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

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

Like its predigital kin, every digital archive reproduces, intrinsically, the knowledge within it and makes arguments about its contents. In an African archive, what is referred to as ‘the accumulated historical representation of Africans, organized in collections, repositories, and libraries throughout Africa and the Western world’ (Garb 2013) is inseparable from the context in which it is expressed. Hence, an African ‘gnosis’ (Mudimbe 1988) is caught in a strait between discourse that is shaped by a dynamic geographic space and one that contends with an (often imposed) epistemology from elsewhere, generally Western.

To attempt any escape from this dialectical constraint, it is necessary to turn to archival imaginaries that attempt to ‘think the world’ from Africa (Mbembe 2022). This can often be ‘para-institutional’, a formulation that considers efforts by individual scholars or knowledge producers to create an archive, often following a circuitous logistical path. Yet, given this para-institutional domiciliation, there is hardly any conception of the African archive that can mark it as complete or, for that matter, finished. It’s ‘choreographies of meaning’ (Varela 2016) are linked to the evolving state of its storage and retrieval in ways that are akin to the management of a repertoire. In this choreographic formulation, the African archive is an embodied repertoire, one which is always in the process of becoming constituted, like performers whose roles shift over the course of a lifetime.

In what follows, I attempt to sketch out what this embodiment can mean and look like. First, I offer lengthy reflections on my curatorial work with African photographers, aiming to delineate the anthropological scope of a contemporaneous, self-reflexive engagement with an African digital archive. Following from that, I examine how photographic archives might be localized or domiciled, turning to archival projects that I term ‘para-institutional’, which often begin with the pragmatic impulses of individual scholars or founders. The third and final section of this paper expands the theoretical parameters of archival constitution by considering the dynamics of collection practices in African photography, with the intention to offer propositions on how to work with a photographic archive in an age of networked images.

Before going on to expand on these claims, it is important to note how the scope of the work attempted here requires a broader understanding of the various physical, institutional, conceptual and theoretical conceptions of an archive. The archival imaginary illustrated below all hangs on assumption that archives, digital or not, have no fixed character—whether in relation to where they are located or domiciled or in how they allow meaning to be produced. This is true for archives of any sort, but it is perhaps truer for photographic archives, since the photographs they contain are ‘meshworks of hybrid forms that can accommodate multiple claims upon them’ (E. Edwards 2020).

2. Discussion

2.1. Initiating, Instantiating (And Instigating) an African Archive

What does it mean to initiate or instantiate a digital archive, and what sort of theoretical and practical questions do such a process raise? I wish to offer an aslant response to this by casting an auto-ethnographic lens on my curatorial engagement with a digital platform over several years, with the aim of offering a sharper (indeed, emboldened) critique of archival mediations in the sections that follow.

Between February 2022 and March 2025, I sent out a newsletter each week, which included a photograph by an African photographer (defined as anyone who was born in any country of the continent or is based there or who has, within the past 7 years, produced a significant series of photographs there). The feature also includes a statement on the photograph by the photographer and a short caption that describes the content of the image based on observable phenomena. This three-part structure allowed for a consistency in publication but equally allowed for the development of what is best described as a born-digital archive with a well-structured collection practice. The digital publication was hosted on Substack (https://tenderphoto.substack.com), the increasingly popular blog-styled newsletter platform.

Tender Photo’s digial infrastructure was designed to accommodate a typology of responses from a diverse range of African photographers. Once a photographer accepted the invitation to collaborate on the feature, I selected three photographs from their online portfolios (downloading the photos from a personal website or making screenshots from an Instagram feed) and sent them with the instruction that one of the photographs should inform the response. The link to a templated form was included in the email and included three core questions: ‘(1) Where was the photograph taken, and how did you do about taking it? (2) Why did you choose this photograph? (3) What is your approach to photography, or how do you think photography is impactful?’ The answers to these questions were edited into a statement (with the questions taken out and the text edited for grammatical consistency) and then sent by email to the photographer for approval. In total, I edited the responses of over 150 photographers.

At the outset, while conceptualizing the platform, I felt it was necessary for me, as I described in the initial newsletter, to be a middleman in the exchange between a photographer and the photograph they took. As such, the frame of our correspondences was important. How could I get the photographer to speak freely and without unilluminating jargon on the image in question? My aim was to present narratives on photography mainly from the point of view of practitioners of the medium, prefaced by short captions that illustrate the possibility of keen observation.

The decision to operationalize this format on Substack was based on the possibility of locating a new vocabulary for photography criticism intended for a non-expert audience. Whereas my published art writing trafficked in traditional modes of magazine or book publication, subsumed as it were within corporatized flows of circulation online, the promise of Substack, as a platform that catered to ‘independent media’, was the possibility of shaping an editorial and curatorial voice from outset and building a reader base from the ground up. There are obvious limitations to this approach, including how sporadic changes to Substack’s algorithms shape the readership of the publication and whether a reader’s inbox is the optimal site for an engagement with photography.

Yet, as the photographs began to accumulate in tandem with both my observations and the photographer’s interpretations, it became necessary to conceive the corpus, even if speculatively, as attentive to affinity-making as an ethos. This, I thought, could shape any conceptualization of the platform as a corpus focused not only on presenting new photographers each week but revisited earlier features as a matter of conceptual necessity. On two occasions, I instigated such curatorial returns. In the first iteration, titled ‘Correspondences,’ I asked a few writers to make connections between three photographs from the archive, chosen without constraint on style or genre, and to write short commentaries on their choice. The goal was to open Tender Photo’s editorial and curatorial process to an engaged group of readers, broadening the diversity of responses to the varied work featured in the publication. For the series titled ‘Kindred,’ each contributor was asked to select a photograph from their family or personal album, pair it with another photograph from the Tender Photo archive and write a short reflection on why they selected both photographs. The idea was to find an analogy between two photographs, regardless of whether they are similar, but which, to the contributor, was connected to an experience, emotion, or idea.

I was instigating responses to the archive that was influenced by certain ontologies in photography criticism. Two examples are relevant here. In The Miracle of Analogy: The History of Photography, Part 1, art historian Kaja Silverman offers an alternative way of understanding photography’s ‘ontological calling card.’ She argues that analogy and not indexicality is a better theoretical frame for understanding the nature and impact of the medium. She posits that it is not a medium ‘that was invented… in the 1820s and 1830s, that was improved in numerous ways in the following century, and that has now been replaced by computational images,’ but ‘the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us’ (Silverman 2015). This revelation of the world occurs by analogy; photography ‘helps us to see that each of us is a node in a vast constellation of analogies’ (Silverman 2015). And by analogy she means ‘authorless and untranscendable similarities that structure Being… and give everything the same ontological weight’ (Silverman 2015). The idea of a vast constellation of analogies is appealed to me in shaping Tender Photo, in which I work with a repertoire of images that are, in many senses, dissimilar in form or subject matter. To think analogically would therefore mean thinking beyond the properties of a single photograph and considering two ‘as the smallest unit of Being’ (Silverman 2015).

In addition, Geoff Dyer’s aptly titled book on photography The Ongoing Moment attempted to ‘marshal the infinite variety of photographic possibilities into some kind of haphazard order’ (Dyer 2007). He wishes ‘to echo the possibilities of simultaneity and random juxtaposition offered by a pile of photographs. You rummage in the box. You pick a photograph and then another one and the way they are combined makes you view each of them in a different way’ (Dyer 2007). Structured as a book-length essay on the visual and thematic affinities of photographs (including a consideration, for instance, of several pictures of blind beggars that is followed in the next section by a reflection on pictures taken in the subway), Dyer’s contribution views each photograph as belonging to a network of ongoing moments, to paraphrase his title. The methodology of his book can be crystallized as a flow of synchronic text that establishes relationships between all the photographs under consideration.

To return the dilemma to the ontological, what makes Tender Photo a digital archive? Since plaformization is subject both to the shifting caprices of algorithms and the companies that create them, what Axel Bruns describes as an ‘APIcalypse’ (Bruns 2019), where else can its archival attributes be exemplified? My proposition is to turn away momentarily from the platform on which the archive is hosted, focusing instead on its bricolage-like collection procedures. To wit, since the decision of what photograph is featured (and, in a sense, collected) is part of a multi-stage process beginning with the photographer’s portfolio, mediated by my selection, and finalized by the photographer, the collection is shaped by dialogic curatorship; what is displayed to the subscribing public is first mediated by an independent curator and then remediated by the photographer, who is constrained by a paucity in the curatorial subset.

Thus, a dialogic curatorship is established here as a prefatory framework for constituting an African photographic archive. It is possible, in the first place, to see the collection of images generated in the logistical and interpretative exchanges between critic and photographer as an ambivalent archive, one constructed with an uncertainty about how, ultimately, the digital images would be stored or accessed. I equally began to understand this flexible curatorial system as a pidginized method of working with photographers. This praxis, as offered by the curator Bonventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, articulates pidginization as discursive tool for exploring the nature of exhibitions in a world where ‘there are probably more people around the world who speak some form of Pidgin and live some form of pidginization culture than those who speak the supposedly dominant colonialist languages of English, French, Spanish, German’ (Ndikung 2023).

I bring up pidginization as a dialogic curatorial method given that Tender Photo is shaped by a polyphonic view of photographic practices. As noted, each photographer is asked the question, ‘Why did you choose this photograph?’ Since a choice was made between three photographs, I have sought to prompt an uncovering of the rationales behind that selection. The responses vary from the experiential and personal to the theoretical and abstract. A manipulated photograph from a family album is chosen by the photographer Jean-Yves Gauze because it ‘serves as an emotional keepsake, preserving my mother’s memory in a way that honors her without objectification’. Another photograph, depicting the moment in a Lagos street when street traders gathered their goods in hurried response to the demands of a government task force, prompted the photographer Oyewole Lawal to note: ‘This photograph embodies a deep story and philosophy. It made me realize what it truly means to be African—how the Western definition of civilization has shaped and continues to shape our people’.

Those multivalent responses indicate how Tender Photo, as an African archive, aims to choreograph self-reflexive meanings: the photographer’s reflection on a photograph shapes the archive as much as a qualitative or quantitative analyses of the collected photographs or its metadata. Yet, if the above confirms Tender Photo as an ontological archive, I wish, also, to define it as a localizable one. I remain drawn to a nomenclature that is logistical in outlook and grounded in operational particulars. As James Yékú put it in his essay on social media images: ‘How will the multimedia project itself be archived, so that future historians who should have access to its archive are not confronted by broken links’? (Yékú 2024). My inclination, on the path of a response to this, is to consider how an archive inevitably confronts where it is kept or domiciled.

2.2. Locating and Constituting an African Photographic Archive

I wish to propose that it is through a process of recuperation that the African photographic archive can point, in a domiciliary sense, to its immediate relevance. If, as Morton and Newbury argue, ‘much of the continent’s visual history has been physically located (and thereby disseminated and controlled) in the West,’ an archival impulse that seeks relocation as its aim might help clarify a practice of domiciliation (Morton and Newbury 2015). Relocation and domiciliation do not suggest only a physical activity but a conceptual one. In fact, it is arguable that an ‘increasing atomization or individualization of African history, accompanied by greater emphasis on biographical approaches and a shift towards personal archives’ makes it impractical to frame a recuperated archive as simply physical (Morton and Newbury 2015).

Given this, to relocate an archive, evident in examples in The African Photographic Archive, is to shift its value from a non-contextualized collection, often personal, to a collectivist one. For Morton and Newbury, the task for researchers and curators in relocating the archive is to ‘reimagine it in order that we might recognize it when we see it…’ (Morton and Newbury 2015). One example of attempts to reimagine is the administrative collection of a senior political figure in southwestern Uganda, located in his living room, and considered by Richard Vokes to be ‘an official archive of sorts, given that parts of this building also double as a public space for the chairman’s various political activities, including for his ad hoc village court, for his numerous election campaigns, and for his major criminal investigations’ (Vokes 2015). Another proposition is by Andrea Stultiens, whose ad hoc methodologies centre around the biography of Kaddu Wasswa, a Ugandan photographer and documentarian.1 Between 2008, when she met Wasswa, and 2013, she produced versions of a book based on photographs and photographed documents. Stultiens’ reflections on her work with Wasswa is worth quoting extensively:

The photographs in the 2010 version of the Kaddu Wasswa Archive refer to and show a past in order to understand the representation of it in (relation to) the present. The image that shows a situation that happened at a specific time and place becomes a time machine that refers to other places and moments to which it is causally related. These places and moments are of course not the same for those seeing the image. Every documented fragment leads to other fragments that are part of a library of experiences, interests and observations connected to the individual that encounters it. The engagement with the image will be completely different when that individual is Kaddu Wasswa himself who keeps digging up new documents and photographs every time I meet him, or me with my interest in what I can and cannot understand of a culture that is not mine.

(Stultiens 2015)

This admission by Stultiens, of what is opaque to her of a culture that is not hers, is part of a larger pattern of exteriority in the archival propositions in the volume edited by Morton and Newbury (Mbembe and Sarr 2022). That is, in most cases, the scholars who take up the recuperative task of relocation are affiliated to Western institutions. To put it squarely, the Western researcher or curator is positioned as an intermediary between an African photographic archive and its multiple audiences, whether within or outside the continent. The most extensive engagement with this tenuous framing is offered at the end of the volume in what reads as a pragmatic epilogue. In that chapter, Erin Haney and Jennifer Bajorek offer an extensive consideration of the institutional setups by which archives are created and preserved within the African continent. They rightly focus on endeavours that centre African publics, which work with a ‘hybrid model’ to evince the social and civic value of photography (Haney and Bajorek 2015).

To return to Morton and Newbury’s estimation that the archive is reimagined so that ‘we might recognize it when we see it’ (Morton and Newbury 2015), the question to ask is not just to ask who is being referred to as ‘we’ but to attempt to understand the ideal community for whom the knowledge in an archive is produced. It is no longer deemed fashionable or relevant to recursively allude to a disjuncture between a Western epistemology and an African one, particularly when, as in the cases mentioned above, knowledge is being produced about Africa. That is, whether the researchers and curators gathered by Morton and Newbury are affiliated to Western institutions, one must look towards a different gnoseological horizon. The notion, hence, is that an ideal community is a universal one; that a knowledge inherent in an African archive is knowledge about the world at large. This is summed up perceptively in a section of Achille Mbembe’s provocative essay, ‘Thinking about the World from the Vantage Point of Africa’, which I find crucial to quote in full:

For those who are concerned about Africa, the essential challenge from now on is, therefore, to work at the intersection of several exteriorities, convinced that there is no longer any sort of outside that could be opposed to an inside. Because, at bottom, everything has moved inside. There is no part of the world whose history doesn’t contain some African dimension, in the same way that African history only exists as an integral part of world history. There hardly exists—either for Africans or for other peoples in the world—any totally hidden forms of knowledge that any one person or group considers as belonging only to themselves and not to others. It is therefore time to move on from the problematic of origins and borders. Indeed, we must seek out and explore other bifurcations and branches of thought. In order to do this, we must openly assume once and for all the composite character of our face and the heterogeneity of our heritages no longer understood as factors of inauthenticity, but as the privileged resources of our own surpassing.

(Mbembe 2022)

Going beyond the question of institutional affiliation, we can look further into the para-institutional contexts in which certain African photographic archives are constituted. By ‘para-institutional’, I refer to a process of domiciliation that begins, largely, with the intrepid efforts of an individual scholar, who, following a circuitous (sometimes serendipitous) path in the pursuit of a scholarly or research interest, attempts to create an archive. One instance might help bring this to focus. What is known today as the Archive of Malian Photography is the result of research by Candace M. Keller on histories of photographic practice in Mali she began in 2002. The archive now comprises the collections of at least a hundred photographers, with over 25,000 negatives digitized. Unlike, for example, the work done with funerary photographs by Heike Behrend in Kenya, which was not focused on ‘photographs that enter the archive but on images brought out of storage for new encounters with users’, Keller’s extensive work is intended both to be brought out of storage and for new encounters (Behrend 2015).

On the project’s website, a subdomain of Michigan State University’s site, the archive is framed, primarily, as a response to the physical condition of personal archives in Mali, which, stored in severe climatic conditions, are often in degraded states. The other stated objectives are to render the archive accessible for wider research and to keep it from exploitation in a global art market. Led by Keller, the project was convened as a collaborative venture between conservators, photographers, student assistants, and family estates. Its institutional home is Matrix, Michigan State University’s Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, with funding from the British Library Endangered Archives Programme, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access Division. Following a digitization process that began in 2011, the partnership agreement with the photographers’ estates mandates that while the physical negatives remain in Mali, Matrix has the right to store copies of the original high-resolution TIFF files and to make low-resolution JPEG versions available on its website and at Maison Africaine de la Photographie (MAP), a local arts venue in Bamako, Mali.

The Archive of Malian Photography is para-institutional insofar as it is established through the goodwill and fervour of an individual whose institutional affiliation ensures the possibility and stability of the constituted archive. Yet there is another sense in which constituting an archive can tilt towards the para-institutional. In this instance, the individuals who work to constitute an archive are also founders of the institution through which it is maintained. From the outset, as such, precarity is understood as a key feature of the logistics of preservation. Consider, as examples, two Nigerian not-for-profit entities that have taken up archiving tasks usually reserved for state actors or research institutions: Olongo Africa, founded by the linguist Kola Tubosun, and Archivi.ng, founded by Fu’ad Lawal. The former, a web publication, recently worked with a conglomerate of partners to digitize and explore most editions of Black Orpheus, a literary journal founded in 1957 by Ulli Beier, a German–Jewish writer who was based in Nigeria for several years until the outset of the Nigerian Civil War. Archivi.ng, who is also a named as a partner in the project, have aimed to digitize Nigerian newspapers, with a goal of the first phase being to archive daily editions of newspapers published between 1 January 1960 (the date of Nigeria’s independence) and 31 December 2010. Both projects are funded by donations, from philanthropies like Luminate, in the case of Archivi.ng, and Open Society Foundation, in the case of the digitization of the Black Orpheus journal. Though these projects do not primarily engage with photography, they cohere with what Haney and Bajorek referred to as ‘hybrid models’, which combine ‘philanthropy and more entrepreneurial approaches’ (Haney and Bajorek 2015). Their precarious entanglement with foreign philanthropies notwithstanding, the key feature of their collection practice is the ambitious zeal of their founders, who must seek out copyright holders and, in some cases, pay significant sums for access to archival material or outright ownership.

All three projects share a flexible approach to domiciliation. The Archive of Malian Photography has made its website the main repository of the low-resolution photographs it has collected, clarifying that the provenance and ownership of the photographic negatives point elsewhere. A similar implication is offered by Archiv.ng, who claim no ownership to the newspapers, making the digital platform the main locus of their endeavour. While OlongoAfrica may seem an exception, since the organization received funding to cover the acquisition of rare issues of Black Orpheus, access is also digital, as with the others; they offer, in fact, the digitized journals via an unrestricted cloud storage (Google Drive) link. What is clear, ultimately, is that constituting an African archive in digital form requires pragmatic collection and curatorial methods.

A noteworthy example of this pragmatism is the ‘Home Museum’, a digital platform created in 2020 as an online iteration of the yearly (now biennial) Lagos Photo Festival. Responding in part to the debates around the restitution of African cultural artifacts, the curators conceived the Home Museum, in which participants could send up to twelve photographs depicting a ‘collection of objects of virtue’. It did not matter whether the participants were amateur or professional photographers or what kind of objects they decided to share. The photographs, sent in from regions as diverse as South America, the Middle East, Russia, and China, as well as across Africa, served as the basis of an online museum with the ‘cultural artefacts of our day’, as Clémentine Deliss and Azu Nwagbogu, the curators, wrote in a statement. The featured photographs included snapshots of record collections, bedrooms, pottery, and assortments of memorabilia. The images were assigned value first by the idiosyncratic claims of the contributors, who wrote accompanying texts, and then by interactions on the website, where users are encouraged to create collections by clicking on a star icon.

Such a disposition towards a crowd-sourced, multiuser platform is similar to artistic responses to the archive, in which the artist rarely interprets the archive as having a settled character. There, the precondition of an aesthetic engagement with a photographic archive is an openness to ‘futurity and contingency’, as proposed by Stuart Hall in his concluding remarks to The Living Archive conference, organized by the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive (AAVAA) and held at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in March 1997 (Hall 2024). Additionally, to speak of futurity and contingency as a collection ethos is to consider an archive of ‘things which fell by the wayside’, a reference to Theodor Adonor’s Minima Morialia made by Brent Hayes Edwards. Edwards goes on to suggest that the ‘recalcitrance of certain artifacts—their apparent muteness—might be understood, in the right light, as a kind of potential, the remnants of an alternative history rather than the worthless shards left behind’ (B. H. Edwards 2012).

2.3. Notes on a Practice of Futurity for Digital Archives

Having taken a theoretical detour to consider the implications of constituting a digital archive and the affordances at the heart of such an endeavour, I wish to offer a few propositions on how such a photographic archive might be utiliszed, disseminated and interpreted. By futurity, I refer not simply to notions of a time to come but to a practice of flux and contingency that is aware of how images operate in a digital age.

To speak prognostically, every photographic archive today is tinted by digitality. Whether the archive is created by born-digital methods, as in Tender Photo and the Home Museum, or is the product of a digitization process, as in the Archive of Malian Photography, photographic artefacts can hardly escape their digital domiciliation. As such, an attempt to reconfigure an archival ethos can begin with a digital aesthetics as an uncontested modality. That is, we take for granted that a digital archive is a site that produces knowledge and experiences. Or to put differently, every digital archive reproduces, intrinsically, the knowledge within it and makes arguments about its contents (Mussell 2014). This argument finds its clearest illustration in the imperial or colonial archive, where ‘the digitization of contested archival material is never a merely technical process,’ but one that implicates the histories from which the records emerge (Mussell 2014).

Recent scholarship has sought to show how digital colonial archives are imbricated with their foundational historical logics as well as how to intentionally move past that. In sum, the problematic can be presented as follows: ‘archival encounters between the colonial and the digital’ are fraught with the tension of how the machinic process of digitization might further elide the personhood of those shown or named in the archival record, similar to what was done during colonization or enslavement (Agostinho 2019). What is proposed is a ‘speculative ethics of care’, ‘how we attend to the dead represented in the open digital commons, those ancestors glimpsed in code, through substitute JPEGs and TIFF files’, as the scholar Temi Odumosu put it (Odumosu 2020). As such, it is a proposal for ethical encounters that bifurcates an African temporality between coloniality and decoloniality, between racist representations and refusals to be seen as such.

Staying with the epistemic shift suggested, I consider the useful notion of an ‘archive after theory’, as formulated by Megan Ward and Adrian S. Wisnicki. By this, they refer to projects that confront the ‘digital result of our postcolonial and archival theories’ as well as attempt to push the ‘boundaries of archival imaginations’ (Ward and Wisnicki 2019). Yet, in emphasizing the inextricability of the digital with the imperial and suggesting that the main function of a future-tilted digital archive is to re-envision an existing colonial one, they make little-to-no room for collection practices that are born-digital in nature. They set up, however, a useful conceptual parameter. ‘After’ is not used to designate a collapse of theory or its impracticality but to point to a futurity in the discourse around archives and postcoloniality. As such, the theories and methodologies that might reasonably inform the constitution of an African photographic archive is one that accommodates forms of futurity, acknowledging both the capaciousness and insufficiency of the existing interrogatory toolkit.

A necessary addition to make, to expand this interrogation, is to denote digitality as a pervasive cultural condition. It is impossible to make any substantial distinction between life in a real world and a digital sphere. ‘Computational infrastructure radiates increased data’, and ‘leads to tacit modes of knowing and new iterations of habit’, as Dewdney and Sluis put it (Dewdney and Sluis 2022). The post-digital as an era is thus best understood not simply as what follows the digital but what completely subsumes it. A world in which ‘computation has become hegemonic’ requires a new understanding of images (Dewdney and Sluis 2022). One way to reconceptualize this is to speak of images as ‘networked’. The networked image ‘emerges through the network; its existence is intricately entangled and intertwined with software, hardware, code, programmers, platforms, and users’ (Centre for the Study of the Networked Image et al. 2021).

What then might an ethics of futurity look like for photographic archives such as Tender Photo? First, such an ethics is concerned not just with the physical or digital domiciliation of an archive but with the archival imaginary of a post-digital era. In fact, it is imperative to indulge in such an endeavour given how a digital archive cannot be spoken of in terms of a fixed domicile but as a flow of dynamic digital assets. To sketch it out in preliminary and speculative terms, we begin by acknowledging what we can learn from an ethics of care: its investment in ‘an archival imagination for digital times’ borne out of the inevitable transition of colonial photographs into algorithmized images (Agostinho 2019). We also note that, within the overabundance of networked images and the overwhelming need for pragmatic approaches to digital sustainability, there is room to work within a network of care.

A network of care is primarily framed within the preservation of digital art. Its ideal pragmatism, as noted by Annet Dekker, ‘adheres to a transdisciplinary attitude, consisting of a non-hierarchical or informal structure’ (Dekker 2022). She gives the example of Slovenian net artist Igor Štromajer, whose conversation approach to his earlier art projects involved both deleting them from the web, to avoid ‘aesthetic loss and technical malfunction’, and a documentation of the process in multimedia files that he then began sending by email to a group of his contacts. An ethics of futurity is inspired by such a relational attitude: we might imagine a network of care developed to cater to a para-institutional cluster of photographers, who dialogue with each other or an external mediator to make sense of their images. As with my work with Tender Photo, the photographic archive created through this ethos is based on transmissions of digital files via email or cloud storage, uploaded to a website for contemporaneous access, with the understanding that no single internet platform will exist in the same form in perpetuity. As such, even if a network of care is limited by the same ‘kinks, folds, hiccups and slippages’ surrounding digital preservation, it inspires our envisioning of an ethics of futurity precisely because it allows for a collective contextualization of photographic images (Dekker 2022).

A practice of futurity braces up to a collective contextualization of images. Much as the process I described for working with photographers required their input and mine in establishing the meaning of the photograph—with the awareness that its eventual dissemination was subject to the algorithmic logic of an internet platform—this practice of futurity exists between the curatorial and computational.