The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast by Prita Meier

The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast explores the history of photography from the Swahili Coast, arguing that in this region, photography was a medium that created connections across and beyond oceans. Meier seeks to understand the meanings of the experience of oceanic photography and the significance of archipelagic space in shaping photographic meaning. To achieve these two goals, she studies the reception of photography in the main port cities of East Africa’s Swahili Coast. Looking at a region that had long-lasting global connections via land and sea, Meier uses photography, and mainly photographic portraits, to rethink the idea of modernity in art history and African art history.

Drawing on 200 photographs, published for the first time, the book is divided into seven chapters, in addition to an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter 1, “Itinerant Photographers,” provides contextual elements of the emergence of photography on the Swahili Coast, and despite underlining how local slavery in this region and elsewhere in Africa differed from slavery in the Atlantic world, the chapter brings to light many similarities, including how British officials introduced measures to contain formerly enslaved people that were very similar to the measures they implemented in the British West Indies in the 1830s. Some of the photographs featuring enslaved people are disturbingly similar to nineteenth-century photographs of enslaved boys in Brazil, except that here, slave owners are not individuals racialized as white. The reader is also led to explore the interiors of the houses of merchants and missionaries in Zanzibar and Mombasa, where photographs are displayed alongside all kinds of furniture and decorative objects from different parts of the world. These settings shed light on how the households of these social actors were connected to the world, and how photography played a crucial role in nurturing these links.

Chapter 2, “Stilled Life,” discusses photographs of Swahili women and girls from many museums and archives in France, Austria, the United States, and the United Kingdom, bringing to light the connections between beauty and violence. Meier reminds us that nearly all accounts of Indian Ocean slavery state that the lives of enslaved women were much worse in the Atlantic world. Through her work on the photographs of these women in this chapter, she wants to reckon with this falsehood. Another important element in these photographs is that they feature “white” enslaved women from the Caucasus region, highlighting how the racialization of slavery was sometimes more complicated in the Indian Ocean. Several of these full-body portraits show abused naked girls. These pictures circulated in a variety of forms, which Europeans bought to create their own albums and scrapbooks. In Chapter 3, “Oceans of Postcards,” Meier explores how these photographs also circulated via postcards, a practice that also existed in West Africa and North Africa, thereby highlighting how Europeans racialized African sub-jects by adding ethnic descriptors to the portraits. Some of these postcards featured elite women and girls posing in studios in Zanzibar and Mombasa. Other postcards, however, show ordinary girls and women engaged in hair-dressing activities in public settings, which for European men meant they were sexually available. As Meier notes, many of the pictures featured on these postcards, taken in the colonial context of the end of the nineteenth century, portray enslaved women or young women in positions of depen-dency. Chapter 4, “The Ornamental Body,” returns to the issue of slavery explored in Chapter 2, highlighting the demand for ornamented enslaved women and girls (known as wapambe) as exotic subjects. In many of these pictures, enslaved women and girls are heavily adorned, posing wrapped in textiles. By presenting their ornamented bodies, slave owners not only commodified their bodies but also displayed their symbolic prestige through slave ownership. Other photographs show large groups of women and girls who performed extremely heavy work in colonial construction.

In the second part of the book, Chapter 5, “Trading the Gaze,” draws on the established practice of gift exchanges in the region to discuss portraits as gifts. Meier explores how gifting all kinds of portraits featuring local important men and authorities, including in the format of cartes de visite, was embraced as part of trading exchanges among elite members of Swahili coastal societies. Chapter 6, “Sartorial Subversion,” examines how ways of dressing in photographic portraits staged resistance. Meier shows how young men fashioned themselves as dandies in these pictures, challenging European control over the ways Africans dressed, a tension particularly vis-ible in photographs featuring European colonizers along with East African sitters. Chapter 7, “Pose and Appearance,” explores how women and poorer populations commissioned photos and embraced poses and fashions from other societies. The book concludes with a beautiful methodological medi-tation about studying photographs as moving objects that circulate across time and space.

The Surface of Things challenges the old assumption that modernity must be addressed from a North Atlantic perspective, in which Africa is cast as peripheral. Instead, it conceives modernity as fluid, oceanic, and archipelagic. Through this approach, Meier disrupts the usual view that places African subjects as exotic models commodified in European photography, showing how East African subjects engaged with and embraced photography in many different ways. One of the several ways the book innovates in its contribution to the history of East African art and the history of photography in Africa is its approach to photographs not through what they represent but as objects that reached the Swahili Coast in the 1860s as foreign artifacts represent-ing distant places and peoples, which were sold with other objects in local markets. Meier explains that people living along the Swahili Coast gradually appropriated these photographs to decorate their homes and to connect themselves to global networks. She shows how photographs acquired mean-ing after they were produced and as they circulated through the hands of different people and across various places along the Swahili Coast between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. In this process, these photographs became multidirectional sites of memory where Europe, Asia, and Africa meet. By doing so, The Surface of Things contributes not only to the discipline of art history, especially in the field of African and East African art history, but also to the disciplines of history and anthropology in fields such as the history of Africa, the African diaspora, slavery, and the global history of material culture.

Meier’s book will be greatly useful to historians and art historians strug-gling to interpret images of enslaved and free African men, women, and children during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. Meier not only offers ways to interrogate these images on the surface for what they represent, but she also provides a variety of tools to allow her readers to understand how and why people used these photographs, how they engaged them, what they meant to them, and the role these photographs played in Swahili coastal societies more broadly. Also, from a purely “docu-mentary” perspective, the book makes available an enormous collection of photographs that allows us to observe many dimensions of the lives of men and women, free and enslaved, living on the Swahili Coast, including their tastes and material world, between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Beautifully written and very accessible, the book will also be a welcome addition in graduate and undergraduate syllabi of courses in art history, African history, history of the African diaspora, as well as visual and material culture.