The Future Is in Your Hands - Portrait Photography from Senegal

Portraiture in Senegal is a powerful tool for creating social connections and mending fragmented lives. Beth Buggenhagen's book explores the role of affect in portraiture practices, combining museum, ethnographic, and archival research with lens-based artists who address themes of separation, visibility, rupture, and repatriation. It reveals the enduring power of images and the efforts under way to keep this art form safely in Senegalese hands.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 07 November 2023
Publisher: Indiana University Press

In Senegal, portraiture holds immense significance as a vital tool for fostering social connections. Individuals engage in the act of sitting for and showcasing portraits, preserving albums, and collectively perusing illustrated magazines. Through these portraiture practices, Senegalese people have crafted idealized images aimed at mending the often-troubled and fragmented lives that have been shaped by decades of migration.

The Future Is in Your Hands: Photography as a Catalyst for Affect in Portraiture Practices offers a broad platform for photography to explore the profound role of affect in portraiture practices. Spanning from the colonial era to the newly independent Senegal, Beth Buggenhagen conducts extensive research on the history of photography, encompassing museum, ethnographic, and archival studies. She also collaborates with lens-based artists who address themes of separation, visibility, rupture, and repatriation through portraiture. Buggenhagen delves into how photographs, as visual and material objects, migrate themselves, mirroring the migratory journeys of the bodies they represent. By complicating the history of portraiture in Senegal, The Future Is in Your Hands unveils the enduring power of images and the ongoing endeavors to safeguard this art form within the hands of the Senegalese people.

Weight: 666g
Dimension: 229 x 152 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780253067692