their talk about "culSegga Wadda 2000) ture" by moving their hands repeat-

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edly away from their stomachs). Xaar means to split apart and cut into slices, to see how something works, to understand in a deep way. The guide, then, takes initiates through the irreversible experience of being split open in order to perceive a new surface that is made meaningful and available for view by an act of cutting. Outside the studio, declaring his wondrous work, the photographer fancies himself as the initiate-guide who ensures the success ofrituallycritical cuts. In The Gambia, photographers celebrate the newness of photography and its status as the sovereign business ofjamano. They often joke, as city slickers tend to do, about the provincial person who has just arrived from up-country, and encounters the bright lights of the capital for the first time. In the joke this person is known as "JJC.""Johnny Just Come," who can be either male or female. JJC walks straight into a studio and sits ready to be snapped, only to interrupt and ask the photographer to turn on some music. The photographer turns on the radio and is about to take the picture when again JJC interrupts, asking this time for some scent to wear for the photograph. With both the latest sounds and the sweet smell of some imported cologne or perfume in the air, Johnny Just Come is readyfinallyto be photographed. Within this joke, the voicing of provincial desires reminds the listener of a time when one could experience the newness of things in a raw, unsophisticated and un-cultured mannera time that happens in the photograph studio. Surrounded by and holding onto the props of modern living, one is accessorized to enjoy the pleasure provided by the ephemeral things of the world (Appadurai 1996:84): the disc jockey putting on the latest song, the waft of perfume in the air, both of which will fade awayand the watch that was bought because it looked great and still looks great even now when it's no longer telling the time, the watch that will always have an appearance to be photographed. What are we to make of the presence of and emphasis on accessories in Gambian studio photography? Commenting more generally on the genre of African "studioist" work, Okwui Enwezor and Octavia Zaya address the lack of signal emitted by African portrait photography. As viewers, we consume them aesthetically; as critical viewers we wish we could see them ethnographically or politically, to tap into some meaning under the mask. However, this aesthetic is all props and pose. It serves, as Enwezor and Zaya note,

to "undress... the pretense of excavating a deeper meaning from the subject, a meaning that ethnographic framing assumes as its lens pans across the body of the othered subject" (Enwezor and Zaya 1996:25). How then can we make these photographs speak to us? In The Gambia, when people explain why they like posing with an imported electrical item they sound as if they are providing some vernacular account of what it is to live in a world full of goods ever moving along the routes of transnational consumer capitalism (Cf. Wright 1997). For example, one photographer explained the desire to be photographed holding a telephone: "Because it's new to us... Not everyone has one in their home like in the US... Most people have to go out of their home to a telecenter to make a call." Accordingly, studios are sites where people practice consumption as a way of engaging and interrogating modernity. This model works especially well for a furniture display found in many parlors and in most studios that looks like a shrine to globalization: wooden cabinets displaying china knick-knacks, snow globes, the kinds of small plastic toys given away with children's meals, nodding dogs, plastic flowers, shot glasses (Fig. 8). To us this looks like a dated sample of prizes collected at the state fair, like all the stuff no one would buy in the Salvation Army store or the charity shop, that was sold off, packed into cargo units, and shipped next to the crates of secondhand clothes, along the routes of the rag trade in freighters to African ports (see Hansen 1999). "Souvenir" is the name locally given to these thingsan appropriate title that ironically addresses how Gambians, most of whom would never receive an embassy's permission to visit America or the UK, can still possess souvenirs from those places without ever having to leave home! Visiting a studio then, being snapped with a telephone, wearing sunglasses, allows people to look a little Western and become armchair tourists of the modern world. For analysts of the global culture of photography, the practice of holding imported things and standing in front of imported scenes is typical of the ludic postmodernism that lampoons modernity (Appadurai 1997). To deem such activity a parody of realism certainly attends to the mimesis (see Bhabha 1994:8592) that disturbs and fractures the Western gaze. However it is also to depart from that same gaze and vantage point. One is left wondering whose modernity is being lampooned, from whose perspective is reality

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We need Abdoulie Conteh as Chairman ofKMC

Fig. 10. "We need Abdoulie Conteh" (Photograph traded in Banjul 2000)

Fig. 11 ."U.D.P. 1997" (Photograph traded in Banjul 2000)

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being parodied. Granted, this model might tell us something about the photograph as a vehicle for social and symbolic messages, about how, for example, the disempowered take on power (Lippard 1997), and how the "meanings of modernity can be contested and where experiments can be conducted by those not well-placed in relation to class and state power" (Appadurai 1997:15). But this model will say little about the photograph itselfits "photographness"or the ontology that underlies the local aesthetic judgment that a Gambian holding a cassette radio, for example, looks good.
CUTTING EDGE

Gambian studio photographers practice an aesthetic based on techniques aimed at appropriately presenting the surfaces and edges of the depicted person. This practice derives its meaning and style from a wider set of activities involving the work of cutting {dagg) and the creative use of blades. Within the world of Gambian fashion, photography belongs to the same category of adornment work as tailoring (new): individuals move freely between these professions, and tailor shops and studios are usually located in close proximity to one another (sometimes next door to one another). Photographers borrow scissors (siso) from tailors (newkat); tailors borrow blades from photographers. The old storefront art of studios often shows through from under the art that decorates the fronts of tailor shops, suggesting that when photographers abandon stores, tailors move in. Photographers cut up photographs and rearrange photographed surfaces according to a variety of techniques ranging from blade-work to double-exposure. Photographers continually recycle and re-shoot photographs. This is necessary because, as one photographer put it, photographic images are scarce in The Gambia compared with other nations that produce fresh images at will. On the streets and around the markets of Banjul, traders sell a type of image locally called "Double Impact." These are sold specifically as photographs and not postcards, and consist of recycled parts of publicaly-available images drawn from the stuff of public opinion: politicians, pop stars, beauty queens, religious leaders, for example. Set out on the sidewalk, or attached to a board hanging from a trader's shoulders, the selection of such images resembles the magazine rack at the checkout line of a supermarketthe faces

change according to whether or not a personality is currently the talk of the town. Cutting and producing political images frequently generates appeal through the logic of proxemic empowerment (Pinney 1997:171). Positioning a head-andshoulders cut-out of Abdoulie Conteh (a local politician) next to a similar cut-out of President Yahya Jammeh, both of which are laid out on a surface depicting the Gambian flag, works to display and testify to the candidate's ability to "fit" and be seen in the position of chairman of Kanifing Municipal Council (Fig. 9). Similarly, the appearance of cut-out portraits of various members of the opposition party (UDP) next to a series of cut-out numbers enables the viewer to envisage the look of the Legislative Council calendar if Ousainoe Darboe were to win the presidential election (Fig. 10). Finally, the positioning of the cut-out of Cheik Al Shirifu, the "Wonderful Child" and charismatic teacher, next to the president allows the president the appearance of a wise Islamic leader (Fig. 11). When depicting the world of politics, photographers work hard to hide the edges of the cuts, and to provide the final assemblage with some visual coherence. They will mask the cuts by painting them, or by shooting the final image with the focus slightly blurred. In contrast, visible evidence of cutting is highly prized in devotional images depicting the lineages of the West African Sufi ordersthe Muridiyya, Qadiriyya and the Tijaniyya. Visually representing holiness depends upon leaving the cuts obvious in the final image. Thus the construction marks in the photograph of the Tijan family testify to the fact that the picture had to be "made up" because the saints were truly holy and did not spend time away from prayer posing for the camera (Fig. 12). In contrast, the assembled photograph of the marabout from Gunjur fails as a representation of holiness because it does not look assembled enoughhe looks as if he visited a studio (Fig. 13). Occasionally, photographers practice the techniques of "Double Impact" for private commissions made for personal reasons and not for sale to the general public. In these cases the cuts work to envisage the repair of social damage. Hanging up high in the studio of Ebrima Dampha on the Bundung Highway is a photograph of his parents: "My father died when I was seven, I can't really see him in my mind." The photograph is a shot of his father cut from one image, placed next to a cut-out of his mother, taken from a

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YAHYA AJ! i f 1999 " CHEIKH AL A AMMEH^GAMBIA \

Fig, 11. "YayhaAJ.J. Jammeh 1999 Gambia Cheikh Al Shirifu" (Photograph traded in Banjul 2000)

Fig. 12. "Tijaniyya" (Photograph traded in Banjul 2000)

Fig. 13. "Maraboutfrom Gunjur" (Photograph traded in Banjul 2000)

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different image. In recent years, civil war in neighboring countries has brought studio photographers into contact with refugees with distinctive photographic needs. For example, a young man, a refugee from Sierra Leone brought Alpha Sowe, of MTP No. 1 Studio in Serrekunda, two photographs. One depicted the young man, the other a young woman, the man's girlfriend who was at the time unable to leave Freetown for fear of rebel attack. With a small pair of scissors, the photographer carefully cut out each of the depicted persons, removing them from their original settings. He took the cut-outs and placed them on top of a new background so that the cut-outs overlapped, shoulders touching. Sowe photographed the assemblage; the man and the woman could now appear in the same photograph.

and dates back to late 1960s, when clients posed behind large pieces of wood, from which the shape of a heart had been cut. Today, the photographer uses a razor blade to slice into a tiny piece of photographic paper the size of a 35 mm negative. He moves with the hand of an embroiderer. First, he cuts out the shape that will frame the facea key, a tree, a flower, a heart, a fish, an outline of the African continent. Next he works on the caption, making tiny cuts, leaving messages in English and Wolof, sometimes French: one-liners from songs by Yousso Ndour and Bob Marley, the "sweetnuthin's," the chatter of love that talks to keep itself anew and thereby truly heartfelt (see Barthes 1978): ya ma neh, Africa 2000, womat, my heartone loveI like youdon't make me cryyes, sama khol, taku dena, ni la, yoba lema, law lachat, pretty woman,

"- ."

Mr. AL
amour, li ma saf, my sweet lover, ya ma sagal, boule falle, safoula, isn't it pleasing? The use of cutting tools in Gambian photography aims at a form of representation that is more concerned with multiplying surfaces than revealing essences. Cuts frequently appear as the folds that separate individual sections of multiple exposures. When a client chooses this style of portrait, the photographer works with the printer at the lab to produce the desired effect. The negative is turned, reversed and exposed repeatedly, so that the person who posed in front of the camera appears in the finished photograph in a refracted

Fig. 14. Love Signs (Photo: Doudou Jeng, New Millennium Image Hunters, Brikama 2000)

The photographer makes his most careful and steady-handed cuts during the production of the "Love Sign" (Fig. 14). This work requires such a delicacy of touch that many photographers retain employees who never take any pictures, but who work only with blades, designing and executing the small incisions. The "Love Sign" is a way offinishinga portrait by framing it with a stencil-like template containing a shape and a caption. This style of cut arrived in The Gambia from Dakar, Senegal, around 1998; Dukarai, a lab technician and printer of some renown, is credited with its invention. The "look" of this style of portraiture is older, however,

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fashion, doubled, sometimes quadrupled (Fig. 15). In many ways this style resembles the "twin portraits" that are popular in Yoruba photography, whose appeal is animated by the sacred powers associated with twins in Nigeria (Cf. Sprague 1978). In The Gambia, twins (seekh) have comparable powersthe prayers of twin children have a particular potency, for example. However, Gambians do not consider multipleexposures to be twin-like depictions, because the match between the exposures is too exact and mirror-like.9 When I asked Jallow of Serrekunda what a multiexposure actually depicted, he answered that it could show me shaking hands with myself. When I am multiexposedas in a hall of mirrorsI refract and appear with "me" in an image in which my "me-ness" is an accessory to my appearance. As Doudou Jeng, of New Millenium Image Hunters in Brikama, puts it, this style of portrait provides a visual representation of what it is to "day-dream" and to attain the state of being "absentminded." Jeng practices his own style of multiple exposure that does not depend upon the assistance of a printer manipulating a negative in a lab. Instead Jeng works solely with his camera, photographing multiple exposures of the client within the same negative. He names this style "Xool sa bopp"a term in Wolof that literally means "to look at one's head," and more figuratively, to look at one's separate and distanced self:10 A young woman stands in front of a scene of tropical palm trees (Fig. 16). She wears a dress of an imported style, a gold chain necklace, gold earrings.

Her hair is dressed in tight braids. On her right wrist is axalis bracelet, worn for good fortune and health; on her left wrist a watch and a gold chain bracelet. On her left hand, two fingers wear rings. Her arms are at her sides and her head tilts forwards and down, her eyes lowered and are out of sight. The effect is that she is looking at and contemplating the image of herself that is appearing in the top half of her body. This is a closer view, a head and shoulders portrait. The eyes are not lowered, but are rather in full view. The top of the head falls within bounds established by the shoulders of the contemplative portrait. In turn, the shoulders of her head move in a curve that follows the hips of the longer portrait. A young woman stands in front of a bamboo forest scene (Fig. 17). She appears from the waist-up in the right half of the photograph. She wears a locally styled dress; around her neck is a gold chain necklace, and her hair is dressed with braids. She raises her left arm to include the bracelet in the photograph. She poses her neck, tilting her head to the left, raising her shoulder, tilting the right side of her body down. A second image appears in the middle of the photograph. Details of the woman's face appear to float, without the face itself, disembodied and opaquely, on the surface of the bamboo forest scenewe see eyes, nose, and lipswe know these features belong to her. These facial details tilt at the same angle as the head to the leftthey appear as a telescopic projection of the left side portrait. They are a projection but not an exact copy. Both portraits overlap at a point where eye, cheek, and mouth double-

Fig. 15. Multiple exposure (Photo: Doudou Jeng, New Millennium Image Hunters, Brikama 2000)

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w^ t

Fig. 16. Xool Sa Bopp (Photo: Doudou Jeng, New Millennium Image Hunters, Brikama2000)

Fig. 17. Xool Sa Bopp (Photo: Doudou Jeng, New Millennium Image Hunters, Brikama 2000)

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have been close together, while bringing into proximity up on the shoulder of the dress. the once-distant. A young woman stands with her back to the camera, So styled, these photographed bodies appear twistturning slightly to her right, showing the right side of ed, stretched and yet stable. They are "robust"they her face in profile (Fig. 18). Her hair is dressed, straightretain their "body-ness" no matter how much they are ened, and a braided bun pinned at the back of the head. disturbed. As such, they provide a visual antidote for A gold earring hangs from her right ear lobe. A gold the other types of images, found outside the studio, that chain hangs at the back of her neck. The woman's also depict the bodies made up of cuts and separations, second exposure is a head and shoulders shot, framed albeit violently. For exwithin the space of her ample, they appear turned back. In this along side street-bought exposure, we see a gold photographs depicting earring hanging from Samuel Doe, the former her left ear, the front of president of Liberia, his the necklace, and the body laid out on a front of her face, stretcher, naked and slightly turned to the dead. The fingers of his lefts, her eyes looking right hand are gone down to the side in a they have been cut off, chattubot style that as have his genitals. A women exhibit not only group of soldiers, some for portraits but also of them Gambian, stand while dancing. The around the stretcher. woman's back frames \., Similarly, these studio her close-up, frontal I portraits occupy a part portrait. The dress' of a local imagination shoulder straps appear that is also inhabited by twicefirst, on the the images of atrocity woman's shoulders, that accompany civil and second, in the area unrest. During my fieldof her hips. work, there were many Xool sa bopp is a refugees from Sierra form of depicting the Leone living in Banjul body by means of split and the areas around representation and the Serrekunda. During one dislocation of details week, GRTS (Gambia into objects in their own Radio and Television right (see Levi-Strauss Service) showed the 1967:239-263). The documentary "Cry portrait shows the toFig. 18. Xool Sa Bopp (Photo: Doudou Jeng, New Millennium Freetown" every night pological universe of Image Hunters, Brikama2000) on television. Every the body twisting and night of the week, it practicingor perhaps sufferinga combination of transformations. The seemed, everybody sat down to watch it. I watched it portrait presents us with a record of the points in the only once, finding it unbearablethis record of the body's trajectory as it oscillates like a dancer, revealing myriad of ways one can mutilate a person's body. I was the range of its possibilities. In the multiplication and traveling in a taxi one day when news of the capture of dislocation of photographed surfaces, we get a sense of the RUF (Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone) leader a dynamic that cuts apart and separates points that may Foday Sanko came over the radio on the BBC World

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\
i

*M

Mm
'if

Fig. 19. Multiple exposure (photo: SahrEllie, 1978)

Service's "Focus on Africa." At the end of the report, my fellow passengers spoke of what should happen to Sanko now that he was in detention. They spoke of how he should be cut up, his legs amputated, his right eye poked outthey had very precise ideas of what should happen to him. The visual aesthetic for the studio multi-exposure and the excessive images of limbless persons is the same. In both cases, visual media technology records the surface of the body as it is rotated and twisted, extended and self-embedded. This process, I suggest, provides us with an idiom for describing aesthetics after colonialism, as well as the experience of postcolonial change. Similarly, we can also locate the look of Gambian postcoloniality in the studio portrait styles. The visual effect of the multiple exposure owes as much to people's familiarity with the look of Mami Wata, the local mythic mermaid-goddess of fashion, as it does to their daily encounter with the founding image-form of both colonial regimes and modern nation-states: the identification photograph (Fig. 19). Passport photographs play a central role in the livelihood of the photographerthey provide most of

his daily income. Much "double impact" work is done with passport photographs. Alpha Sowe showed me a picture of a father with his son who had recently died. Sowe had taken a passport photograph of this young man just before his death and made a cut-out of his head and shoulders. Next, the photographer visited the deceased's father, an imam, and photographed him, in his study, surrounded by books, posed as if he were praying. With a razor blade, Sowe made a cut in the photograph into the side of the father's right shoulder, into which he then slid the shoulder of the cut-out of the sonjoining the two in one photograph. Frequently, a photographer will put as much effort in taking a passport picture as he will for any other kind of photograph. A passport picture is a portrait, after all. If the client likes the passport picture, there will the chance of enlargements being ordered and further sales. Many people save their out-of-date ID cards, keeping them in albums so as to save the photographs. The same album might contain the treasure of the only photograph taken of a long dead relativean enlarged passport photograph (Fig. 20). Outside the studio, passport photographs are nec-

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essary items whenever one has any encounter with any sort of official agency in The Gambiain addition to voting, one needs to carry a photo ID, for example, when traveling anywhere (in case one passes through a security checkpoint), when opening a bank account, or applying for a job. In the history of photography in The Gambia, the obligation to pose for an identification photograph during the first national census and voter registration drive was for most Gambians, throughout the country, the first experience of encountering a

Independence, of the Republic of The Gambia. The colors and design of the national flag frequently adorn the borders of street-bought photographs as well as the walls of studio-fronts. Furthermore, the photographers who established the first studios in The Gambia earned the money that covered their set-up costs by managing the logistics of photographing the population for the first national census. Yet, in its Gambian context, the act of taking passport photographs establishes a national photographic practice that is contra-modern, in

Fig. 20. Enlarged passport photograph, private album, EboTown (photo: Liam Buckley 2000)

photographer and being photographed. As such in The Gambia, the passport photograph is something of a national art form that works to substantiate the intimacy of relationships of both the photographer with his clients, and the state with its citizens. Finally, when we "read" photographs as photographs, what knowledge of the world do we gain? Answering this question immediately depends upon the attitude towards itour assumptions regarding the historical conditions surrounding the emergence of Gambian studio photography (see Foucault 1972:4049). Certainly, studio photographs are objects of

which the techniques of modernity animate behavior that falls beyond the spheres of rationalism, efficiency, and governmentality. Although the photographed surface marks a site of allegiance, the shine that surrounds the accessorized portrait-subject reveals a statu.s that is personal and that does not belong to the state. Furthermore, as a follower of fashion, a person can appear shiny without having to own the shine. Photography, then, depicts a form of personal status that is not informed by the logic of possessive individualism. Studio-based accounts of the transition from colonialism to independence describe a history moving

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from a time when photographs portrayed jikko to the time of jamano-style portraits. Common to both of the faces of postcolonialityits before and afteris the absent allegiance of the photographed person to the state in both its colonial and modern national forms. Colonial authorities may have been worried by the idea of colonial subjects "getting possession [of photography] and using it as an instrument of subversion by showing the true conditions of their people" (Monti 1987:8). However, when the hands of the colonized took control of the camera, they produced studio work that had little to do with the politics of anti-colonialism (Enwezor and Zaya 1996:30). Indeed those photographers who took government contracts at Gambian Independence worked hard to disassociate their work from any kind of politics, refusing the frequent offer of full-time employment in the nation's new civil service. Thus from the time of Independence, when photographers played a key role in mediating people's experience of becoming national and "no-longer-colonized," the practice of portrait photography was not political. Furthermore, by refusing to make political articulation and by emphasizing the appearance of imported accessories, Gambian studio photography is typical of that aspect of African popular culture that is not concerned specifically with "transcending colonialism" and that appears to be "remarkably insensitive tonot so much dismissive of as blind tothe issue of neocolonialism or 'cultural imperialism'" (Appiah 1992:149). In other words, while the political economy of postcolonial transnationalism may serve some structuring role in the layout of the Gambian studio, the persons who pose there do not necessarily view their depiction in these terms (see Spivak 1988). Thus, Area, a "Sapeur" (member of SAPEthe Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance), declares that "war just isn't my thing." He borrows a suit and travels out of the conflictzone to a nightclub to appear in a fashion competition, and leaves victorious. Tonight, his only fear need be the rain that could ruin his hair (Bitemo 1999:158). Rather than dismissing the "a-political" air of studio photography as an effect of some ideological mystification on the part of photographers and their clients, we would do well to take it seriously. Studio photography gives breathing space to an aspect of the imagination that is not allied to any particular side or politics. It attends to that part of a person engaged with the immediacy of experience, often ignored by politics

and always celebrated in fashionfalling in love, longing, being lonely with heartache, feeling on top of the world, feeling left behind.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I received funding for research in The Gambia, 19992000, from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. In The Gambia, the following people assisted me in collecting the data used in this paper. Stephen Amat Bahoum, Pa Sega Gaye, Lamin Sanyang, Malick Secka, Ousman Njie, Cornelius Gomez, Sahr Ellie, Doudou Jeng, Muntaga Jallow, Ansoman Ceesay, Madi Kuyabu, and Mbye Seine. In Charlottesville, Virginia, I wish to thank Carroll Ann Friedmann, George Mentore, J. David Sapir, and Adria LaViolette for their helpful comments. A version of this paper was presented before the Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, 26th October 2001.
NOTES

1. Compare with the Yoruba idea of clarity, ifarahon (Sprague 1978:54). 2. The image is to be found in Pinney (1997:65). Many of the photographers with whom I worked enjoyed looking at this book. 3. For an account of the way body parts change in importance see Renne (1996). 4. For more on this dynamic see Irvine (1974, 1989, 1990); Wright (1989). 5. Older and more experienced photographers often tease their younger counterparts, charging them with knowing nothing about cameras other than the flash. 6. This idea of shine is drawn from Bakhtin's concept of "refraction" (Bahktin 1981:432). On the shine of fashion, see Simmel (1950:340-343), Cixous (1994:97), Schoss (1996). 7. Aesthetic change can also be judged negatively: every time I traveled into Banjul from Serrekunda, and exited the "bush-taxi" at the corner of Allen Street, I would see a painted sign on a wall that read "Do Not Urinate Here." With the proverb in mind, I asked my research consultant, Pa Sega Gaye, whether it would be possible to reverse the logic of its wisdom if the jikko (character) of individuals were to change, if they stopped urinating on walls in the street, then the jamano would change as a result. This was not possible, 1 was

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told. The population of Banjul had changed dramatically since the 1970s. The original Banjulians had moved out to Fajara and Serrekunda, being replaced by a different demographic with a different jikkowhich included, for some at least, the habit of urinating against walls. It was not jikko that had changed, but jamano which places, sorts, and locates different combinations ofjikko'd persons. Jamano had changed the population of Banjul, had drawn in people from the provinces, and was responsible for the stench of urine at the corner of Allen Street. 8. The watch that stops is a central motif in the movie Udju Azul di Yonta (The Blue Eyes ofYonta), a portrayal of post-Independence society, set in Guinea-Bissea. 9. The visual appeal of "twin-ness" might also come from the chance to look like a movie star. In The Gambia, video-cassette films from India and Nigeria, frequently portraying "twin," good-evil, characters are very popular. 10. "Xool Sa Bopp" is part of a Gambian aesthetic lineage that dates back to the early 1970s and Malick Secka's studio Ifange a Mandinka term describing the act of self-appraisal.
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Latour, Bruno 1993 We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levi-Strauss, Claude 1967 Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America. Pp. 239-263. In Structural Anthropology . New York: Anchor Books. Lippard, Lucy 1997 Frames of Mind. Afterimage 24(5):8-12 Masqualier, Adeline 1996 "Mediating Threads: Clothing and the Texture of Spirit/Medium Relations in Bori (Southern Niger)." In Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa. Hildi Hendrickson, ed. Pp. 66-94. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mercer, Kobena 1995 Home from Home: Portraits from Places in Between. In Self Evident (Exhibition Catalogue). Birmingham, England: Ikon Gallery. Miller, Daniel 1997 Modernity, An Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad. Oxford: Berg. Mofokeng, Santu 1999 The Black Photo Album. In Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography. Pp. 68-75. Paris: Revue Noire. Monenembo, Tierno 1999 Portrait of My Grandfather. In Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography. Pp. 207207. Paris: Revue Noire. Monti, Nicolas 1987 Africa Then. New York: Knopf. Pinney, Christopher 1997 Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Renne, Elisha P. 1996 Virginity Cloths and Vaginal Coverings in Ekiti, Nigeria. In Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa. H. Hendrickson, ed. Ppp. 19-33 Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schoss, Johanna 1996 Dressed to 'Shine': Work, Leisure and Style in Malindi, Kenya. In Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa. Hildi Hendrickson, ed. Pp. 157-188. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Simmel, Georg 1950 Adornment. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Pp. 338-344. New York: Free Press. 1971 Fashion. In On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spencer, Frank 1992 Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply Photography to Anthropometry during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century. In Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920. Elizabeth Edwards, ed. Pp. 99107. New Haven: Yale University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 1988 Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds. Pp. Pp. 271-313. Macmillan Education: Basingstoke. Sprague, Stephen 1078 Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves. African Arts 12(l):52-59. Thompson, Robert Farris 1993 An Aesthetic of Cool. In Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas: Selected Readings. J. C. Berlo and L. A. Wilson, eds. Pp. 22-35. Englewood: Prentice Hall. Tutuola, Amos 1994 The Palm-Wine Drinkard. New York: Grove Press. Wagner, Ulla 1981 Tourism and the Gambia: Dependency. Ethnos 46:190-206. Wagner, Ulla and Bawa Yamba 1986 Going North and Getting Attached: The Case of the Gambians. Ethnos 51:199-223 Wendl, Tobias 1999 Portraits and Scenery in Ghana. In Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography. Pp. 142155. Paris: Revue Noire. Wright, Bonnie L. 1989 The Power of Articulation. In Creativity and Power: Cosmology and Action in African Societies. W. Arens and I, Karp, eds. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Wright, Donald 1997 The World and a Very Small Place in Africa. New York: M.E. Sharpe.

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