Department of Anthropology

When the illustrated magazine, Bingo: l’illustre africain, first appeared on newsstands around Dakar in 1953, studio photography flourished across French West Africa. Studio photographers created and captured their sitters’ aspirations during a booming economy and migration to the city. As the social contexts of the circulation of photography shifted to include illustrated black magazines, sitters began to think about themselves differently and in time, their aspirations began to shape portrait photography in Senegal. Reader submitted photographs in Bingo magazine show how illustrated magazines offered a new register in which what Krista Thompson calls “the politics of being seen being seen in a new light” could come into play. Bingo magazine was both a slice of material culture and represented desired, if unattainable, forms of material culture from the photographs, to the phonographs, and the cameras advertised in its pages.

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