1 INTRODUCTION: RELOCATING THE AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury African photography has emerged as a signiicant focus of research and scholarship over the last 30 years. From the frequent use of photographs as illustrations for historical and cultural narratives and the turn towards visual evidence across the humanities and social sciences to in-depth studies of speciic collections, photography has become an essential medium for those seeking to understand African societies and cultures of the colonial and postcolonial periods. As they have delved deeper into the photographic archive and as historical photographs have become ever more important to the stories they want to tell, researchers from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds have begun to crat sophisticated ways of understanding and working with photographic images. Ideas around photography as a means of communication and as an artistic medium have merged with insights from anthropology and material culture studies to produce a complex and relational appreciation of the photograph as image-object. As Pefer reminds us, ‘[w]hat was called a “photo” was not entirely the same material thing in Africa as it was in Europe’ (2013: 12). Added to an awareness of the image form as material culture is a greater attention to the biographical shits that photographs are subject to in the course of their ‘lives’ and how their inherent social and cultural meaning is thereby patterned and communicated. Photographs are the subjects of complex narratives. As images they are copied, remembered and imagined, as well as reproduced in various places and points in time; as objects they are touched, exchanged and marked. Just occasionally they are deposited in institutional archives. More oten, and not least in Africa, they remain outside of oicial collections, subject to deterioration and loss. Property of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.