Headnotes, Fieldnotes, and Field Photos: Reflections on the Simon Ottenberg Archives

In a remarkably thoughtful and personal essay on decades of making fieldnotes, Simon Ottenberg introduces the concept of headnotes—or memories of field research that he collected and retained in his mind (Ottenberg 1990: 144-46). Headnotes, he admits, while “subject to distortion, forgetting and elaboration,” constitute a reservoir of “impressions, scenes and experiences” not recorded or elided in his fieldnotes, e.g., negotiating payments with informants or struggling to learn the local language (Ottenberg 1990: 144). From these two sets of notes, Ottenberg informs us, he engaged in a kind of storytelling or a construction of reality in his published record (Ottenberg 1990: 145). Curiously, Ottenberg does not discuss his field photographs or visual methodologies in this reflexive essay, although he does mention that he “employed photographs a great deal” in his book Masked Rituals of Afikpo (1975) and that a few photos “have a reality my notes lack” (Ottenberg 1990: 149).Ottenberg's field photographs (black-and-white and color slides) figure prominently in this publication (and others— see also Ottenberg 1997; Ottenberg and Binkley 2006; Falola 2006), providing the artistic and ethnographic contexts for his detailed descriptions, translations, and interpretations of Igbo masks and masquerades in Afikpo (also known as Ehugbo), Nigeria. Clearly, Ottenberg's images were a valuable source of visual information beyond his fieldnotes and headnotes (Fig. 1). Back at home, his visual archives allowed for deeper analysis and interpretation of Afikpo masks, their stylistic features, and the various players and stages of masquerades outlined in the publication and accompanying exhibition.1Simon Ottenberg's photographic archives at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution constitute a significant part of his visual legacy in African anthropology, art and education. Perhaps most significantly, his donation of ethnographic field slides to an art museum (as opposed to keeping with his original field notes)2 demonstrates the specialized attention he gave to these visual materials and an increasing recognition of the value of his field photographs to the study of Africa's arts and cultures.The Simon Ottenberg collection in the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives (EEPA) contains approximately 4,300 original slides from his field research periods in Afikpo village-group, Nigeria (1951, 1959, 1988, 1992) and with Limba peoples in Sierra Leone and Guinea (1978-80). Two photographic series are arranged by peoples, fieldwork research periods and locations, accompanied by detailed scope notes, captions and extensive annotations.3 In 2017, Ottenberg donated his research materials on artist Olayinka Burney-Nicol from Sierra Leone (see EEPA 2017-009), a labor of love that led to the publication of the artist's biography (Ottenberg 2014).As a student of anthropologist Melville Herskovits, who encouraged visual documentation as part of ethnographic fieldwork, Ottenberg took a 35mm camera to Nigeria in 1951 and 1959, shooting both color and black-and-white film.4 His early slides cover a wide range of subjects from arts and crafts, agriculture and farming, family life and domestic scenes, the construction of homes, buildings and roads, as well as local leaders, social groups, cultural performances, masquerades, initiation rituals, title-taking ceremonies, ancestral shrines, and all types of material culture. These images captured the diversity of artistic and spiritual traditions and cultural performances in Igbo villages during the 1950s-1960s. An invaluable visual resource on Igbo life, Ottenberg's archives documented the rapid cultural and sociopolitical changes he encountered in the year leading up to Nigerian independence, including Independence Day celebrations in Abakaliki Town on October 1, 1960 (see Ottenberg 2005). His images also provide evidence of his ethnographic approach to photography and film and his insatiable desire to document cultural changes. Similar to his fieldnotes and headnotes, Ottenberg's field photos became a vital part of his storytelling in ethnographic writing and played a key role in his descriptions, interpretations, and (re)interpretations of Igbo ceremonies and masquerades throughout his life.I first met Simon Ottenberg at the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) in 1993. Simon was a familiar presence in the hallways at the museum and would often visit the archives and library to research contemporary African art, in particular the work of Nsukka artists from Nigeria in preparation for a major exhibition, The Poetics of Line: Seven Artists of the Nsukka Group (NMAfA, 1997-1998), and accompanying publication (Ottenberg 1997). In his “retirement years,” Simon was more active than ever and his energy level never seemed to wane. He continued to pursue field research in Africa and publish into his 80s and 90s, branching out to areas of art, aesthetics, music, performance, and visual culture in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. At the time, I was a young archivist beginning my professional career in the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, one of the largest single repositories of African photography and visual materials on the history of Africa. With my background in visual anthropology and experience working in video/film production and photographic archives, the Elisofon Archives was a perfect fit for me. Thanks to the support of my supervisor (and later mentor), Christraud Geary, curator and head of the EEPA, I was able to apply my knowledge and skills in film and video production to create an in-house video production unit with professional Hi8mm equipment (remember Hi8mm?). We trained museum staff in education and public affairs to videotape special events and educational seminars and began a rigorous program to document docent training sessions, guest lectures, interviews with artists, exhibit installations, and artists at work in the galleries.5 During this period, I worked with Simon to videotape interviews with Nigerian artists and scholars who visited the museum for the Nsukka project. When he planned a trip to Nigeria in 1994 to interview additional artists, I was keen on accompanying him with our professional Hi8mm camera and equipment. Instead, the museum director presented me with what seemed an impossible task—teach an octogenarian how to use a Hi8mm camcorder, tripod, and microphones and successfully return with broadcast quality video/audio of artist interviews for use in the exhibition! It was a challenging task, but Simon was an enthusiastic student who took his task seriously and practiced with the equipment for weeks. Nevertheless, I was skeptical and then pleasantly surprised when he came back with good quality video and audio—the results more than met my expectations (see Ottenberg 1997: xvi). The edited videotapes Simon produced on this trip were featured in the Nsukka exhibit at the National Museum of African Art (1997-1998) and an accompanying videotape The Poetics of Line: Seven Artists of the Nsukka Group (1997). Thirteen videotape interviews with Nsukka artists recorded in 1994-1997 are part of the Ottenberg archives and constitute a rich visual resource on contemporary Nigerian art and artists.6 Ottenberg was a proficient photographer in the field (i.e., his slides are in focus, well composed, with multiple views and good color/light exposure), but most importantly he gained the trust of Afikpo villagers and obtained relatively unrestricted access to photograph their daily lives and ritual activities. His images demonstrate an ethnographic eye increasingly attuned to artistic processes and the processual aspects of ritual and performance. In the case of initiations and masquerades, Ottenberg photographed the entire ritualized sequence of events, with a focus on the initiates, masked performers, participants, and onlookers. Certainly, his visual archives were central to the process of transcription and description of his fieldnotes, producing what I call thick metadata (borrowing from Clifford Geertz) for the catalogue record in the form of extensive annotations with indigenous terminology, place names, and proper names of artists, local leaders and informants. In James Clifford's essay “Notes on (Field) notes,” he cites Ottenberg's essay on headnotes in the same volume, emphasizing the “critical function of memory as a (re)contextualizing process making fieldnotes (re)intelligible” (Clifford 1990: 53). Clifford identifies three distinctive moments in the practice of making field-notes—inscription (writing), transcription (translation with local informant), and description (representing a coherent reality) (Clifford 1990: 51). As part of the inscriptions created in the field (in addition to his scratch notes, index cards, maps, and fieldnotes), Ottenberg's field photographs functioned as “mnemonic artifacts” (Clifford 1990: 53) in Clifford's terminology, to remember, transcribe, and describe ethnographic information during the process of research and writing. His visual archives were riding on a “moving escalator” (Ottenberg 1990: 159) with his fieldnotes, in constant dialogue with his headnotes, and a vital part of the writing and (re) writing of his ethnographies. Ottenberg's meticulous descriptions and interpretations from his headnotes, field-notes and field photos are exceptional in comparison to other EEPA collections and have greatly enhanced the value of his visual archives for both contemporary researchers and communities of origin concerned with their own histories and cultural traditions.Ottenberg's sense of moral obligation and responsibility to the Igbo community comes through in the visual record he created and resonates with his discipline and archival practices. In his essay on his fieldnote practice, Ottenberg reflected that he was “constantly re-interpreting Afikpo, ever looking at my fieldnotes in different ways” (Ottenberg 1990: 146). In a similar way, Ottenberg's relationship to his field photographs changed over the course of his life, including his perceptions of the “image as text” in anthropological discourse (Ottenberg 1990: 156). As part of this ongoing dialectic between his fieldnotes and headnotes, he made continual use of his photographic archives in his writings and teaching.7 Ottenberg's field photos played a key role in his interpretations and (re)interpretations of Afikpo village-group life, an activity he considered “an immense responsibility” to the community (Ottenberg 1990: 154).In his essay, “We Are Becoming Art Minded: Afikpo Arts 1988,” Ottenberg revisits the same communities he worked with in the 1950s and reflects on the impact his book on Afikpo masquerades has had on the Afikpo (Ehugbo) themselves (see Ottenberg 1989). While his book made the Afikpo known to the external art world and stimulated local carvers to produce carvings for sale on the international art market, Ottenberg observed that Western notions of art and artist introduced by outside researchers like himself, led them to adopt these concepts and reshaped their notions of self and collective identities. He describes many changes in Afikpo art and aesthetics in the decades since his absence, perhaps most importantly a “reevaluation of traditional art and associated rituals” condemned by colonial administrations and missionaries. “Art in Afikpo has not died out”, he concludes, “it is creative, innovative and expanding” (Ottenberg 1989: 203).In the past decade, Igbo scholars and Afikpo (Ehugbo) community members have discovered the Ottenberg archives online (searchable on SI Collections and Google) and are now using his field photographs to explore their own artistic traditions, cultural histories and geographies8 (Fig. 2). Ottenberg's images have acquired renewed value as digital archives in the twenty-first century and provided the Igbo community (locally and globally) with the ability to reflect on their own past and culture. Perhaps this continued dynamic engagement with Ottenberg's photographs by the source communities themselves represents his most enduring and sustainable legacy.