The Future from Yesterday: Photographic Archiving Practices in Nigeria

After the first permanent photograph was taken in 1826 by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, several other inventions have followed in the history of photography. Notable among them were those made by the French painter and chemist, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot, George Eastman and Oskar Barnack.

Early in the 19th century, Nigeria and the rest of Africa began to embrace photography. Several photographic studios and darkrooms were established in major cities of Africa including Lagos, Ibadan, Kaduna, Jos, Dakar, Bamako, Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, etc. Most photographs were taken in black and white and, later, in colour. The majority of photographers processed their black and white films in their darkrooms and kept a good record of their negatives, using imported negative holders.

With the introduction of the Quick Service System (QSS) by colour labs, most photographers began to rely on their services, and there was a shift from the use of black and white film to colour. Gradually, the number of darkrooms began to dwindle. Today, there does not seem to be a single functional commercial black and white darkroom in Nigeria. Despite this shift in medium, photographers still largely kept their negatives.

The advent of digital photography in the early 2000s began to put pressure on photographers, forcing them to decide what to do with their negatives as they would also need to create space for their new processing acquisitions such as computers, printers, external hard drives, etc. With more photographers working digitally these days, it is not uncommon for the negatives of a photographer to be discarded or destroyed for lack of space and for lack of interest due to the societal shift to digital photography. This is a sad reality, as the importance of preservation in photography cannot be overemphasised.

Preservation is the process of properly storing photographs and negatives in a place where they can be protected from elements that can damage them. Such preservation processes can be challenging within Nigeria and many other African countries due to the heat and humidity of the tropical weather. Lack of knowledge in preservation and conservation can be a major reason archives cannot be kept or sustained.

For analogue archives to survive, photographers on the continent must create processes that will address the challenging weather conditions. One of the best ways to preserve photographs and negatives is to scan and digitise them, and store them on hard drives, ensuring images made yesterday can last a lifetime. Hard drives can become damaged or corrupted, so it is good practice to make multiple copies of the hard drives, and use cloud storage as an offsite backup to mitigate physical loss or damage. Such requirements may not come cheap for the average Nigerian photographer. Nevertheless, the importance of photographic archives is not diminished, and Nigerian photographers need to seek affordable means to preserve their images if they wish their archives to last for future generations.

Today, by providence, the responsibility of managing and caring for my father’s archive rests upon my shoulders. He had a simple but effective method of preservation. Some of the negatives are still in the same envelopes after 50 years. These negatives are mostly still in good condition, although some have been lost due to weather damage and rodents. The archives continue to be an important resource for scholars, museum owners and custodians of culture all over the world.