Digitality and the African Photographic Archive: Towards a Practice of Futurity

In this paper, I examine ways in which a digital photographic archive might be instantiated or instigated, how that instantiation contributes to discourse on the localization of archives, and how the imbrication of an archive with the knowledge it produces requires new ways of knowing. I argue that the key responses to that imbrication, broadly conceptualized as an ‘ethics of care’, should be expanded into an ‘ethics of futurity’, given the affordances of the networked image. I conclude by pointing to how a practice of futurity for digital photographic archives is concerned not just with domiciliation but with the archival imaginary of a post-digital era.