The Afterlife of a Colonial Photographic Archive: The Subjective Legacy of InforCongo

After the dominant popularity of early studio photography among African art scholars, curators, and dealers, the official photographic agencies that flourished on the continent after World War II became the subject of studies of multiple researchers. Usually kept in public institutions, these bodies of images are mediated through different archives such as museums, embassies, libraries, government offices, or private companies. This article provides an ethnography of “archive-as-subject” rather than “archive-as-source.” It examines the constellation of sites and guardians of the InforCongo archives, created in 1950 by the colonial authorities in the Belgian Congo. Based on research conducted in Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), my article then examines the disparate postcolonial lives of this archive and, in particular, the subjective relation to it visible in its trajectories and variations in preservation.