Miracles of Analogy: Activating an African Digital Archive

In this paper, I intend to relay varying modes of curatorial engagement with Tender Photos, a digital platform of African photography. Since 2022, when I cofounded the platform, it has featured the work of nearly 200 photographers from the African continent, mainly in a weekly Substack newsletter. The paper shall seek to consider how born-digital photographic images establish dynamic claims to an archive, and how their mutability in an era of networked images allow for a deepened, interactive engagement. The first section of the paper will argue for how every digital archive reproduces, intrinsically, the knowledge within it, and makes arguments about its contents. This proposition finds its clearest illustration in the imperial or colonial archive, in which the pixelated documents remain imbricated with the histories from which the records emerge. Beginning with a survey of key responses to that imbrication, broadly conceptualized as an ‘ethics of care’, I will go on to propose that the affordance of the networked image requires a new epistemological framework for collecting and exploring photographic documents. In the second section of the paper, I would turn to models of curatorship based on two immersive engagements with the Tender Photo archive. This engagements, framed around what I intend to describe as an ‘ethics of futurity’ for digital photographic archives, is concerned not just with domiciliation, but with the archival imaginary of a post-digital era. The first engagement will report on an interactive exhibition of a constellation of images and texts at the Lagos Photo Festival 2025, in which viewers were presented with an asynchronous cascade of images and blocks of texts on two walls, and invited to match an image with its corresponding caption. A second engagement, presented for the first time at the conference, would be a prototype for an image association game inspired by popular word association puzzle games, particularly 4x3. It challenges viewers to group images from the digital archive into categories by identifying the correct keywords that connect them. Concluding my presentation in connection with the theme of DPASSH 2026, I would show how creative engagement with a contemporaneous African digital collection is a ‘miracle of analogy’, a reference to Kaja Silverman’s book of the same title. Silverman offers an alternative way of understanding photography’s ‘ontological calling card’, arguing that analogy and not indexicality is a better theoretical frame for understanding the nature and impact of the medium. The revelation of the world occurs by analogy, and photography ‘helps us to see that each of us is a node in a vast constellation of analogies.’ Thus, as the paper would show, thinking analogically, allows us to find a frame for proposing a dialogic, even playful, engagement with photographs.