Portrait of a young African woman in traditional attire, symbolizing perseverance and cultural pride.
A new book, Portrait and Place: Photography in Senegal, 1840 – 1960, takes an in-depth look at the development of the art form during a particularly tumultuous period in the country’s history. Upon the introduction of the daguerreotype sometime in the 1840s, West Africans immediately embraced photography, in part because it dovetailed with a cultural practice known as xoymet, a Wolof term meaning “to let someone catch a glimpse of something intimate.”