John Ryle profiles Pierre Verger. Buckley Photography Colonialism. Home — Cultural Anthropology. Photography and Photo-Elicitation after Colonialism — Cultural Anthropology. With the growing interest in colonial photography, researchers—often anthropologists and museum curators—routinely take artifacts of this work back to the site of their original production to elicit data on the content and response to the images (e.g., Day and Leizaola 2012; Geismar and Herle 2010; Young 1998).
This scholarship attempts to present local and alternative knowledge of the history of colonialism recorded in the photographs. With this in mind, I approached my fieldwork in The Gambia, West Africa, expecting to gather historical narratives and subaltern commentary on the politics of the colonial past. I received nothing of the sort. Instead, I listened to extended commentaries on the appearance of the photographs—how they looked “old”; evaluations of the people and objects depicted; guessing of the brand names of the cars and bicycles in the images; and criticisms of photographic composition.