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To reach mainland Mombasa from the Old City, located on an island in the bay, one takes a ferry to Likoni, the dock on the shore to the south. There, on a steep bluff at the water's edge, several young photographers set up shop in the early 1990s (Fig. 1). Though they began with little equipment, making do without appropriate lamps-not to mention electricity and running water-business flourished, and the young entrepreneurs gradually built up their studios. They called themselves jua kali (Swahili for "hot sun" or "sharp sun"), which designates people who work in the so-called informal sector. In 1996, while conducting research on popular studio photography in Mombasa, Kenya, Henrike Grohs and I became acquainted with the self-- named "Likoni Ferry Photographers."
These photographers work more or less illegally as squatters, since the land on which their studios stand belongs to the city or to the ferry company. In Mombasa, as in many other African cities, much space is illegal space; it is occupied rather than owned (Cooper 1983:31). I believe that the illegal status of the space the Likoni group occupies contributes substantially to their particular aesthetic. The state rigidly prevents the street photographers who work in public squares from creatively altering those sites; as one of them put it, these places must remain "natural." But the Likoni Ferry Photographers are not subject to this degree of restriction. Although their existence has been repeatedly threatened and they fear being driven away, their studios enjoy "artistic freedom" in a location that eludes the authorities of the postcolonial Kenyan state. Indeed, these photographers and their productions are a unique local development that makes use of a great variety of images from the outside world. As Daniel Miller has observed (1995), here we have an innovation, a discontinuity produced a posteriori out of the local consumption of global elements.
In 1996 approximately thirty photographers worked in Likoni. About ten had their own studios (Figs. 3-7); the others, among them six young women, worked as roving photographers down by the dock or sometimes as touts for the studios. All were autodidacts or, as they themselves proudly put it, self-made men or women. With a few exceptions, they belonged to various independent fundamentalist Christian churches. Most of...