Flora S. Kaplan

Some uses of photographs in recovering cultural history at the royal court of Benin, Nigeria

Photographs collected for research in 1980 and in the course of field work at the royal court of Benin in 1982 and 1983 to 1985, as well as photographs taken by the researcher, are used to stimulate, supplement, and support ethnographic study. Many of the photographs are themselves ethnohistoric documents, marking the demise of the autonomy of the Benin kingdom at the end of the nineteenth century, and giving evidence of the impact of colonialism and of social change in society. Special attention is given to the work of the first indigenous Benin photographer, S. O. Alonge, whose photographs form the bulk of the collection used and discussed here. Alonges work constitutes a microcosm of history, and a chronicle of technology and developments in photography in Nigeria, in the twentieth century. All of the photographs prove useful tools in linking memory and oral tradition to recorded events, customs, and persons. In so doing they serve to recover Benin cultural history.

The problem of lead in mexican pottery

Much public attention has been focused in the United States on utilitarian Mexican pottery as a source of lead poisoning. Our work demonstrates that, if a firing temperature of at least 1150 degrees is used, lead-glazed earthenware is made safe for the storage and preparation of foods. Examination by d.c. arc emission spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction shows that the lead then remains in crystalline form. An exchange-equilibrium for lead between solutions and earthenware material is postulated.

Benin art revisited: Photographs and museum collections

Sometimes surprising results were obtained in doing ethnographic fieldwork among the Benin people of southern Nigeria by using photographs of art objects seized by a British military expeditionary force against the Benin kingdom, in 1897. These results have import for the documentation of museum collections today. The more than two thousand objects taken from the Obas palace in 1897, dating from the 16th to 19th centuries, were sold to offset the expeditions expenses and subsequently entered European and American museums around the turn of the century with little documentation. Photographs are here used to revisit Benin art and to probe the events represented, the identity of persons portrayed, and the content and meaning of the objects collected. Ethnohistoric photographs as well as studio portraits, made available in Nigeria, were used in this study along with field photographs. Specific objects reveal continuities and discontinuities of form and meaning, and manifest the effects of conquest and colon...

Nigeria: shedding a ghostly presence

From back stage to stage front – such is the itinerary described in this article, through three exhibitions of a secluded group of African women represented in royal court art. The author is an anthropologist, formerly curator of African, Oceanic and New World art at the Brooklyn Museum and now Director of New York Universitys museum studies programme.