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1
I WISH THERE WAS COLOR
I WISH THERE WAS SOUND
VISUAL CONVERSATIONS
ABOUT AFRICA
6
DEAR READER,2
My interest in Paul Julien’s legacy began when I came across
one of his books at a flea market. I am not sure whether it
was the first one, Campfires Along the Equator, or the
second, Eternal Wilderness. I do know, however, that the
quality of the beautiful rotogravure process used for the
printing of the photographs, combined with the variety of
depictions of the African continent, drew me to it. I had
already been working on photography projects in Uganda
forseveral years in response to questions that had arisen
while visiting a Dutch friend who migrated to East Africa,
and it was in relation to one of these projects that I was
invited to contribute to a photo festival in Lagos, Nigeria.
3
That experience, and how it related to and simultaneously
differed from working in Uganda, generated an urgency to
develop a better understanding of the images I had been
studying there within the wider context of photographs in
and of ‘Africa’.
A commission from the Noorderlicht Photofestival in the
north of the Netherlands made it possible for me to follow
up on this initial feeling of being drawn to Julien’s work.
4
I
felt ambivalent and conflicted towards him, particularly as
a result of the texts in his books, all four of which I by then
owned. My unease was summed up best by the introductory
text in Eternal Wilderness. In its opening paragraph Julien
dedicates the book to the porters who carried his baggage
during the adventures the book describes, before casually
dismissing them, stating that it is unlikely they will ever see
the book and will surely not be able to read it. Who were
these porters, I wondered? What were their names, who loved
them, and what did they think of the task they were given by
this white man? I was aware that it was highly unlikely that
answers to these particular questions might be found, but I
figured that placing myself in situations where I could listen
to people who now live in the regions in which Paul Julien
once produced photographs might at least make it more
possible.
5
As I write this no porters have yet been identified.
But names and faces were (re)connected, and individuals
who had been anonymous ‘types’ were given profiles.
6
One of the first journeys I made with photographs from
the PJU Archive was to Liberia. I had digitised around two
thousand lantern slides and they were organised in terms
of geographical or ethnic origins, with seventy-eight being
tagged with ‘Liberia’. I also made my way through a file of
documents labelled Liberia, where I came across a series of
TEACHABLE MOMENTS
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
ACTIVATION OF THE PJU ARCHIVE 1
ANDREA STULTIENS
I take PJU, the th ree-letter code
assigned to the legacy of Paul
Julien within the wider Collection
of the Nederlands Fotomuseu m,
to be the most radical redu ction
imagi nable for this comp lex set
of materia ls relating to thousands
of encounters which, i n turn,
resulted in tens of thousands of
photogra phs. T his letter, and this
book at large, begin to expand
that archive with the aim to
ensure that it wil l no longer be
what it was. Here I would like to
thank Emelie Chha ngur, artist,
curator and museum director at
the Agn es Etherington A rt Centre
at Queens Unive rsity in Kingston,
Canada, whose app roach to
working with anc estral mate-
rials — which the PJU A rchive
arguably is — will have a lasting
influ ence o n my practice.
This book is not only an i nvitation
to you, dea r reader, but also
an ackn owledgement of all the
people who took up my invitation
to join the activation p rocess.
I use the footnotes not only to
add refere nces to my writing,
but also to name people who
made things possible along the
way or who explicitly joined the
conversations. Some names will,
inevitably, be unintentionally
overloo ked, an d I ask forgiveness
for any omissions. I do, however,
thank all of them, al l of you, and
hope you will enjoy this book as
a token of appreciation as well
as a souven ir that continues to
remind us of the valuab le time we
spent together. While informing
you with this letter, I hop e to
avoid gestures of ‘showing off’
as described over three decades
ago by Mieke Bal, i n a text that
is still disturbingly urgent. Mieke
Bal, ‘Telling, Showing, Showing
off’, in Critical I nqu iry, Vol . 18 ,
No. 3 (Spring, 1992), pp. 556-594.
The Kaddu Wasswa Archive 2010,
Post Editions, co-authored with
Kaddu Wasswa and A rthur Kisitu,
and my dissertation Ebifananyi, a
study of photog raphs i n Uganda in
and through an artistic practice,
Leiden University 2018.
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7
illustrated articles produced for the Flemish magazine Ons
Land (‘Our Country’). There was not enough time at that
point to start engaging with the collection of negatives that
also formed part of the archive, and anyway a large number of
these negatives were not accessible because Julien had stored
the 6x6 roll films he used from 1936 onwards by wrapping
them in paper, rolling them tightly and then collecting them
in wooden cases. It would have been impractical, and from a
conservator’s perspective irresponsible, to simply unroll them.
So I travelled to Liberia, carrying only the digitised lantern
slides and the photographs published in Ons Land, and
started by walking the streets of downtown Monrovia.
Images soon began to align with the world, beginning with
two exposures, PJU-1894
7
(‘Dutch Consulate Monrovia’), and
PJU-1958
8
(‘Monrovia, foreground Monum. Pres. Roberts’),
which had both been made from a single position, simply by
adjusting the angle at which the lens ‘saw’ the world. While
I rarely make only one photograph at a time these days, this
still caused a shock. Could the radius of action of Julien’s
movements have been much smaller than I had assumed?
AsI worked my way through his images this indeed turned
out to be the case; Julien made many photographs, but
they were produced during a surprisingly limited number
ofencounters.
9
The first chapter of Julien’s first book, Campfires Along The
Equator, describes his ascent of a mountain in Sierra Leone,
and in the opening paragraph he mentions how several
months spent in the Sierra Leonian jungle had worn him
down. However when I read the letters he sent home to his
parents, there seems to be an obvious gap between what he
writes to them and the claims his book makes. The‘months’
he describes spending in the jungle were actually mere days,
probably spent largely in the comfortable setting of a rest
house in Dambara administered by the local Catholic Mission.
This is an example of the gap between what American writer
Timothy O’Brien calls ‘happening truth’ and ‘story truth’.10
Story truth, O’Brien tells his readers, departs from happening
truth in order to convey an experience to a reader, and Paul
Julien made ample use of story truth in hiswriting.
A photograph as encounter always holds some kind of
happening truth. The camera was there. So was the person
operating it, as were the people and scenes in front of its
lens. The moment captured cannot relay the events that
surround it, though; for that we must rely on context, which
often comes in the form of stories. These stories are coloured
by intentions which might be related to ideologies, good
or bad, to the teller’s knowledge or lack thereof, or to more
pragmatic aims such as entertaining an audience, or selling
books.But story truth can only endure until it meets an
audience which recognises it as such. I found one example
ofthis in Dambara where, as elsewhere, Julien was presented
with several performances, and the secretary of Paramount
Chief Moriba Kargobai provided him with a letter listing the
names of the masks (‘devils’) and performers.
Part of a series of co mmissions
named The Sequel in which
photogra phers followed up on
existing work. The outcomes
of these commissions were
exhibited during the 2013 e dition
of the festiva l. Thank you H ester
Keijser, Mon driaan Foundation,
and the team at Noorderlicht.
In English the c onventional verb
in relati on to the ways in which
photographs come into existence
is ‘to take’.
This ma kes it a
one-sided, possessive action. But
a photogra ph is, as argued in this
letter, actua lly ‘made’ by several
protagonists. When I refer to th e
person who owne d the photo-
graphic apparatus and who — in
most cases — pushed the button
which exposed its light-sensitive
surface, I will speak of the
production of a photograph.
See the we bsite [Re:]
Entanglements.net (last accessed
March 1 5, 2024), resulting from
the research project ‘Museum
Afforda nces’ i nitiated by Paul
Basu. It was an inspiration for my
work with the PJU Archive and le d
me to the notion of affordances,
defined by the Meriam Webster
dictionary as
‘
the qua lity or
property of an object that defines
its possible uses or makes clear
how it can or shou ld be used.’
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Theorist of photography A riella
Azoulay perhaps most famously
argues that a photograph is the
product of an encounter between
several protagonists, mainly
photographer and photographed,
camera and spectator. In my work
with the PJU Archive I explored
this idea of the photograph as an
encounter in roughly two ways.
Firstly, by reconstructing past
encounters through the Archive,
connecting individual frames and
thus constructing wider views
of scenes previously on ly seen
from a single perspective. I also
connected the p hotographs
selected for distribution, whether
through printi ng or as projected
illustrations in lantern slide
lectures, to the negatives from
which context they are lifted . And
secondly, I initiated encounters
between photographs from the
PJU Archive a nd peo ple who
recognised in those im ages the
past of their own culture, even
sometimes literally their own
ancestors. See Ariella Azoulay,
‘What is a photograph, what is
photogra phy’, in Philosophy of
Photography, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 9-13.
Timothy O’Brien, 1991, The Things
They Carried, in the shortest story
in his book title d‘GoodForm
’
.
PP.
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9
Apart from Stan Frankland, who
is quoted with the introduction
to Doreen B aingana’s text in this
book, a lso see Chris H ugh Ballard,
2006, ‘Strange Alliances, Pygmies
in the Co loni al Imaginary’, in
World
Arch eol ogy
, Vol. 38 (1): 133-151.
See for in stance R. Ruggles-Gates,
1958, ‘ The African Pygmy
’
, in Acta
geneticae medicae et gemellologiae,
02, pp. 159-218, and Martin Gusinde,
1955, ‘Pygmies and Pygmoids, Twides
of Tropical Africa’, in Anthropological
Quarterly, Vol. 28, No . 1, p p. 3-61.
Both articles reference Paul Julien.
The documents in the PJU Archive
include several letters from Ma rtin
Gusinde to PaulJulien.
The Batwa Experience is
one of the initiatives in a
‘Batwa Development Program’
established by an Ame rican
missio nary couple ‘to help
the Batwa h elp themselves’.
Batwaexperience.org, last
accessed March 16, 2024
.
Despite having this document to hand Julien still confused
two of the masks, with Yavie becoming Nawphalie. This
misunderstanding endured for almost 90 years before being
resolved within five minutes of my making one photograph
available to people who knew what they were looking at.
Julien’s third monographic book is entirely devoted to
‘pygmies’, a problematic categorisation used to refer to
Western imaginations of communities of people living
acrossthe Congo Basin in central Africa.11 The term was
adopted from Greek mythology, and was employed by
outsiders — Western explorers, anthropologists and mission-
aries — to confer an imaginary unity upon otherwise separate
communities. The motivating idea behind Julien’s interest
in ‘pygmies’ was a theory of which he was far from the only
proponent.
12
These communities were thought to be the rem-
nants of the original inhabitants of Africa, and by tracing the
relationships between them, including through the collection
and examination of blood samples, Julien hoped tocontribute
to an understanding of the origins of humanity.
Among the ‘pygmy’ communities visited by Paul Julien are
groups he refers to as Efe, Baka, Babongo, Bakola, Basua
and Batwa. During his tour through East Africa in 1947 he
visited and photographed Batwa, members of an ethnic
group who were displaced from their ancestral lands in the
forests of Western Uganda and Eastern Congo when the
colonial authorities began to clear populations from what
would become the nations’ national parks. In the resulting
images they pose for portraits individually, in small groups,
and with Julien standing next to them. Several photographs
and film clips were also made that depict them dancing.
When I was in the early stages of activating the PJU Archive
I paid visits to people who self-identify as Batwa, at one
point joining a small group of tourists for a visit billed as
‘TheBatwa Experience’.
13
Our hosts, clad in barkcloth,
performed and posed patiently for our cameras while we
busied ourselves with experiencing. I had spoken in advance
with the local guide — not a Mutwa (singular, where Batwa is
plural) but a Mukiga — to ask if I could show the performers
some of the photographs from the PJU Archive. He thought it
would be ok, but in the event there was too much performa-
tivity to proceed; the poses were too perfect, too photogenic,
too hermetic to connect beyond the natural masks that
werein place.
Things were different in Rwamahano, Uganda, where the
community works with an organisation engaging in ‘respon-
sible tourism’.
14
This group also performs and informs visitors
about their past lives in the forest, the experience they offer
tourists, which is called ‘Batwa Today’, also presents tourists
a glimpse of their present day-to-day lives, which includes
poverty and marginalisation as well as singing and dancing.
Here the photographs I brought were eagerly passed around
from hand to hand, and Nyinamakyante William, an elder
in the community and husband to Women Representative
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The director of this organisation,
Miha Logar, who I have been in
touch with since 2005, made the
introduction a nd helped through
facilitation and communication
with the community. The organ-
isation has had different names
through the years but it ca n
currently be found as ‘Gorill a
Highl ands’, a reference to th e
mountain gorillas which inhabit
the regio n and are, arguably, its
main tou rist attraction.
10
Ntezikyi Kedres, recognised one of the elders pictured
alongside PaulJulien. This man, he said, used to come to visit
his community from the other side of the volcano — across
the border, in Congo — when he was a boy. It has not been
possible to make further connections from this identification,
but it offers a counterweight to the documentation of perfor-
mances that are often presented as authentic curiousities.
The attachment of a name restores the dignity of a man
previously designated as a type, representing an ethnicity.
In publications, Paul Julien was keen to present the scenes
and people in his photographs as authentic, as ‘discovered’
by him. One example of this is an image depicting a young
woman who, according to the caption which accompanies her
portrait in Campfires Along the Equator, has just returned
from the ‘Bundu Forest’ 15. Even if we disregard the documents
ava
ilable in the PJU Archive that serve to contradict this
claim, it seems suspiciously fortuitous that Julien’s brief visit
to the village should coincide with a girl returning from an
initiation that lasted for an extended period of time and
which was only organised once in several years. Through
such captions, photographs move beyond inscriptions,
remnants of, witnesses to happening truths, and instead
enter the realm of the story truth. In the process the agency
of lived experience of anyone other than the producer of the
photograph is taken away and the depicted and their worlds
are reduced to representatives of what that producer wants
to say.
In this book several strategies are used to respond to this
form of pressure and cultural violence. Pictures are pre-
sented and accompanied by ‘object data’ rather than captions,
to reduce the rates of inference and assumption that might
result in the incorrect assignment of meaning. The texts also
take measures to avoid appearing to present empirical truth
where it is not or cannot be known. To this end, Dutch-Sierra
Leonean researcher and writer EstherKamara and Ugandan
writer Doreen Baingana both use fiction as their tool.
In 2019 I not only visited the Batwa community in
Rwamahano but also made a trip to a group of people in
Kigali, Rwanda, who, because of stringent laws enacted in
the wake of the 1994 genocide, are not allowed to self-identify
by ethnicity. Nevertheless, after seeing photographs and film
footage from the PJU Archive, the group responded by singing
a song about their forced migration from the forest. I men-
tioned this while showing the same materials to the elders
in Rwamahano, Uganda, and one of the group, Kyabazaga
Norah, immediately started to sing a similar song, with others
joining in. This song has since been added to the repertoire
performed for tourists during the Batwa Today activities.
The first exhibition of the PJU Archive activations, held in
Groningen during the 2013 Noorderlicht Photofestival, was
inspired by anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s observation
about the artificial temporal separation between anthropol-
ogists and the people they studied, with the former living in
P.
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‘Bundu Forest’ refers here to
the place in which girls would
be educated and i nitiated into
woman hood by the Bundu or
Sande Society.
12
the here and now of their audience while the latter occupy
a fixed past.16 Even in the later editions of Campfires,
Wilderness and Pygmies, produced more than a decade
after the first publication of Johannes Fabian’s book, the
blend of story truths and ethnographic observations repeat
this problematic phenomenon. My initial method of tackling
this disconnect was to juxtapose past and present-day
encounters, and to invite the (Dutch) audience of the exhi-
bition to relate explicitly to the presented temporalities.
In the context of a photo festival in the Netherlands, this
method and its outcome worked. But in retrospect I see its
limitations. These juxtapositions did address an issue that
demands attention, but they do not propose an alternative.
For such alternatives to emerge other, parallel, archives
needto be taken into account.
When I first visited Monrovia in 2013, the National Museum
of Liberia had only recently had its roof repaired after being
shelled during the civil war that wracked the nation from
1999 to 2003. I asked Lamie Taweh, the museum’s education
officer, whether there was a photo archive, and he led me to
a table where a pile of documents lay. The heap contained a
jumble of historical maps, drawings and photographs, recent
reproductions, and documentation of events at the museum.
Some of the images were stuck together, possibly as a result
of water damage caused by the leaking roof. Lamie Taweh
17
and I spent an afternoon digitising the material in the file,
and I also later added copies of the photographs produced
inLiberia by Paul Julien to the resulting digital archive.
When I returned to Liberia a year later, someone had orga-
nised an exhibition on the top floor of the museum. I would
have liked to know who had initiated the display, who chose
and organised the prints, but this was not clarified, perhaps
because Lamie Taweh was himself not fully convinced of its
form. The show consisted of laminated prints of photographs
with added captions and, as well as recognising some of the
pictures digitised a year before, I found some photographs
from the PJU archive on display alongside captions which
had been extended to include new (to me) information.
Thisexhibition placed Liberia in a pan-African context that
went beyond the nation’s recent troubled history.
18
While
there was an element of nostalgia to it all, the result broad-
ened the meaning of the images displayed by revealing their
relation to other African pasts. This helped me to go beyond
the past-present comparisons and to see the PJU Archive
itself as part of such a wider scope while de-centring Europe.
The show I set up three months later was simply titled
Liberiain1932. There was no need to invoke the present.
Itwas simply there, and the museum was part of it.
New material, or at least material that was new to me,
continued to emerge from parallel archives. Among the
documents in the PJU Archive I found repeated mention
of a Cor Adolfse who, it seemed, had worked together with
Julien extensively during the 1990s
19
. When visiting him,
Ilearned that Mr. Adolfse had, after an early retirement
Johannes Fabian, 2014 (first
published 1 983),
Time an d The
Other: How Anthropology Ma kes
Its Object
, Columbia University
Press.
All the more appropriate when
one takes into consideration that
the Organisation of African Unity
was founded in Sanniquellie, the
town where I met the descendants
of Chief Kwei D okie.
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13
due to health issues, contacted Paul Julien as an admirer
of his books wondering what had happened to their
author. This curiosity resulted in new editions of three of
the four books and extensive renewed attention in Dutch
media, as well as the digitisation of all the black and white
photographs in the collection and most of the 16mm film
produced by Julien. Mr. Adolfse also had possession of most
of the notebooks referring to the African journeys I was
interested in, and had typed them out. A whole parallel
archive, plus a wealth of personal narratives, now became
available to me. This also made clear how much I had
missed by not having access to the 6x6 roll films.
In 2015 I received funding from a Dutch foundation whose
goal is to ‘stimulate the development of contemporary Dutch
photography and film’ while preserving and activating his-
torical photo collections.20 I used half of the money to cover
the cost of flattening the rolled-up 6x6 films that had so far
beeninaccessible to me.21 The result of this was that the range
of legible photographic documentation of Julien’s journeys
from 1936 onward was significantly expanded. Then in 2019
Mr. Adolfse visited the Nederlands Fotomuseum to add to the
archive the materials that were still in his possession. As we
toured the vaults with Martijn van den Broek, the museum’s
Head of Collections, we passed by boxes of slides labeled PJU.
Many of them were half the size of normal 35mm transparen-
cies and Mr. Adolfse explained that they had been produced
by Paul Julien’s first wife, Elly. There were also boxes of slides
produced by Julien himself in parallel to the black-and-white
exposures. None of these photographs had previously been
published, which is probably why I had overlooked them —
Ihadn’t searched for them, because I didn’t know they existed.
With the other half of the Dutch foundation’s funding I
travelled to Sudan, where I worked with photographer and
filmmaker Elsadig Mohamed to activate the black-and-
white photographs produced in 1933 and 1947 when Paul
Julien travelled through East Africa. Along the way we
encountered a wealth of parallel archives, including oral
histories triggered by the photographs we showed, albums
in the care of the daughter of the first Prime Minister of
independent Sudan, and black-and-white prints of historical
photographs related to the history of al-Mahdī that had
beencollected by one of his descendants. Our work resulted
in anexhibition that started not from juxtapositions, but
fromthe potential of the in-between.
22
How does one enter the in-between? While pondering this
question I remember how I was only able to construct the
panoramic village view adorning this book’s cover from
negatives in the PJU Archive after visiting Dambara town
in 2020. I knew from earlier experiences that Julien’s radius
of action was not as great as the number of photographs he
produced suggests, but the loose 9x12 negatives made it hard
to identify which exposures had been produced at the same
location; the 9x12 negatives that form the panoramic view are
not filed sequentially, and not all are labelled as having been
See demixfotoprojecten.nl. Last
accessed March 17, 2024. Th ank
you Rafael Philippen , initiator of
the foun dation , for thinking of my
work within the context of your
own interests.
This was d one by Katrin Pietsch,
who published an article about
the method she developed.
Some of the films feature in the
photogra phic illustrations with
the article. Katrin Pietsch, 2015,
‘Flattening Rolled Negatives on
Filmbase’, in Topics in Photographic
Preservation,
Vol. 16 , pp. 245 -256.
PP. ,
The exhibition was made
possible by the G oethe i nstitute
in Khartoum and was part of
the Mugran Photo Week 2015.
The in-between is an important
concept in Sufism, beautifully
written ab out by Paul Stolle r,
2008,
The Power of the Between:
An Anthropological Odyssey,
The University of Chicago Press .
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14
produced in Dambara.I also did not — could not — see the
same view while in Dambara. Unlike Chief Moriba Kargobai’s
house, which was also photographed by Paul Julien, the old
town visible in the background of the photographs of the
performances no longer exists. Chief Moriba Kargobai’s son
Desmond recognised the scene, though, and took Kemurl
Fofanah and I there in 2022. It is a communal forest now,
home to a concrete monument erected by Chief Moriba
Kargobai to honour his predecessor who built and governed
the town. Despite how much of a cliché it seems, I can’t
escape the thought that I had to distance myself from the
Archive itself and get close instead to what could be seen in
it — both geographically and in terms of lived experience
and heritage — in order to literally see certain connections.
In 2019, after finishing my PhD research, I received
funding from NWO, an organisation which funds scientific
research in the Netherlands.
23
The title of the project was
Reframing PJU; a contribution to current discussions on
the de-colonisation of museum collections and emerg-
ing developments in the digital humanities as well as
research in and through the arts. This may remind some
viewers of the generous introduction text by Birgit Donker
and Guinevere Ras of the Nederlands Fotomuseum, but the
element of digital humanities perhaps needs some elabora-
tion. Digital Humanities is a field of study concerned with the
intersection of technological affordances and the disciplines
studying aspects of human society and culture. ‘The digital’
has been important for me from the start of my work with
the PJU Archive; it would not have been possible to do what I
did without the use of Facebook, for instance, where groups
devoted to regional histories enthusiastically gave their own
time to connect me not only to valuable views and comments,
but also to people who helped me get around.
As part of my application to NWO, I had also proposed to
further develop the methodology of my artistic practice
as a research method
24
and to work out a digital, online
form appropriate to my findings. This outcome eventually
appeared on the experimental online journal Bridging
Humanities,
25
but not until I was forced to stop travelling
with photographs from the PJU Archive. The outbreak of the
Second World War prevented Paul Julien from travelling, a
pause which led to the publication of his first book. Similarly,
after I returned from Sierra Leone to the Netherlands on a
repatriation flight due to airport closures in response to the
COVID-19 pandemic, I suddenly found myself with a lot of
time on my hands to metaphorically swim in and with the
digitised files from the PJU Archive. I still had not really
figured out what language to use in order to de-centre
Paul Julien and reframe the photographs he had produced.
I wanted my allegiance to be with the affordances of the
images, but I could not negate the person who produced them.
In the time availed to me by lockdowns I started to break
the frames open not only spatially, as happened with the
panoramic view of Dambara, but also in terms of time.
The fun ding (thank you NWO)
was part of a round of grants
called ‘The Idea Generator’ which
‘wants to promote research with
a potentially high socia l impact
that is ris ky or too early in its
development for an assessment
in a regular peer review process.’
An imp ortant guide for how I
understand what I do is Fre nch
philosopher Jacques Rancière’s
positio ning of ‘a rtistic practices
as “ways of doi ng and making”
that inter vene in the general
distribution of ways of doing and
making as well as in the relation-
ships they maintain to modes of
being a nd forms of visibi lity’. It
makes what I do relational, and
makes me — and oth er artistic
researc hers — re spons ible to at
least tr y to understand the ‘gen-
eral distribution’ of ways of doing
and making etc. that we intervene
in. Ranciere, 2004, The Politics
of Aesthetics: The Distribution
of the Sensible, Continuum
International Publishing Group.
Thank you Mirjam de Bruijn for
supporting the NWO application
and opening the platform you
initiated to me. Its current state
is in need of an update that I
hope to get to on ce this book
is fully out of my hands. See
bridginghumanities.com and
pju.bridginghumanities.com,
bothlast accessed Marc h 17, 2024.
See bridginghumanities.com
lastacc essed M arch 17,
2024.
PP.
PP.
P.
BACK OF
THE BOOK
PP. , ,
P.
1935, Ivory Coast
9x12 ne gative PJU -2455 filed as
‘Lagunary landscape Abidjan’.
15
The Netherlands
Reprod uction of an un dated
magazine clipping in the
docu mentation folder ‘Angola
Busine ss’, reproducin g a cropped
versio n of 9x12 negative PJU-2 455
filed as ‘Lagunary landscape
Abidj an’. Given the sequ ence of
travels m ade by Paul Jul ien, this
clip ping is likel y to have been
published after his 1955 journey
toEthiopia bu t before his firs t
journ ey to Angola in 1 960. As with
many other announcements
andpress release s regarding
hisjour neys, it isprobab le that
thisshor t text waswritten by
Julienhimself.
26
DR. PAUL JULIEN
The renowned orator of the aforementioned pro-
gramme is a Dutchman, albeit of French descent ,
his grandfather being a Frenchman . He studied in
Utrecht and obtained his doctorate therein 1933
withaphysico-chemical thesis.
Even as a student he took a keen interest in the
anthropological sciences and, after a period of
study in the Dutch Indies, he initiated anthropolog-
ical bloodresearch in West Africa, which he later
expanded to the entire Africancontinent.
He has worked in, amongst others: Liberia, Morocco,
Algeria, Sierra L eone, Rwanda, Uganda and f ina lly in
Ethiopia, from whence hereturned afew weeks ago.
He has notably specialised in serological research of
pygmies and is the only researcher in the world to
have made first-hand reports and research with all
major groups of these rainforest-dwellingmidgets.
17
Istacked and combined exposures made more or less from
one position in digital collages, or joiners. I then made looping
animations in which the layers in the collage moved one by
one to the background, making room and time for the next
frame. Each exposure took six seconds to emerge and disap-
pear, the average duration of a human breath when the body
is at ease. I developed four different types of ‘breathing’ photo-
graphs. The first one breathes internally, through encounters
as manifested in the negatives in the Archive. The second
one breathes from the encounter as captured on the negative,
to encounters facilitated by means of distribution, such as
the lantern slides or in printed matter. In the third type of
Breathing Photograph, pictures produced by me and people
who collaborated with me or who responded to my initiatives
breathe with the digitised negatives. And in the fourth, final
type, the photographs produced by Paul Julien are brought
together in one view with other generally distributed views.27
These generally distributed views themselves are not one-
dimensional. Just as much part of a wider consensus in
thinking about ‘The Dark Continent’, was the Kingdom of
Buganda, in present day Uganda, as a place of progress.
Henry Morton Stanley wrote about the ruler he met in 1875 as
‘a generous prince and a frank and intelligent man [...] whose
character was well worth studying for its novel intensity
and extreme originality’ whom he judged ‘could be made to
subserve higher ends than he suspected he was fashioned
for’.
28
In a handwritten manuscript Paul Julien seems to echo
these observations:
1933, Tanganyika
In Eternal Wilde rness, caption ed
as ‘Su mmit of the Kib o crater seen
from the e dge of the forest.’
See Bridginghumanities.com
for examples of eac h of the
type of Breathing Photographs
described. They are here called
‘Primary’, ‘Secondary’, ‘Tertiary’
and ‘Scopic B reathing’. Last
accessed March 20, 2024. See
footnote 19 for the idea of
‘generally distributed views’.
Henry Morton Stanley, 1878,
Through the Dark Continent
,
Chapter IX.
18
‘Most Honourable Ladies and Gentlemen,
29
Previously we devoted some attention to the
land of the Nilotes and became acquainted
with these peoples in their impoverished
dwellings in the swamp wetlands of the Sudd,
where we familiarised ourselves with their
curiously antiquated customs, some of which
were of an extremely breathtaking African
cruelty and heathendom.
Our present route continues south. We are to
follow the Baḥr al-Jabal — as the Nile is known
south of the Lake No — and will soon reach Albert
Nyanza, the utmost lake of the great African
Riftvalley — or at least its western branch.
This Lake Albert — the last of the great African
lakes to be discovered — is at once the most
beautiful and distinguished when compared
to Lake Victoria, that while most impressive
for its immeasurable surface area, avails itself
of exceedingly monotonous surroundings. […]
Lake Albert constitutes the western border of
the Ugandan protectorate.
The Ugandan protectorate has undergone devel-
opment in the past half century that is without
parallel in Africa. Today, the comfortably fur-
nished train runs from the coast to Kampala, the
capital city by Lake Victoria. The source of the
Nile is arched over by a steel rail bridge while
the inter-colonial trains thunder across. […]
Today, Uganda comprises a number of small
kingdoms of which Buganda is the principal.
A major part of Uganda, and at least the west
and districts around Victoria Nyanza, exudes
the spirit of progress. The country has an
excellent network of motorways that is espe-
cially close-knit to the north and east of Lake
Victoria, while there are fabulous hotels in the
larger towns that offer travellers all manner
ofEuropean comfort.
Furthermore, the rail network of the Kenya
and Uganda Railways presently reaches
far into Uganda with contemporary trains
equipped with both dining cars and wagon-lits
that maintain a fast service with the coast and
also features an extensive series of coach con-
nections, so you will find it difficult to imagine
how this source location of the Nile was
still terra incognita but a few decades ago.
[...] These various remarks will make it
apparent that there is no longer such a
thing as an unspoilt Africa. Both Uganda and
Kenya have become utterly subsumed by the
Western world and the Europeanisation of
the country proceeds with truly remarkable
pace. Both Catholic and Protestant missions
have stimulated this remarkable transforma-
tion and while the success is largely credited
to the rather staid behaviour of the British
government of the Ugandan Protectorate, this
progress should be credited in the main and in
essence to the great individual intelligence and
level of civilisation of the Africans themselves.
[…]
Much like most of Uganda, Buganda is entirely
under the control of the British Protectorate,
yet to a large degree enjoys almost complete
self-governance. The king bears the title of
Kabaka and resides in his palace on Mount
Mengo near Kampala, one of the seven hills
on which the commercial capital of Uganda is
built. […] By special permission of the British
authorities, I was allowed to visit the Kabaka’s
palace where the eternal drum rolls that is
beaten by day and by night and was intro-
duced to some of his senior ministerial civil
servants — blacks only, of course — and permit-
ted to visit the main complex of governmental
offices, where the Lukiko, being Buganda’s
parliament, convenes and where the Katikiro,
the first minister and his colleagues reside.
The palace itself is largely a European-
style building standing amidst a large, well-
maintained garden. There are many stone
and wooden annexes, covered with galvanised
sheet iron. And others constructed in a refined
indigenous style, which is to say the walls
are made of neatly bundled elephant grass,
bedecked with carefully shaven, cone-shaped
straw roofs.
Naturally, it is unavoidable that to the
European a country as Uganda — that has
experienced such fast-paced development
and where the indigenous people enjoy
self-governance to such a great, unequalled
extent among African nations — will at
first glance appear to be a hybrid between
European and African cultures.
When in the afternoon for example the trading
offices and governmental bureaus in Kampala
close for the day and large hordes of blacks in
European garb travel to their often strikingly
European-style homes by bicycle, sometimes
Translation of a handwritten and
undated manuscript for a radio
lecture, part of the PJU Archive.
19
by motorcycle or car along the mirror-smooth,
broad asphalt roads, when you hear the gram-
ophones ring out across the streets at night and
see black youths at play with tennis and golf,
when on occasion you visit one of Kampala’s
cinemas where the natives sit in awe night
after night, marvelling at American movies,
then one is sure to be left with the impression
that the inherently African has been eradicated
here and has been replaced by an artificially
implanted Western culture of imitation.
And yet, this is only true to a certain extent.
There is no factually demonstrable part of
Africa that has developed along such an indi-
vidual trajectory, where — despite unavoidable
bastardisation — so much of the indigenous
character has come to independent fruition.
In my considered opinion, Buganda is the
only part of Africa where colonisation has
culminated in a culturally satisfactory result.
[…] Which undoubtedly speaks in favour of the
indigenous civilisation, that in defiance of all
the threats from Europe it has managed to
maintain a certain degree of independence. […]
On two of the seven hills of Kampala, Christian
temples of faith presently have Buganda’s
fair city in their sights. One of these, the
eldest, is the renowned Anglican cathedral of
Namirembe, situated amidst a sea of tropical
plants and flowers. The Catholic cathedral, that
wouldn’t look out of place in a major European
city, is situated on Rubaga hill, from which
vantage point one has a magnificent view of
Kampala. Both can accommodate thousands
ofthe faithful.
And when I visited those places of worship,
where the Catholic cathedral was constructed
stone upon stone with funding collected by
local inhabitants, when I luxuriated within
the impressive and cool spaces of our Catholic
temple of faith — probably Africa’s largest — it
appeared to me little more than legend that
even in the middle of the last century not even
an inkling of European civilisations and of
Christendom had managed to reach the
banks of the immense Victoria Nyanza. […]
A few kilometres outside of the city of Kampala
lies Kasubi hill. Kasubi is surrounded by a
mound of elephant grass, as is the palatial
city of Mengo. There is a gate in this mound
of grass that is fiercely guarded and where
no man — black nor white — may pass without
beingable to present a letter of passage signed
by theBritish government […].
One inclement afternoon I visited the tomb
of this great monarch. Outside the rain was
pelting down on the surrounding huts. Once
through the gate, we arrived in an open square
of approximately sixty metres in diameter at
the other end of which was situated a cone-
shaped hut of very finely crafted reed grass.
The black grave minder slides rush mules over
my shoes as the ground is sacred, and slowly
we set foot in the sanctuary where the great
Kabaka rests. The interior is of a noble simplic-
ity. There is no sign of any European influence.
This grave, which is sacred to the Baganda,
is African. Actually, the hut is in essence the
sameas an ordinary large Baganda dwelling.
A great number of trunks — decorated in red
and black colours — support the roof. The hut is
open to the front and the opening is sparsely
lit, illuminating the floor where the Kabaka’s
grave is situated in the centre under the
spread-out straw. Behind this, on an altar, are
arranged a large number of iron and bronze
spears: the monarch’s personal weapons. It
is not quiet in the hut. In a corner, beside the
grave, a veiled female figure is crouched down
[…] whose task it is to guard the tomb and
mourn the monarch.
Outside, the tropical rain rustles down on the
thatched roof. Chill bursts even permeate the
hut, where the Kabaka’s skeleton has found its
final resting place. Mutesa, I then think, has
been laying here for fifty years. What hasn’t
come to pass in Central Africa, in the half
century that the bronze spears at the head of
the grave relate to visitors of his martial acts.
He has seen the European inf luences reach
his shores. As a young man he saw the first
white man appear before his father’s court,
has himself stimulated the major overturn in
his country, has made his people great and
strengthened it to be the most civilised part
of the black community, and even though he
himself did not become a Christian and died
a heathen he did lay the foundations for cul-
tural revival and I do believe that when once
perhaps in the distant future Africa has chosen
the way of culture and Christianity for good,
this great African will be granted the honour
he deserves as one of the pioneers of his people
before Christendom arrived and that he has
laid the foundations on which African peoples
are currently finding their own path to a
higher, indigenous African culture.
PP. ,
PP.
20
In one period between the COVID lockdowns, faced with
no real possibility of travelling beyond the borders of
the Netherlands, I contacted the Centre for Fine Art in
Amsterdam Zuidoost to ask whether they could help me
toget in touch with individuals of African descent who might
be interested in photographs held in the PJU Archive. This
resulted in an invitation to a residency and introductions
to Abu Kanu and Jude Kehla.30 Abu Kanu brought a keen
material eye and an interest in the masks photographed
by Paul Julien, while Jude Kehla contributed a view that is
highly critical of past- and present-day representations
constituting imaginations of Africa.
While writing an application for financial support for this
part of the research I came across the notion of a heritage
communit y.
31
Though I was initially not sure what to make of
it, this phrase later helped me to better understand my own
position in the research project relative to that of the dif-
ferent people responding or contributing to it. I had already
positioned my primary heritage community, to be situated
within the Dutch context. This is a distinctly different
position from, for instance, that of sons or granddaughters
of people depicted in the photographs, or people who recog-
nise traditions because they practice them, or people who
recognise traditions because they know them from photo
albums in the family, or people who experience racism on a
daily basis. Each of us is part of multiple heritage commu-
nities that — while all fluent and unfixed — afford different
responses to the material in the PJU Archive. So long as we
are curious, each of us has something to wish for in relation
to the framed presence of past encounters.
This research project has taken both myself and the PJU
Archive to many different places, both literally and met-
aphorically, but one centre of its orbit will continue to be
those cool, dark caverns of the Nederlands Fotomuseum’s
archival depots. Photographs have a curious way of revealing
themselves gradually, but they are fragile too, and the sen-
sitivity of many photographic materials means that careful
treatment is necessary if such registers of meaning are to
be available to future audiences. Places like the Nederlands
Fotomuseum and the Eye Filmmuseum, where the 16mm
films Paul Julien produced are kept, are vital for the preser-
vation of materials such as the PJU archive, protecting them
from damage and making them accessible to researchers for
re-examination.
32
It was Professor Arthur Abraham (1940-2020) who verbalised
perhaps most poignantly the potential of wishing with archival
materials. He first welcomed me to his house in a suburb of
Freetown with the question, ‘So, what do you want to know?’
But when I showed him the photographs and silent films
produced in Sierra Leone on my laptop screen he sighed.
‘I wish there was color,’ he said, adding, ‘I wish there was
sound.’ With these wishes I entered another kind of in- between,
one in which my initiatives were not primarily informing the
PJUArchive or filling in gaps in local collections.
Thank you Annet Zondervan
and Renske de Jong and your
colleagues at CBK Zuidoost i n
Amsterdam for this opportunity.
Thank you
Cultuurfonds
for your
trust in a strange p roposal sub-
mitted du ring a gl obal pande mic.
In preparation for this book
I produced photographs in
the archival de pots of the
Nederlands Fotomuseum. Here
I came across other boxes with
lantern s lides. It turned out th at
what I had digitise d more th an a
decad e ago was a set ordered by
geographical location or ethnic-
ity. I had not yet seen the l antern
slides that were o rganised on
thetopics of the lectures.
PP.
PP.
PP. ,
21
The real world, of course, had — and has — colour as well as
sound. These properties were lost in the lived experience’s
translation into most of the mediations that together form
the PJU Archive.
Olivette Barnet, educational officer at the Sierra Leone
National Museum, had asked me whether I could facilitate
an activity for the schoolchildren in the Museum Club. With
Professor Abraham’s words still fresh in my mind, I proposed
that the children would colour in photographs from the PJU
Archive based on their understanding and interpretation
of the depicted past, and the Professor would judge the
outcomes based on his lived experience and knowledge as a
historian. As it happened, the day of the exercise and judging
was the last time I saw Professor Abraham in person. When
the global lockdowns brief ly stranded me in Sierra Leone, we
jokingly exchanged messages about me helping him to sort
out his library, a task he could not do for himself due to the
dust and his asthma. But then I returned to the Netherlands,
and Professor Abraham died a few months later.
Of course this book’s contents are the result of so much more
than just one conversation, but in this case I will permit
myself to indulge a reductionist tendency. I like to think that
the encounter with Professor Abraham’s remark was crucial
for the book you are holding, and its potential to expand our
understanding of how images and imaginations are con-
structed; what they preserve, what they leave out.
Perhaps this book can contribute to reversing the tide of
‘Africa is a country’ narratives.
33
This is, however, only
possible, if you join me in acknowledging that this continent
has been (and to some extent unfortunately still is) defined
externally by story truth, and that that tendency must be
diligently named and challenged. Legacies such as Paul
Julien’s can, now that they are archived, easily be ignored.
This is tempting, given the cultural violence that such mate-
rials result from and are part of. However, the combination
ofpreserving and activating such archives makes the open-
endedness I plead for,
34
as well as your engagement with
it,possible.
On that note I leave you in the care of other words and
images for yet another round of encounters in which you
decide where to take what you see.
War mest,
Andrea
See Binyavanga Wainain a’s
article ‘How to Write About
Africa’ in literary magazine
Granta 92, The View From Africa,
2005, and online journal
https://africasacountry.com
which ta kes the cliché as a van-
tage point to publish ‘opi nion ,
analysis, and new writing on
andfrom the Afric an left.’
Last accessed M arch 17, 2024.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold
considers anthropology to
be ‘a generous, open-ended,
comparative, and yet critical
inquiry into the conditions
and potentials of h uman life in
the one world we all inh abit.’
Ingol d’s thin king about what
constitutes research and what
relates anthropological inquiry
to artistic researc h has been
highly influ ential for my making
and thi nking. Tim Ingold , 2017,
Anthropology an d/as Education,
Routle dge, pp . 58-59.
PP. , ,
,
P.
2
The Nederlands Fotomuseum
and the Paul Julien Archive
(a.k.a. PJU)
After Paul Julien’s death in 2001, most of his
archive was handed over to the Nederlands
Fotomuseum.
Julien’s many rolls of 6x6 negatives had been
wrapped in paper and stored in wooden holders.
This made them inaccessible, as simply unrolling
them risked damaging their emulsion surfaces.
Nevertheless registration of the archive began
in 2005 using what information was available
regarding the negatives, and an inventory was
made of the archive’s entire contents. Slides
were only superficially cleaned, and the vulner-
able glass negatives and autochromes, not all of
which were in good condition, were stabilised
toprevent further deterioration.
Besides photographic material the archive also
includes correspondence, reports, receipts,
photo albums, and several other objects includ-
ing two pre-recorded radio talks preserved on
vinyl records. It also includes various Dutch and
international editions of Paul Julien’s four books.
Three of them were bestsellers, and all were
illustrated with photographs made during his
journeys. Their titles are listed below, followed
by any abbreviation by which they are some-
times referred in this book:
• Kampvuren langs de evenaar //
Campfires Along the Equator [Campfires]
First published in 1940
• De Eeuwige Wildernis //
The Eternal Wilderness [Wilderness]
First published in 1949
• Pygmeeën // Pygmies
First published in 1953
• Zonen van Cham // Sons of Cham [Cham]
First published in 1958
A small selection of what were arguably Paul
Julien’s most iconic photographs were digi-
talised and made available by the Museum.
The 16mm films produced by Paul Julien was
handed over to the care of the EYE Film Museum,
where they have been inventoried and partially
digitalised.
After Andrea Stultiens started to work with the
Archive in 2012 the Collection underwent a
partial expansion, with the addition of objects
and documents that had remained with Henry
Hofsteenge, son of Paul Julien’s second wife,
and materials that were still in the care of Cor
Adolfse, Julien’s literary agent during the 1990s.
The Nederlands Fotomuseum oversees more
than 175 archives of photographers from the
Netherlands and places them in a contempo-
rary context. The Fotomuseum’s archive is held
in high-quality cool storage and the institution
conserves, registers, digitises and presents
itsCollection via digital channels as well as
inpublications and exhibitions.
The Nederlands Fotomuseum also manages
thecopyrights for Paul Julien’s oeuvre.
The archive
innumbers:
Negatives
ca. 21,000
of which
glass n egatives
700
9x12cm s heet negatives
ca. 3,300
6x6 negatives on r oll
ca. 17,000
autochromes
several
35mm c olour slid es
ca. 30,000
lantern slides
ca. 5,000
prints, m ostly 13x18
and20x25cm
ca. 15,000
Fotomu seum
Collectors Council
WITH THAN KS TO:
Everyone w ho engaged with
the PJU Arch ive overthe years.
THIS PU BLICATION WAS MADE POSS IBLE BY
This publication accompanies the exhibition
Iwish there was c olor / I wish there wa s sound
inthe Ned erlands Fotom useum in Rotterd am,
the Neth erlands fro m the 31st of May 2024
tothe 15th of Septe mber 2024.
COVER PHOTO
Digita l collage ba sed on twenty-thr ee 9x12
negatives p roduced du ring perfor mances stag ed
for Paul J ulien by Para mount Chief M oriba
Kargoba i III in Dam bara, 193 4.
© 2024 Jap S am Books,
Nede rlands Fotomu seum.
© Text: Doree n Baingana , Birgit Donke r, Esthe r
Amin ata Kamara, N ico de Klerk, Ke rmurl
Fofana h, Guinevere R as, Andrea Stu ltiens.
© Photogra phy: Andrea Stu ltiens, Pau l Julien,
Elsadig Mohamed.
All rig hts reserved. No p art of this pub lication
may be tra nsmitted in any fo rm or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including
photoco py, reco rding, or any sto rage and
retrieval sys tem , without prior p ermission i n
writing f rom the Neder lands Fotomus eum,
theautho rs, the (heirs of t he) photographe rs,
artistsan d the publis her.
COMMISSIONED BY
Birgit D onker, Director of th e
NederlandsFotomuseum
CONCEPT & EDITING
Andrea Stultiens
with An nika Felder
PHOTOGRAPHS
Andrea Stultiens
Paul Julien
Elsadig Mohamed
Cano n Griffin
TEXT
Doreen Baingana
Birgit Donker
Esther A minata Kama ra
Nico d e Klerk
Kermurl Fofanah
GuinevereRas
Andrea Stultiens
FINAL EDITING [NL/EN]
Willem Groenewegen
Petra ter Veer/Terveertekst
Will Boase
Eleonoor Jap Sam
TRANSLATION
Willem Groenewegen
Petra ter Veer/Terveertekst
Amar Jamal
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Bob Verbruggen
COLLECTION & CONSERVATION
Annette Behrens
Flip B ool
Martij n van den Broek
Loes van H arrevelt
Had assa Kon ing
Katrin Piets ch
Sonja W ijs
REPRODUCTION & POSTPRODUCTION
Andrea Stultiens
Marc G ijzen
Nede rlands Fotomu seum:
Marwan Almokdad
Eelco Loode
Cengiz Mengüç
Mathijs va n Oosterhoudt
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Kumme r & Herrman
LITHOGRAPHY
Marc G ijzen
PRINTING & BINDING
NPN Drukkers
PUBLISHER
Jap Sa m Books,
Prinsenbeek,
the Netherlands
www.japsambooks.nl
Printed and bound
in the N etherland s/EU.
ISBN
978-94-93329-17-1