ABSTRACT
In his introductory essay to A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010 curator and art historian Simon Njami argues that photography has offered a way for African photographers to fracture the West’s “monopoly on seeing” (2010, 12). He writes: “The reversed mirror that the colonized peoples started to present to the world from the 1950s onwards showed the beginnings of the internalization and deconstruction of the images that went before” (13). For Njami this “reversed mirror” does not so much reflect or represent the real but rather is a site for reflection, one that leads us to consider questions of being. In his reading, photographs are philosophical objects that capture our experience of “dédoublement, or duality” (12) and that provide a means for figuring and refiguring our inner states in relation to the external world. The uncanny ability of photography to return us to past events also alters our experience of time.
