Recaptioning Congo: African Stories and Colonial Pictures, published by Lannoo in 2022, began as an exhibition project at the photography museum FOMU in Antwerp and grew from extended research into photographic practice in the colonial Congo between 1885 and 1960, conducted by Dr. Sandrine Colard, who served as the book’s editor. The volume places that archive under unfamiliar pressure: rather than allowing imperial images to retain the captions and framing that once directed their meaning, it invites writers to look again from African-centered positions and to supply new, creative, contemporary or literary captions. What results is less an illustrated history than a deliberate act of re-reading, in which the relation between past and present, Africa and Europe, Belgium and Congo is repeatedly reopened.
The photographic record assembled here is an imperial archive, not a single authorial body of work, and the book’s contributors include writers and everyday Congolese urban voices alongside the editorial and research labor behind it. That mixture is the point. Photographs made to serve colonial description are set beside language that refuses the original terms, so that the gap between image and caption becomes the space where historical argument happens. The effect is cumulative rather than announced: looking is retrained across the sequence, and the archive’s authority is neither denied nor restored but made visible as something constructed, usable, and contested.
The book appeared as a 272-page hardback, and in 2023 it received a Jurors’ Special Mention at the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, recognition of the publication within an international photobook award programme. For collectors attentive to how photography’s histories are being rewritten, its significance lies in method: Colard’s research, the exhibition context, and the writers’ interventions together demonstrate how archival images can be returned to argument rather than reverenced as evidence. It belongs with work that asks what a photograph’s caption does, and who has been permitted to write it.
