Photography and the performance of history

Abstract

To understand orikiA [a form of Yoruba praise chant] ... you have to see them as a very specific, intense and heightened form of dialogue, in which the silent partner is as crucial as the speaker [for our contexts here read viewer] ... it is clear that the dramatic communication of oriki chants [here read photograph] is at the heart of very far-reaching processes of social action ... In engaging in this action [it is] reactivating the encoded past for a present purpose.1