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Title
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Images of Africans Collections
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Description
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The 'Images of Africans Collection' brings together photographs and visual materials drawn from a range of collections held at the Cory Library. These collections provide the foundation for researchers to investigate themes of cultural memory, identity and representation, as the images depict African people across different periods, places, and social contexts. Many of these images and materials were originally created within colonial or Western frameworks, and inevitably by context, the intent behind their production was shaped by ethnographic, administrative, or exhibitionary purposes that may carry negative or objectifying connotations.
This collection, as a project, in its intention to redefine past constructions, is curated with reflection, inquiry, and critical engagement in mind. The dynamic un-obscuration of those past histories, allows these images and materials to be recontextualised, acknowledging the circumstances of their creation while using them as sources through which African presence, lived experience, and historical reality, can be more fully recognised. By bringing these materials together, the collection highlights Africans as individuals and African communities situated within their own cultural, social, and historical contexts.
Through this reframing, the 'Images of Africans Collection' aims to foreground the dignity, resilience, and beauty of African people. It positions the images as part of broader processes of identity formation, heritage preservation, and collective memory, inviting critical engagement with the past while affirming African histories and experiences as central to the curative, preservative role of the Cory archive.