Harriet Walker
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Abstract
As a social practice, photography is structured like language; it belongs to the symbolic order imbedded in social beliefs and institutions, yet it is a hybrid form of communication with multiple culturally determined functions. In this paper, I look at some specific photographic practices in Ghana that began in the 1950s to suggest that, while associated with modernity, they draw upon the conventions and codes of more traditional forms of social communication.
Beneath the surface of photographs, like the text embedded in Akan traditional art forms, are layers of connotative, culturally specific meaning. Studio photographers have encoded spoken and visual proverbs in portraits using culturally understood gestures and props as well as textiles and backdrops to communicate the desires of clients who wish to achieve their social potential. Like traditional textiles, photographs are worn to express political views and lineage group solidarity, and like traditional pottery, sculpture, and textiles, they mark rites of passage and indicate a family's status and religious beliefs.
Rather than having a single, fixed meaning, photography borrows and cross-references meanings between culturally specific forms of communication. Henry Fox Talbot conceived of the photographic process as nature writing—a text that could describe the reality of the visual world. For Ghanaian studio photographers, the text in the photographic process is the time-honored Akan tableau of metaphoric meanings that have been shaped by traditional beliefs concerning the importance of destiny and social roles as well as a dynamic vision of reality that includes the unseen world.