Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2022
Photography which has traditionally been classified as “ethnographic” or “anthropological” has received considerable attention in recent years and some of the major contributions to the field have been on African images, presenting analytical histories of photographic production and use, for instance Geary's analysis of photographs of Bamum in the Cameroon Grassfields (1988). I am not going to review this literature or the particular issues raised by it as there have been various such useful exercises, for instance Geary (1991) and Roberts (1988); nor am I going to consider the merits of specific collections because this would merely regurgitate much of what was said on the subject, and subsequently published (Roberts 1989a), during a two day seminar convened by Andrew Roberts which took place at S.O.A.S. London in 1988.