Photography as Cultural Memory: Documenting the Igbo Masquerade Festival Tradition

Photography functions as both a documentary tool and a form of cultural memory production, raising important questions about who photographs cultural traditions, how they frame them, and what the circulation of photographs does to the communities and traditions depicted. This study analyses photography's role in documenting and constructing cultural memory around Igbo masquerade festival traditions in Anambra and Imo States, examining both historical and contemporary photographic archives and practices. A qualitative research design is employed, combining systematic analysis of 300 photographs from institutional archives, private collections, and social media platforms with in-depth interviews conducted with 15 photographers who have documented masquerade traditions and 20 community members who are both subjects and consumers of masquerade photography. The study examines the representational choices made by photographers from colonial documentary photographers to contemporary Nigerian photojournalists and community photographers, analysing how visual framing, point of view, and technical choices shape the cultural meanings communicated. The theoretical framework draws on the cultural memory literature, the anthropology of photography, and the postcolonial critique of documentary representation. The study examines how the democratisation of photography through smartphones has changed the balance between external and internal community perspectives in masquerade documentation. Recent scholarship on African festival photography has called for community-controlled documentation as an ethical and epistemological imperative. Findings contribute to visual anthropology, cultural heritage documentation, and photography theory. Keywords: photography, cultural memory, Igbo masquerade, documentation, visual heritage