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Letters

Letter 3: Impact

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Header: blend of photographs made at Markato in Addis Ababa by Paul Julien in 1955 (PJU-colour slides box 6) Collection Nederlands Fotomuseum) and me (digital photographs, August 2019)

 

From a radio lecture, broadcasted in 1933
“Gbarnga is an economic hub […] with a level of activity one wouldn’t expect in central Liberia. It is the seat of a District Commissioner, Mr. Ross, for whom I carried a letter from the president giving him the assignment to assist my expedition. It had been difficult along the way to get access to the materials needed for my blood research so any assistance was more than welcome. Mr. Ross went to the market with me, asked the people to squat and, helped by an interpreter, addressed them: “A powerful witch-man came to the village, a sorcerer, a big medicine man. Tomorrow 8am all those suffering from pest, all the lepers, all those with yaws should come to the courthouse to be examined and give blood.” There was obviously a misunderstanding and the man took me to be a medical doctor. I hurried to whisper in the commissioner’s ear that I would prefer healthy people. The messenger shouted: “The healthy should also come, women, children all should come. The whole village should come. Understood?” A loud applause was the result. 
Early the next morning I was busy preparing for the research. Eight am there was nobody there. Nine, nobody, quarter past nine Mr. Ross grew nervous and sent out a group of messengers to force the people, with violence if need be, to the courthouse. It was all in vain. The village was completely deserted. The whole community had fled into the forest, and I may add that they did not return before I left a couple of days later.”
PJU-1868, [The interpreter of Mr. Ross (on the far right of the photograph) addressing the people at the market of Gbarnga, Liberia, August 1932]. Collection Nederlands Fotomuseum
From an interview with Julien published in 1960. 
“I can imagine that someone who collects blood samples is thought of as a medical doctor. There are of course photographs on which I am taking or analysing these samples while surrounded by a group of Negroes. I always tell them that I have come to see their diseases. They would not understand my true interests and also, I have been able to help many people with medication, injections and dressing of wounds. The authorities of course know better.”[1]The radio lecture was broadcasted by the K.R.O., the interview was published by the ‘Katholieke Illustratie’. Both media had a national reach and a Catholic denomination. Julien also operated, … Continue reading
Illustration (based on negative filed as PJU-656 exposure 3) with the quoted interview. Personal collection.
Addis Ababa, Wednesday August 7th 2019
Dear Dr. Julien,
Sixty-four years after you briefly visited this town, on your way to South Western Ethiopia, I am in Addis Ababa. Yesterday I visited Itegue Taitu Hotel, where you spent your first nights in the country. I brought a print of the Kodachrome slide you made of the accommodation. The host I met was surprised to see how much changed since 1955. He showed me where you once stood, looking down towards the building behind the restaurant and the tennis court on its right. A banner and a truck now blocked the view. The tennis court, the host informed me, had long gone. Meanwhile time seemed to have stood still in the restaurant itself. While enjoying my lunch it was easy to imagine you coming down the stairs any moment.
Dining hall of Itegue Taitu Hotel, August 6th 2019.
PJU-colour slides box 6 [Itegue Taitu Hotel, Addis Ababa, 1955]. Collection Nederlands Fotomuseum.
While I type this letter on my laptop computer a documentary titled ‘The Great Hack’[2]‘The Great Hack’, Noujaim & Amer, released January 2019, distributed by Netflix, USA is playing on the television set of my host, artist Michael Tsegaye. This film addresses the theft of personal data shared on the internet, a phenomenon you may remember emerging in the late 1990s. The stolen data was used to influence national elections without the ‘provider’ being aware of it. You too collected data from individuals you encountered on your journeys without their informed consent. This therefore seems to be an appropriate moment to share some thoughts with you about the relation between our respective ambitions and the effects our actions had and could have. In other words, this letter is about impact.
Last Monday I did a presentation for a group of Ethiopian photographers and designers. After speaking about my way of working[3]See the pp.13-30 of my dissertation (https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/67951) and the first letter to Julien on Bridging Humanities. I showed them the photographs and films you produced here. I added translated information from your notebook and from newspaper clippings reporting on a public lecture with “Shankala” as its title. Michael told me that Shankala, Amharic for black[4]See Shinn & Ofcansky, p. 363, ‘Ethiopian Historical Dictioary’, Scarecrow Press , is now considered to be a derogatory term because it was used to refer to people with dark skin as well as to slaves. I decided to avoid using the word. I did, however, use ‘Negroe’ and ‘Pygmy’ when quoting you while I am well aware that these words are considered to be offensive too. Their past and present day uses by non-black people like you and me emphasize differences between people with different position of power. They generate a distance I consider to be problematic. One of the members of the audience was indeed offended by me using the words, while others argued that the messenger should not be shot here. 
Composite of exposures 5 and 6 from film PJU-657. Collection Nederlands Fotomuseum.
It was not the first time I encountered this kind of response to the work I, as a white European, do on the African continent or to the historical materials I bring to the table. I take this to be a reply to the privileged positions that both you and I have and use to come, ‘take’ whatever it is we need and leave again. This observation could result in a dismissal of ‘your’ photographs because it reduces their meaning to your position as a maker. Such a judgment, however, also dismisses the possible agency and relevance of the visibility of the people, places and objects you photographed. It eliminates the potential impact of the accessibility of the photographs for them, and the possibility for people in ‘the West’ to learn from them. In order for this potential to unfold I take it to be my responsibility to explain to who-ever I encounter and work with what the purpose of my visit is. This may lead to uncomfortable situations, as was the case with the person I offended, despite my attempts to carefully position my words, yet it cannot result in being less honest about my intentions. Which reminds me of a question I wanted to ask. You repeatedly mention in your writing how the ‘natives’ you met were rude, primitive or dishonest. Did it ever occur to you that they may have, rightfully, thought the same of you? 
Governmental press conference, July 15th 2014, Monrovia, Liberia.
With regards to your first major scientific expedition in 1932 I have a more particular but related concern. July 2014 I was in Liberia for the third time. During earlier visits I followed the same route you travelled eighty-two years earlier. I visited, as I mentioned in the previous letter, descendants of ‘King’ Kwei Dokie and prepared an exhibition of your photographs in the National Museum in Monrovia, that was now about to open. Ebola, a deadly and highly contagious virus, had been raging through the region for a couple of months. The crisis related to it reached a new height in the week before the planned exhibition opening. I was invited to speak about the show during the weekly governmental press conference while Ebola was, of course, its major topic. After providing the journalists who were present with numerous facts about the virus, the Minister of Health addressed the people of Liberia directly through the microphones and cameras in the room: ”You should not be afraid of the health workers, because they too get sick”. I found it hard to believe my ears. As if the Minister was aware of this he repeated the remark several times. Then I remembered reading the anecdote on the population of Gbarnga fleeing town because of the way in which the district commissioner had communicated the purpose of your visit. Is it possible that you, and others with related missions, contributed to the continued fear of western medicine that the minister tapped into? Would you do things differently now? 
And also, going back to a more general concern about impact, would it make sense for you to be decentered from the meaning and value of the photographs you produced? This question as well as the others asked earlier will stay with me as I work my way towards the next letter. 
With best regards,
Andrea
p.s. I almost forgot. Yesterday the first proof of your presence on the African continent from someone else’s perspective also reached me. Johan Helland, an emeritus anthropologist specialised in issues concerning the Horn of Africa, replied to the electronic letter I sent him. He was the eight-year-old son of the Norwegian family with whom you spent a night in Southern Ethiopia. He recognised all the adults on a group portrait I attached to the letter. You took the picture at the mission in Neghelle. Johan does not remember you himself but recalls his mother mentioning an anthropologist who was on his way to research ‘pygmies’ and visit Lake Stephanie. The failure to achieve both these goals of your Ethiopian expedition and the way you, nevertheless, transformed your experiences into a public lecture might just become the topic of my next letter.
PJU-637, exposure 1. Mission Neghelle, Ethiopia, July/August 1955. Collection Nederlands Fotomuseum.
An earlier version of this letter was published in the first issue of ‘Trigger’, an annual publication of FoMu, the photography museum in Antwerp, Belgium

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References

References
1 The radio lecture was broadcasted by the K.R.O., the interview was published by the ‘Katholieke Illustratie’. Both media had a national reach and a Catholic denomination. Julien also operated, next to his ideas about science, from a Catholic worldview.
2 ‘The Great Hack’, Noujaim & Amer, released January 2019, distributed by Netflix, USA
3 See the pp.13-30 of my dissertation (https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/67951) and the first letter to Julien on Bridging Humanities.
4 See Shinn & Ofcansky, p. 363, ‘Ethiopian Historical Dictioary’, Scarecrow Press
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Letters

Letter 2: Positioning

Leiden, March 22nd 2019
Dear Dr. Julien, 
Following up on the previous letter in which I introduced myself as well as my interest in your photographs, I would like to share some thoughts with you about the way you and I manoeuvre between – and make use of different disciplines. Pointing out some of the similarities and differences between us will, hopefully, explain what I started to do with your photographs and why.  
I’ll take the academic disciplines we wish to engage in and our dissertations as vantage points. It seems to me that we both are primarily interested in anthropology. This is not the most obvious academic discipline for either one of us, taking into consideration that your doctorate, as I only recently found out when trying to read your dissertation, was obtained in ‘math and physics’ at Utrecht University and mine in a programme for artists and designers offered by Leiden University. We both start our inquiries with multiple disciplines at play. The question then is how these disciplines related or relate to each other. 
In academic discourses across the humanities and social studies the word ‘interdisciplinarity’ is currently ‘en vogue’. The term, signifying “the combining of two or more academic disciplines into one activity”, usually implies something that is desirable and productive, but how and when the drawing of knowledge from several fields or disciplines into one particular context actually leads to added value, to a whole that is more than an (often unequal) accumulation of its parts, is rarely clear and I have not yet seen it addressed in a satisfying way. In an attempt to address this in relation to our practices I would like to first give some thought to the two components of the notion: ‘Inter’ and ‘disciplinarity’.
The word disciplinarity builds, of course on discipline, which can signify both a distinct subdivision of knowledge as well as “the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behaviour”. Building on these two meanings disciplinarity is a framework that allows specialised discourse to unfold and a factor that limits the exploration of possibilities through rules and codes. 
The prefix ‘inter’ signifies an in between. Alternative prefixes in relation to disciplinarity are intra- (within or inside), multi- (involving several or many disciplines), cross- (beyond disciplines, combining disciplines) and trans- (the union of interdisciplinary efforts).
Besides it may not be bad to take into account that to ‘inter’ as a verb signifies the activity of burying a dead body, as it might have to lead to the conclusion that to go from disciplinarity to interdisciplinarity implies the end of the relevance of the subdivisions of knowledge involved. On that note I’ll return to the ways in which each of us was disciplined.
Knowing that you taught chemistry in a high school for decades, I was surprised to learn that you were awarded your doctoral degree not in chemistry but in math and physics. When I was in high school the three were distinct subjects. It did not occur to me then how they relate, overlap and need one another, and I guess I have not given it a lot of thought since. A confession: I hated math and physics even more than chemistry and dropped all three subjects as soon as I could. I (therefore?) do not understand most of the writing in your thesis. It is presented in jargon that is only accessible for those who have been disciplined. 
I tried to understand the title of your dissertation “Electrokinesis of Silverhalogens” by looking up the two words that meant nothing to me on first sight.
About electrokinesis I read that it refers, in physics, to “the transport of particles or fluid by means of an electric field acting on a fluid which has a net mobile charge.” This still had a limited resonance, but the word electrokinesis also signifies the idea of the generation of electrical force using psychic power, as ‘demonstrated’ in works of fiction. I stumbled upon numerous sources that claim that this type of electrokinesis can be trained by humans. What do you think? Does this border on the many myths you heard in Africa? Is it simply an appealing story? Something we are yet to understand and master? Or can choose to believe (in) it, like the existence of one superior being and creator, as you so often discussed with your friends belonging to pygmy communities?
The title of my dissertation is “Ebifananyi, a study of photographs in and through an artistic practice”. I imagine that there is one word in this title that does not mean anything to you. Or, actually, could the Luganda word Ebifananyi ring a bell and take you back to the time you visited Buganda and photographed the royal enclosure and tombs in 1933? In any case, Ebifananyi is the word used to signify photographs as well as other two-dimensional referential depictions, but its most literal translation would be likenesses. This suggests that photographs are something different for people who use this linguistic construct than for you and me, who have been disciplined to think of them as pictures made with a camera and a light sensitive surface. This is funny when realising that until recent developments in digital photography, the silver halides among the silver halogens you studied were, as you of course know, key to the production of photographic pictures. 
Despite my illiteracy in terms of physics I recognised the structure of your dissertation and saw a parallel between our research-processes as discussed in our respective introductions. During the first stages of our research we both were confronted with a fallacy in our basic assumptions, which changed the substances we worked with. If I understand correctly this meant in your case that a quality that you projected onto silver bromide and that was needed for the experiments central to the research method did not exist. In my case it meant that the position of photographs in my study shifted from being a way to get access to aspects of a particular cultural context to being its subject. 
The title of your dissertation mentions what it is about, mine also includes what could be thought of as a discipline and positions it as a method: ‘in and through an artistic practice’. This implies that the how of the research is as much at stake as the what. I take this to be the fundamental difference between our otherwise overlapping interests and ambitions to contribute to the development of knowledge. 
At this point it might be useful to introduce the term affordances. I only came across it when finalising my dissertation and used it casually in the conclusion, but want to explore it further while working with your legacy. Psychologist James Gibson proposed to think of all organisms as beings in an environment that offers affordances, possibilities. These affordances are not fixed but relative to the organism that actives them.
Allow me to illustrate this by constructing a string of affordances, starting from your training as a chemist, which could have led to a career in a university lab. You, however, made it into an affordance that allowed -gave you a reason- to travel. Browsing through your photographs it seems to me that the camera that you brought with you on these journeys afforded you to approach people in different ways than taking their blood samples did. In the former case these people were individuals with an agency that they brought to the encounter to a bigger or smaller extent. In the latter case the individuals formed a line, waiting to be taken blood from. They were turned into a source of data before receiving some salt or tobacco in return. The photographs that resulted from these encounters afforded, for you, communication about your experiences in publications and lectures and for your audiences to imagine ‘Africa’. These same photographs now afford for you to be remembered as a photographer, as your legacy is in the care of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam. They afford for me to bring something when I travel to the same places you once visited. They also afford me to experience the affordances your photographs have for the descendants of the people connected to who and what you once photographed. And they will afford the audiences to the outcome of my artistic practice to engage with all of this from their position. 
British anthropologist Paul Basu currently leads a research project called ‘Museum affordances’, which is “investigating the latent possibilities of museum collections, curatorial interventions and innovative exhibition practices.” To do this the ‘Museum Affordances’ project works with data collected by colonial anthropologist N.W. Thomas: his notes, objects, sound recordings and photographs. The project builds on the premise that there are affordances tacitly present in Thomas’s materials that can only be activated by people who connect to them in other ways than a British team of researchers can do. Materials are brought to where they were once collected and which in turn informs them. In the process the position of N.W. Thomas is made relative to what the material he collected and produced affords while it is kept in British museums. I only got to know about this project recently, but consider it to be related to what I, several years ago, started to do with your legacy. I intend to look beyond the output of the way you were disciplined and see what this affords. Meanwhile I am curious as to whether and how the central position of artistic practice as method may have other affordances than a more conventionally disciplined vantage point.
I will end this letter with an experience that may say something about the affordances of ‘making’ as a tool to investigate your material. This example concerns the photographs and film footage you produced in 1932, while being hosted by Kwei Dokie, chief of the Manoh in Sanniquellie. 
The name Dokie immediately rang a bell when I mentioned it to the man who was driving me upcountry in Liberia in 2013. One of the first victims of the Charles Taylor regime, leading up to the civil war in the country in the 1990s, was Samuel Dokie, member of a prominent family in Sanniquellie. It indeed turned out to be easy to find family members of Samuel Dokie, who all identified as descendants of the chief you photographed. I was first introduced to mr. James Moore, who was burdened with the responsibility of passing on the family history. He knew stories about his ancestor who was an important chief in the early 20th century, but had never seen him. He told me all he knew about Kwei Dokie, and I gave him copies of your photographs.
When I returned to Liberia, a year later, I also had access to digitised versions of the film you made about your journey through Liberia. The titles you added to the footage mention that a party was organised in your honour, and that the chief, who you call a King enjoyed himself at the dance. So did Dokie’s descendants when watching the film. 
After the screening a lady approached me. She introduced herself as someone who married into the family. Her mother, she said, was 106 and lived with her. She would like for her mother to be remember, just like Chief Kwei Dokie. Would it be possible for me to come and film her? 
The next day I paid a visit. Mother was beautifully dressed but did not seem to be aware of her immediate environment. Her daughter switched on a sound system and played music from her mother’s youth. As soon as the eyes of the elderly lady sparked with recognition and life. A gap between her past and our present was bridged by music and documented in film by me as an affordance of film footage produced by you eighty-two years earlier. In addition, the excess of description that is part the photographic capture shows a reality full of care behind a façade that, at least to my western eyes signifies poverty.
Our interest in anthropology and the privileges that allow(ed) us to travel affords so much more than data, doesn’t it? This raises the question what kind of impact the documents we produce could afford, which is what I will be thinking about towards a next letter to you.
With warm regards,
Andrea
An earlier version of this letter was performed during the so-called ‘Joined Session’ of the doctoral candidates of Doc-Artes and PhDArts, Leiden University, March 2019
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Letters

2019_Dear Dr. Julien_an introduction

To my porters.
To you, my black helpers of many years toiling away in God’s African wilderness I dedicate this book, which probably will not be shown to you and surely you will never read.
Houmt Souk, 22 July 1949. Paul Julien[1]From the introduction to Julien’s second book Eternal Wilderness. 

None of you suspects that this book describes your lives. None of you has ever been able to read one single word, knows even what a book is, but with a flawless intuition you understood that you had a friend in me, and you answered with heartwarming loyalty.[2]From the introduction to Julien’s third book Pygmies, published in 1953. 

Groningen, March 2nd 2019

Dear Dr. Julien,[3]This letter was antedated and written for a booklet published December 2019 with a symposium on artistic research. The symposium was related to a lecturer’s research group at the Royal Academy … Continue reading 

More or less seven years ago on this very day I traveled to Liberia for the first time. The aim of the journey was to find out what the photographs you made during your first expedition through ‘Equatorial Africa’ in 1932 mean to – and what their value is for – Liberians. This journey was a response to the introduction text in your book “Eternal Wilderness”. In future letters I intend to tell you more about this journey, but first I should introduce myself to you, which I hope will generate a common ground for us to build on. 

I was born in 1974, when you were already in your seventies, and raised in a Roman Catholic family in a small village in the south of the Netherlands. Other than this, and different from you, religion did not play a big role in my life. In my primary and secondary education there was no ambition to contribute to science, nor did I have an urge to travel, both of which seem to have developed with you at an early age. I did, however, have an interest in the way everyday life manifests itself. In the production of photographs I found a way to make the outcomes of my interest useful for other people. I had a hunch that in order to meaningfully depict everyday life, it had to be familiar to me. It had to be experienced from the inside, not only seen from the outside. This led to a strong hesitation to travel as a photographer. I did, however, make a journey to visit a dear friend who had migrated from the Netherlands to East Africa. It was the end of 2001, the year, I would learn later, in which you left us.[4]Paul Julien died February 17th 2001, not long before he would become a centenarian. 

By 2005 my friend had settled down in Uganda where I visited her again. This time too, there was a kind of confusion and fear that I self-diagnosed as a culture shock. I literally had to mind every step that I took while walking through Kampala or Kabale, the small towns in, respectively central and south-western Uganda that you may remember passing through during your journeys in 1933 and 1947. If I did not, I would fall as a result of my rather clumsy movements, and the conditions of the roads and pavements. The culture shock, I figured, was caused by a lack of familiarity with the world encountered. It had to do with the absence of things that could be taken for granted. It signalled, moreover, exactly those aspects of life that I had been trying to picture in the photographs I produced. I intuitively started to use my skill in the production of photographs as a tool to investigate this culture shock.

My intuition led to a shift in my career from editorial and ‘art’ photography towards academia. Producing photographs became a research method that was eventually formalised in a dissertation on photographs in Uganda that you may want to take a look at if this is at all of interest to you. It consists of eight photo books and a thesis that investigate the consequences that follow from the production and use of photographs in the particular historical and cultural context of Uganda. The observation that the Luganda word for photograph, Ekifananyi, does not refer to ‘writing with light’ but to a likeness has a central place in the thesis.[5]Stultiens, Ebifananyi, a study of photographs in Uganda in and through an artistic practice, 2018 Would you agree that this interest in how world views manifest in language is something that we share, even though you primarily applied it to words connected to religion, while I do this with pictures and photographs? 

The research method I just mentioned is grounded in an understanding of photographs developed by photography theorist Ariella Azoulay. She thinks of a photograph as the outcomes of an “encounter between several protagonists in which the photographer cannot a priori claim a monopoly over knowledge, authorship, ownership, and rights”.[6]Azoulay, What is a Photograph, What is Photography, in Philosophy of Photography Volume 1 Number 1, 2010  From this follows that photographs, the ones I worked with in Uganda as well as those in your legacy, cannot be claimed attributed to a single author or owner. 

When I encountered your photographs for the first time I was struck by the depth suggested by nuance in grey-scale and deep blacks made possible by the rotogravure printing. The photographs I saw were produced in a variety of places, ranging from Tanzania in the east to Sierra Leone in the west of the continent. At the time I felt that I had to look beyond the photographic production related to Uganda, which is as you know, a rather small country within the scale of the continent. I considered this to be necessary to get an idea of how the pictures I worked with relate to a wider scope of imaginations of Africa.

Hoping that this gives you an idea of my motivation to engage with your legacy I return to your introduction to “Eternal Wilderness”. The one page text is written in a second person narrative that addresses your porters and dedicates the book to them. I was fascinated by this form, but also surprised if not disgusted by it. The words you used evoke the existence of your porters and at the same time create a gap between me as the reader of the text and the very people you address. It took me some time to understand what caused my surprise and disgust. It is the fact that your porters, formally the addressees of the text, were not its audience. Ever since this dawned on me it seemed both natural and necessary to reframe the photographs you produced with the descendants of the addressees of your letters and others who, however loosely, identify with them. 

Just like you I have, before starting this correspondence made use of letter writing as a narrative device, a form that helps to convey a message to a wider audience while writing to a particular addressee. The thesis I mentioned earlier, for instance, is built around a set of letters written to a variety of people who have a stake in the historical photographs I worked with. The idea here, however, was not to evoke the presence of the addressees in terms of distance, which is how I read your use of it, but as a way of joining with them. 

In The First Dutch Systematically Organised Encyclopedia, published in 1949, I read that “The reader will, through the study of anthropology and medicine, notice that these branches of biological science form a unity as far as the anthropology can be understood without the knowledge of medicine, but the other way around this is not possible.”[7]Eerste Nederlandse Systematisch Ingerichte Encyclopedia, ed. Prof Dr. C.J. van der Klaauw et al., VolVI, p.237. “The Dutch Eerste nederlandse systematisch ingerichte encyclopædie (1946–52; … Continue reading This helped me to understand the way your research was embedded in anthropological practices during your days a little bit better. Since then the field of anthropology became increasingly critical of its imperial roots, of how it has been used to justify colonial ambition, to freeze people defined as ‘others’ in a time and space that does not develop.

You may remember how, during your days as a physical anthropologist, the nature of this branch of knowledge shifted from an entanglement with medicine and biology, to sociology and ethnography. British anthropologist Tim Ingold takes this development still further away from the idea of anthropology that you were familiar and comfortable with. He positions correspondence, in a wide sense including but by no means limited to letter writing, as a mode of being in the world of things as well as people that is “a joining with; it is not additive but contrapuntal, not ‘and…and…and…’ but ‘with…with…with’.”[8]Tim Ingold, Knowing From the Inside, 2017 p.9, p.13. Different from your porters, who assumedly would not see the book your text is part of, the evoked presence of addressees of my letters had consequences for what I wrote. The same goes for the letters I write to you. 

When speaking about my engagement with your work in public, I usually start with a fragment from the film that mr. Adolfse made with you in the 1990s.[9]Cor Adolfse contacted Paul Julien as a fan of his work, and ended up working closely with him throughout the 1990s, digitising a large part of Julien’s legacy, producing the unpublished film … Continue reading In this fragment you first introduce and then read the opening text of The Eternal Wilderness with minor adjustments compared to the words you wrote in Houmt Souk in 1949. These adjustments are based on the shift in medium rather than the post-colonial discourse that developed since the book was first published. It is, for instance, hard for me to imagine that you did read and think about the critique formulated by Edward Said in his book “Orientalism”.[10]Edward Said, Orientalism, 1977 The fragment often angers the audience. In line with my sentiments when encountering the introduction of Eternal Wilderness, they often find your words and the pictures that support them embarrassing and/or painful. Nevertheless I hope you are open to this correspondence because I assume that your photographs will gain both value and meaning by ‘reframing’ them. This  is done by adding information, perspectives and updates to them with descendants of the people you once met. While I start to reflect on this process in preparation for my next letter to you I remain,

Yours truly,
Andrea

Footnotes: 

References

References
1 From the introduction to Julien’s second book Eternal Wilderness.
2 From the introduction to Julien’s third book Pygmies, published in 1953.
3 This letter was antedated and written for a booklet published December 2019 with a symposium on artistic research. The symposium was related to a lecturer’s research group at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in which I worked on Reframing PJU for a year. The PDF of the booklet can be downloaded here.
4 Paul Julien died February 17th 2001, not long before he would become a centenarian.
5 Stultiens, Ebifananyi, a study of photographs in Uganda in and through an artistic practice, 2018
6 Azoulay, What is a Photograph, What is Photography, in Philosophy of Photography Volume 1 Number 1, 2010 
7 Eerste Nederlandse Systematisch Ingerichte Encyclopedia, ed. Prof Dr. C.J. van der Klaauw et al., VolVI, p.237. “The Dutch Eerste nederlandse systematisch ingerichte encyclopædie (1946–52; “First Dutch Systematic and Comprehensive Encyclopaedia”) had a classification that was in almost reverse order of that of the Encyclopédie française; both works were established on a philosophical concept of the order and main divisions of knowledge influenced by both Bacon and Coleridge.
8 Tim Ingold, Knowing From the Inside, 2017 p.9, p.13.
9 Cor Adolfse contacted Paul Julien as a fan of his work, and ended up working closely with him throughout the 1990s, digitising a large part of Julien’s legacy, producing the unpublished film quoted at length here, and arranging the publication of new editions of Julien’s first three books which led to renewed interest for Julien in Dutch mass media. 
10 Edward Said, Orientalism, 1977
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