Since the introduction of photography by commercial studio photographers
and the colonial state in Kenya, this global medium has been intensely
debated and contested among Muslims on the cosmopolitan East African
coast. This book does not only explore the making, circulation, and
consumption of popular photographs, but also the other side, their
rejection and obliteration, an essential aspect of a medium's history
that should not be neglected. It deals with various »social spaces of
refusal« in the local Muslim milieu and in that of »traditional« spirit
mediums in which (gendered) visibility was (and is) contested in various
and creative ways. It focuses on the »aesthetics of withdrawal« the
various ways and techniques that process the photographic act as well as
the photographic image to theatricalize the surface of the image in new
ways by veiling, masking, and concealing. In a fragmented historical
perspective, Heike Behrend seeks to complement, decenter, and counter
the history of photography as it has been told by the West and to
narrate another history beginning with preceding local media such as
textiles and spirit possession.