I Am Sparkling: N. V. Parekh and His Portrait Studio Clients—Mombasa, Kenya by Isolde Brielmeier

I AM SPARKLING N. V. Parekh and His Portrait Studio Clients Mombasa, Kenya 1940-1980

Isolde Brielmaier

Fig. 3 - Portrait of Mzee Ali c. late 1940, N. V. Parekh.

Image reproduced by author with permission.

le. There was only one belt and this really pleased me. I thought for certain that no one else in Mombasa would have anything like it, so I decided to buy it. You know sometimes, you could buy many of the same things at this market and then you knew that everyone else would have it. I was a young man at this time and I was very proud to now own such a special belt and to be the only one. Several days later, I decided to wear my new belt and to go to visit [the N. V. Parekh studio], so that I could have a picture of my “new look.”

When asked what the studio experience was about—what it meant to him—Mzee Ali explained, Taking the picture was really about the belt. Parekh was the most famous, the most well-known studio at that point, so I usually went there. […] When I entered the studio, I just told Mr. Parekh, the photographer, that I wanted to have a picture taken of myself while I wore my new belt. I basically walked onto the studio floor and decided I was going to stand just like that…like a bwana kubwa so that you could see my one of-a-kind fur belt. I was very proud in that photograph.

Mzee Ali described what he did with his photograph once he went to the studio to retrieve it, I was very happy to see the finished picture. I had paid for it outright. I brought it home with me…I was very happy. I liked to look at it and so I also hung it in my sitting room for all who visited my home to see. Sometimes, I would put it on or just above the [picture] cabinet…just here in the room, next to the light.

Mzee Ali left very little room for the photographer’s input. He explained that Mr. Parekh was a very kind man and because he had only recently opened his studio, he was very interested in pleasing his customers. In his photograph, Mzee Ali positioned himself as the central figure within the frame. He explained that Mr. Parekh had very few props, only simple backdrops.5 He placed his hands on his hips in order to adopt the bwana kubwa or “big man” stance. Mzee Ali said this pose jokingly referred to his important status as one who had acquired a new stylish and unique commodity and directed the viewer’s eyes to what he considered to be a very important feature of the photograph, namely his fur belt.6 In his view, the painted background, with its seemingly random curtain edge and partial image of a flower pot was irrelevant.

For Mzee Ali, as for many others during this early period of local photographic history in Mombasa, a visit to the photography studio signaled their prosperity and cosmopolitanism. They were able to consume and display their acquisition of local and international commodities—both within the image in the form of material items such as accessories and clothing as well as with the actual image itself as a visual and tangible ornament—that very few other people had. The process of composing and ultimately picturing an individual’s ideal identity as she or he saw it was also bolstered by the use of elements such as poses, props and gestures.

5 This appears to be true. In photos from the late 1940s and early 1950s, Parekh’s studio seems to be sparsely furnished, with few free-standing props.

6 This sort of bwana kubwa or “big man” pose seemed quite popular among several men with whom I spoke and was often referred to in a joking manner. It seems indicative of certain status, gendered ideals and references to male strength and wealth.

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Fig. 4 - Portrait of A. C. Gomes c. 1890.

the eventual subject matter of a great many of their photographs. In the colonial archives, for example, South Asians were always listed with greater specificity—with regards to employment, political roles, culture and status—than their counterparts in the “native” population.49 Thus, these early South Asian photographers had the power to control and define the lives of those “beneath” them. Yet, they also had to answer to the oppressive and regulatory demands of the colonial British government.

A. C. Gomes In 1868, a year before the opening of the Suez Canal, a young South Asian man by the name of A. C. Gomes (fig. 4) founded the Indian Ocean coast’s first photography studio in Zanzibar (in fig. 5), Gomes’ studio is marked with a sign on the left just past the white building with the columns).50 Gomes arrived in Unguja (the larger of the two islands that comprise Zanzibar) from Goa, India, then a Portuguese protectorate. He began his photographic work as a commercial venture, producing picture postcards to fill the demand for the growing steamship tourist industry that had emerged along the Indian Ocean and southern African coasts.51 With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the steamship traffic along the Indian Ocean coast increased steadily. European boats would dock at busy port cities such as Mombasa, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar in order to refuel, giving their travelers the opportunity to roam around the city before continuing their journey. European tourists often visited Zanzibar’s many curio and antique shops. Those stopping at Gomes’ studio would select postcards from a number of images that he kept on display in his cabinets and windows (fig. 6).52 In East Africa, A. C. Gomes, along with several other photographers of South Asian origin may be credited with establishing and developing the practice of black and white studio portrait photography. It is this fact that sets the region’s photographic practice apart from those in other areas of the African continent. Whereas the history of photography in Africa is often positioned in relationship to Europe—as both the center of culture and technology—local photographic practices in East Africa, and specifically along the Indian Ocean coast, present a different model. It is one that revolves around exchanges—historical, 49 See, for example, the Annual Reports of the Mombasa District Commissioner, 1941-1960.

50 Drumkey’s Year Book. Arranged and Compiled by Mr. YSA Drumkey, formerly private secretary to the H.H. Sultan of Zanzibar. Published from the TIMES Office in Bombay, 1907; and, Bill Tunstall, “Postcard Pioneers: East Africa’s Earliest Photographers,” SAFARI (Nairobi: 1998) 19-25. See also: A.D. Bensusan’s, Silver Images, History of Photography in Africa (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1966), in which he points out that the first studio in the world opened in Calcutta, India in 1840. For the purposes of this project, my research encompasses primarily Kenya and coastal Tanzania with some comparative work conducted in the cities of Kampala and Jinja in Uganda.

51 Tunstall, 19-22. The mass production of printed “picture postcards” actually followed the production of cartes-devisite and small “albumen prints” of various peoples, places and things—both at home and abroad—which European travelers would collect and paste into albums. Cartes-de-visite emerged in Europe before 1860, specifically in England and France. These “visiting cards” were typically comprised of individual and sets of images (particularly individual portraits), which were produced as paper prints that were pasted to a mount measuring 4x2½ inches. The cartes-de-visite were collected and exchanged, often becoming a part of elaborate family albums in the Victorian era. As more Europeans and Americans began to travel towards the late-19th and early 20th century, the demand for photographic views of landscapes, historical landmarks and exotic peoples and places increased. Photographers who specialized in these images often wound up establishing publishing companies—one of the largest opening in England by Francis Firth in 1860—in order to increase the production of such images. These photographs were then commercially produced in vast quantities as “postcards” in standard sizes, replacing the earlier albumen prints. For general information concerning the history of cartes-de-visite and albumen prints as well as the production of postcards, see Chapter Five in Beaumont Newhall’s The History of Photography. Also see: William C. Darrah’s Cartes-deVisites in Nineteenth Century Photography, Gettysburg, PA: W.C. Darrah, 1981; Richard Carlene’s Pictures in the Post: The Story of the Picture Postcard and its Place in the History of Popular Art. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1971; and, Howard Woody’s essay, “International Postcards: Their History, Production and Distribution (circa 1895-1915)” in Christraud Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb’s Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998.

52 Tunstall, 19.

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Fig. 5 - A. C. Gomes Studio c. 1890 (center left), Zanzibar.

Fig. 6 - Lamu Girls, postcard, c. 1890.

social, economic and visual—between various peoples and cultures of the global south in addition to their exchanges with Europeans.53 And in this context, this history both highlights the centrality of “minor-transnationalist” cultural producers and practices (referring to their on-going engagement with both “majority” and “minority” cultures, moving beyond the simplistic binary, “margin to center” model)54, while also intervening in and expanding discussions around “diaspora,” specifically those looking beyond the Atlantic toward other “ecotones,” or pluralistic spaces out of which exchange, tension and ultimately, change emerge. Art historian John Tagg writes, Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence, and its products are meaningful and legible only within the particular currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography as such.55 And it is Tagg’s insight that demonstrates how photographic producers of different origins, experiences and status were, in fact, creating different kinds of images for the same consuming audiences from the late 1860s through the 1930s. His insistence on the power relations of photography and his assertion that these relations are historically and circumstantially grounded is crucial to understanding the Indian Ocean’s early photographic producers and consumers and bringing them into clear and central focus. The discussion that follows, then, outlines the early photographic world of the region. It draws comparisons between the work of South Asian and European photographers who were active during this time and examines the factors that affected the shifts in studio photography in the 1940s.

When A. C. Gomes began his studio work in Zanzibar in 1868, photography as it is now known was still relatively new in the world. He most likely learned his trade from one of the early European photographers who was at work in India at the time.56 According to Christopher Pinney, photography was first used in India in 1840 and the first photography studios opened along the coasts during the mid-1850s.57 By the 1870s, there were sever53 Interestingly, Tobias Wendl and Vera Viditz-Ward have shown that in Ghana and Sierra Leone, respectively, it was in fact men of both African and European descent—“creoles”—who were responsible for igniting local photographic practices.

For information, see: Tobias Wendl. “Entangled Traditions: photography and the history of media in southern Ghana,” RES 39, African Works (Spring 2000): 78-101; Tobias Wendl and Heike Behrend, Afrika in den Bildern seiner Studiofotografen,” in Snap me one! Studio-fotografen in Afrika, H. Behrend and T. Wendl, eds. Munich: 1998, 8-16; and, Vera Viditz-Ward. “Alfonso Lisk-Carew: Creole Photographer,” African Arts 19.1 (November 1985): 46-51, 88.

54 For further information, see: Lionnet Françoise and Shu-mei Shih, eds. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

55 John Tagg. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, 63.

56 The history of photography in India has been covered through a range of publications and exhibitions. Most notable is the early work by Judith Gutman, Through Indian Eyes. New York: Oxford University Press: International Center for Photography, 1982. More recently, Christopher Pinney’s research looks at local practices in India in Camera Indica: The Social Lives of Indian Photographs. Pinney notes that Indian apprenticeship in photography began as early as the 1840’s. Early and more recent exhibitions that have sought to reveal the history and importance of photography throughout India both past and present include: India Through the Lens: Photography, 1840-1911, Smithsonian Institution, 2002. Focus on Indian Photography: Imaging India in the 19th Century, December 2, 2006–February 28, 2007, Harvard University Art Museums, Arthur M. Sackler Museum; Picture This: Contemporary Photography and India, December 6, 2015 - April 3, 2016, Philadelphia Museum of Art; and, Illuminating India: Photography 1857-2017, an exhibition that formed the core of a larger series of programs and events commemorating 70 years of Independence and comprising part of the British Council’s UK/India Year of Culture in 2017-2018 at The Science Museum of the United Kingdom.

57 Christopher Pinney. Camera Indica, The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1997) 17, 72. See also, Tunstall, 19.

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Fig. 7 - Swahily Beauties of Zanzibar, postcard, A. C. Gomes, 1888.

Fig. 8 - Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), Le Bain des femmes, oil on canvas. Private collection.

al hundred studios throughout India. Pinney describes the nature of Indian photography during this early period, explaining that “the images [produced by these studios] were strikingly different from the [colonial] anthropometric photographs [produced earlier], but they were not strikingly different from the self-commissioned images that Europeans collected of themselves.”58 Early Indian photographic practitioners were part of an elite that mimicked key colonial aesthetic forms [and] the technical expertise necessary to produce photographs during this period came ensconced in a repertoire of pre-existing practices that were easily replicated.59 It is likely then, that by the time A. C. Gomes established his studio on the main street in Zanzibar, his practice was already governed by certain conventions. As with his counterparts in India, Gomes seems to have focused on certain elements in his work, drawing from the compositions of European painting, specifically what he saw as the “naturalism of pose and the artistry of context.”60 Among Gomes’ earliest postcard images is a 1888 composition of four young women who are posed within a studio environment in front of an elaborately painted backdrop featuring European columns, archways, and hanging vines and blossoming flowers providing an outdoor context (fig. 7).61 In India, these backdrops were first imported from Europe in the mid-1800s. It is thought that they were later produced in India and may then have been exported to photographers working along the East African coast.62 In this particular photograph, entitled Swahily Beauties of Zanzibar, a woman seated at the back of the frame holds a large fan that spreads across the center of the picture covering two of the backdrop’s columns. The fan is positioned in such a way that it almost substitutes or “sits in” for a fifth person, helping to balance the picture and create a pyramid formation.63 The woman to her left leans with her elbow on her lap, her other hand on her hip. A third woman is seated on a small pedestal at center, her right foot resting on her knee; she holds a large leaf in her right hand and a carved wooden comb in her left.

The formal elements of this photograph, with its pyramidal composition and backdrop featuring exotic painted arches, are similar to those of many Orientalist paintings of the late 19th-century. The 1889 painting, Le bain des femmes by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérome, for example, displays contrasts of light and dark, seemingly seductive body poses and gestures, providing an interesting comparison with Gomes’ image (fig. 8).64 Like 58 Pinney, page 72.

59 Pinney, 72.

60 Pinney, 72-3. Here he points out that although it may have been written for a European audience in India, the earliest photographic manual by F. Fisk Williams, A Guide to the Indian Photographer (Printed in Calcutta, 1860), was also widely consumed by indigenous studios and laid out specific conventions which photographers often followed.

61 Beaumont Newhall. The History of Photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982., 70.

62 Interviews with N. V. Parekh, London, England March 2001 and Bill Tunstall, owner of Africa Archive in Liverpool, England, April 2001. Tobias Wendl also discusses the importance of backdrops in early and more recent Ghanaian photography in his article, “Entangled Traditions: photography and the history of media in southern Ghana,” RES. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-101.

63 As will be discussed in Chapter 4, the “pyramid” formation of subjects is a common trope of Orientalist imagery. It is particularly prevalent in staged studio images of harems in which women are featured as a sexualized and “passive” group. Within these colonial contexts, writer Malek Alloula argues that the “sexually repressed characteristic of colonialism [and of the viewers of such postcard images] can surface or pour itself out at any moment. In no way can the accidental be a mode of functioning of the postcard, since it is entirely based on its mastery by means of models and studios.” Malek Alloula. The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1986, 130 (note 15).

64 From 1886 to 1889, Gérome produced many paintings of baths throughout the Middle East and North Africa. This painting, Le bain des femmes, is one in a series of works that can be found in the catalogue by Gerald M. Ackerman.

La vie et l’œuvre de Jean-Léon Gérome. Les Orientalistes 4. Paris: ACR Édition Internationale, 1986. See catalogue

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Gomes’ Swahily Beauties, this painting features its female subjects within the setting of a semi-enclosed bath containing a large window that creates a stream of light from the upper left corner. The archway in the background creates a pyramidal frame for the picture.

The primary subject is a naked woman who is seated in the foreground to the left. Like the young woman featured at the center of Gomes’ photograph, this woman rests her right leg upon her left knee. She appears relaxed, leaning back against the bench with her gaze directed at the viewer. She is positioned in an open manner, the curves and crevices of her body free to be explored by the audience. Her white skin provides a strong contrast to the dark bench on which she sits just as Gomes has used the white fabric of the women’s clothing to provide a stark contrast to his subjects’ dark skin.

The clothing featured in Gomes’ image reveals additional details. All four of the women are wearing dresses and cloth wraps—an older version of today’s kanga cloth (a brightly printed piece of fabric with bold patterns and proverbs written at the edges)—made of hand-woven cotton fabric. Their legs are covered by marinda pants, or long trousers with ruffles, that flare out at the ankles in a style that was typical of Zanzibari dress at the time.

Three of the women wear elaborate hairstyles with hair braided and coiled on top of their heads and the woman seated at the back has her head wrapped in cloth. Yet, the covering of the bodies with this particular patterned fabric suggests very little. Zanzibar at this time was predominantly Muslim and was structured along strict class and status lines. However, it is difficult to learn much about the identities of Gomes’ subjects from the photo or to determine whether this is in fact the way they themselves would have dressed.65 Historian Laura Fair states that, “the importance of dressing up to one’s status—be it actual or aspirational—was widely recognized throughout East African society.”66 Fair points out that in 19th century Zanzibar great importance was placed on dress as a marker of an individual’s class and status, or to distinguish Arabs from others. She notes that within this predominantly Muslim environment the absence of head coverings or shoes was often a visible sign that an individual was a member of a lower class, but that within this class, people of higher status might appear with their heads and feet covered.67 Yet, because most of the photos made by Gomes and his contemporaries were staged, to varying degrees, they provide minimal information about their subjects. It should therefore be noted that although these women may appear a certain way in this particular photograph, it cannot be assumed that this reflects how they would carry and dress themselves.68 In order to create a studio scene, such as the one described above, Gomes undoubtedly employed discipline, creativity and artistic imagination. The final printing of the image required a certain technical skill, especially given the hot, humid environment of the tropical Indian Ocean islands. In order to fix the final image onto the ultra-thin paper available at the time, Gomes probably would have mixed a concoction containing egg-white which number 377.

65 I also came across a photograph in the National Museums of Kenya which Fair also cites in her book. This photograph featured several slave women dancing, all of whom were wearing marinda pants and head wraps similar to those worn by the women pictured in Gomes’ photograph. For more information concerning dress in coastal East Africa during this period, see: Chapter Two, “Dressing Up: Clothing, Class and Gender in Post-Abolition Zanzibar,” in Laura Fair’s, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890-1945. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001.

66 Fair, 66.

67 Fair, 68-9.

68 Interestingly, local residents in Mombasa also provided “readings” of such old photographs and postcards. Many people said that this specific image looked “unfamiliar” and that the scene had probably been set up in an “unnatural way” in order to make the women look “old fashioned” and “primitive.”

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Fig. 9 - Postcard (women & street scene), c. 1890.

would have served as a glue-like substance. This substance would eventually give the photographs their common brown tone and texture.69 A. C. Gomes was among the first of many South Asian men—part of the larger South Asian diaspora along the Indian Ocean coast as well as southern Africa—who were responsible for initiating the practice of studio photography in eastern Africa. It is thought that these men probably emigrated to East Africa from South Asia under two specific sets of circumstances. Some may have simply come to the Indian Ocean coastal region in search of a better life during the mid-19th century, traveling in large wooden boats, or dhows that plied the trade routes established by South Asian merchants beginning in the 5th century. Others were recruited in India by the British as skilled laborers—clerks, tailors, launderers, shop keepers—and individuals who were seen as part of the effort to facilitate the colonial project in Kenya. Whatever their means of arriving, there appear to have been several other South Asian photographers, in addition to Gomes, who set up studios in Zanzibar throughout the late-19th century and also concentrated on postcard production.70 Almost all of the picture postcards produced in East Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries featured local scenes and peoples. However, because of the lack of processing facilities in East Africa, most photographers created their postcard images locally and then sent them abroad for printing to countries such as Germany, one of the largest producers of picture postcards during the late-19th and early 20th centuries.71 A noteworthy example from this period is a postcard of Mombasa printed in the late 1800s or early 1900s (fig. 9). Like Gomes’ Swahily Beauties of Zanzibar, this rendering of two young Zanzibari women was carefully staged in the studio and then mass-produced as a postcard. The two young women featured are posed stiffly with the woman standing on the right placing her straight arm awkwardly around the woman who is seated to her right.

The women are displayed with bare shoulders, no shoes and only kanga cloths wrapped around their bodies. Pictured next to a street scene of Mombasa, the young women look like they are welcoming visitors to the city; they are thus displayed as one of the many curiosities that awaits the foreign traveler.

Some fifty years after Goan photographer A. C. Gomes founded his business of postcard production and portraiture in Zanzibar (1868) and after ventures such as William Young’s Dempster Studio had become well-established in Nairobi (1907), a new generation of largely Asian African photographers began to emerge in the cities of East Africa, and particularly in the large and busy port city of Mombasa, Kenya. As second and third generation Kenyans, these men established local black and white portrait studios in various Mombasa communities beginning in the mid-1900s.72 William D. Young By the early 1900s, printing technology was greatly improved, enabling practitioners to 69 Tunstall, 19-20.

70 In most instances, I (along with other researchers such as Africa Archive’s Bill Tunstall and the National Museum’s Sultan Somjee) was only able to locate the last names of these photographers along with the initials of their first names.

71 Tunstall interview, April 2001. For further information concerning the production of postcards in Africa see: Geary and Webb’s, Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards,1998.

72 Many East Africans of South Asian background are now 2nd, 3rd and even 4th generation Kenyan. Many had begun in the late 1990s to refer to themselves as “Asian African,” so this term, when appropriate, therefore replaces “Indian” or “Asian.”

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