Photography became Armah’s means to navigate place, her film camera becoming her companion in travel and opening up new ways of seeing. She was interested in documenting Ghanaian street life, photographing sellers, particularly enamoured by women carrying goods on their heads until, upon reflection, she realised her discomfort with the gaze that persisted in her early photographic practices. She felt that her photographs delivered an over-stylised portrayal of Ghanaian life, perpetuating a fantasy of home enraptured with what she refers to as a ‘diasporan aesthetics’.
‘I have a lot of critiques of certain diasporan relations with home because I think they can conveniently sidestep self-reflection, and truly acknowledging power and privilege is difficult,’ she says in our phone call. ‘Proximity to Europe or North America significantly shapes how you’re able to engage with home.’
Armah is deeply aware of her position within the Black diaspora, recognising that their relations are shaped by a spiritual desire for return. The complexities of defining home, alongside the question of return, have informed her archival practices, her work with what she’s named saman archive. ‘The way I relate to saman archive and think about how to work with the archive is folding this question of return, what it means on a personal level for me and what it has meant more broadly for others in a similar position to me, by building a relationship with the country and all its complexities,’ she says.
In this sense the archive – not just saman but how Armah approaches collection, research, and navigating visual and material culture – has become a site that articulates Armah’s relation to Ghana, guided by the people, places and ideas she encounters while developing it. Its contents stand as testimonies to her experience, which began from her collection of photographic negatives – mostly portraits shot by Ghanaian studio and itinerant photographers, many of whom often destroy their negatives after several years, once it’s unlikely that their customers will return for reprints.
For Armah, collecting these images is a gesture towards an approach to history that recognises her own preoccupation for insight into the life that “could have been”, had she been raised in Ghana, which fold into broader questions of how we can know a nation beyond the hegemonic narratives told about it. Armah seeks to move beyond ‘objective’ historical narratives, acknowledging how her own desire to rearticulate her relationship with home is foundational to saman archive’s formation.
This desire is not unique, she points out, but is in fact very common in the way many people of the Black diaspora engage with the nation, as the first African nation to gain independence and a point of departure for many in the Americas and the Caribbean. For Armah, if the relationship so many have with the nation relates to the Trans-Atlantic trade, it is imperative that her approach to archive building, and narrating its past and present, rejects the logics that could justify the violence of this trade.
‘I need to constantly be looking at what I want from the archive and of my practice, to try to make sure that I’m not reproducing the world as these systems that gave rise for the need for return for so many take as common sense,’ Armah explains.
Armah has named the archive after an Akan word for ‘ghost’, which can be used colloquially in Ghana to refer to photographic negatives, but also resonates in other ways. ‘I think everything starts with “saman”, not even the content of the archive, the negatives, but “saman” as a term,’ she says. ‘I’m interested in what it means to have an archival practice that is guided by or responsive to people who aren’t here anymore. For me, the ghost is a figure that helps me think about what we owe to the past, because it’s like a figure that demands “This happened and I am owed repair”.