Born from the pages of DRUM – the groundbreaking magazine launched in 1951 – the DRUM Archive is one of the most vital visual records of twentieth-century African life. Across decades of publication and multiple African editions, DRUM documented the textures of everyday experience alongside the defining forces of its time: the rise of urban modernity, cultural innovation, political struggle, and the enduring creativity of communities living under profound social and economic pressure. Its photographers and writers shaped a new visual language – one that carried stories of style, music, sport, work, protest, and intimacy with an immediacy and dignity that remains resonant today.
The DRUM Archive – formerly Bailey’s African History Archive (BAHA) – safeguards this extraordinary legacy. Established by publisher Jim Bailey in 1984 to preserve and expand access to the Bailey estate’s photographic and editorial legacy, and stewarded today by his heir, Prospero Bailey – the DRUM Archive's mission is both archival and forward-looking: to protect the material history of the collection while enabling ongoing research, interpretation, and creative engagement. The archive is not only a repository of images, but a living cultural resource – one that continues to inform scholarship, inspire artists, and deepen public understanding of the social histories it contains.
Peffers Fine Art is proud to represent the DRUM Archive commercially, working in close partnership with the Bailey estate and BAHA to ensure these works are presented with the seriousness they merit. Our commitment is threefold: cultural preservation and celebration, knowledge transfer and critical engagement, and uncompromising quality maintenance. Through museum-standard printing and authentication protocols, careful editioning, and thoughtful contextualisation, we aim to honour the archive’s historical weight while supporting its continued visibility and vitality – serving collectors and institutions, and encouraging sustained academic and public interest in one of Africa’s most important photographic legacies.
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DRUM Archive Photographic Prints
The DRUM Archive Photographic Prints present key images from BAHA as fine-art objects, produced to museum-standard archival specifications. Each work is printed with archival pigment inks on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm, embossed with the BAHA authentication chop, and inscribed with full edition details and the credit line: © The Drum Archive / Bailey’s African History Archive.
These prints are offered in a strictly limited edition of 25 + 5 Artist’s Proofs (APs), with a small range of carefully considered size options to suit both intimate collecting and institutional presentation. Pricing progresses in incremental steps after every five sales within an edition, reflecting scarcity and the growing demand for historically significant images.
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DRUM Archive Photographic Prints
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DRUM Archive Magazine Covers
DRUM Archive Magazine Covers are offered as iconic graphic objects – bold, immediate, and historically charged. As covers, these works distill the visual language of DRUM into a single frame: public-facing images that carried stories of Black modernity, style, politics, sport, music, and everyday life across Anglophone Africa.
Each cover is produced as a high-quality archival print using archival pigment inks on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm, embossed with the BAHA authentication chop, and inscribed with edition details and the credit line: © The Drum Archive / Bailey’s African History Archive.
Covers are available in an edition of 250 + 5 Artist’s Proofs (APs), in A1 and A2 sizes. Pricing increases are applied in 25-print increments across the edition, allowing collectors and institutions to enter early while recognising the growing rarity of later numbers.
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DRUM Archive Magazine Covers
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DRUM Archive Posters
DRUM Archive Posters are an open-edition format designed for broad access and everyday living with the archive – an invitation to bring DRUM’s visual history into contemporary spaces without the constraints of a limited edition. They offer a direct, affordable way to engage with the images and design language of DRUM, while supporting the wider ongoing project of preservation, digitisation, and public knowledge transfer.
Posters are produced with the same commitment to material quality as the editioned works: archival pigment inks on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm, embossed with the BAHA authentication chop, and inscribed with the credit line: © The Drum Archive / Bailey’s African History Archive.
Available in A1 and A2, open-edition posters are ideal for first-time collectors, gifts, education contexts, and interiors – keeping the archive visible, circulating, and culturally active.
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DRUM Archive Posters
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