{by Andrew Dosunmu (Nigeria), "Studio Portraits" series}
As someone who has lived in South Africa and just returned from a recent visit, I am constantly concerned with how I represent Africans in my photography. As such, I was excited to see CarlaGirl Photography's snippet about an exhibit at the Li-Space in Beijing’s Caochangdi district aiming to reimagine the traditional ways Africa is represented through photography.
Our South African folks over at Chimurenga, have also developed a list of resources about the China-Africa relationship in preparation for their next publishing project, The Chimurenga Chronicle -- a once-off, one-day-only edition of a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to May 18-24, 2008 to re-imagine the present.
How Africans Want to Be Seen
(SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal)
A new exhibit at Li-Space in Beijing’s Caochangdi district aims to refashion the traditional visual impression of Africa – that of famine, war and poverty – through images that show a continent of culture, hope, imagination and dreams.
“Africa: See You, See Me!” features the work of 36 African and non-African photographers, including Angele Etoundi Essamba from Cameroon, Moroccan Majida Khattari and Italian Marco Ambrosi.
China, which has a growing business presence in Africa, seemed an important place to display the photographs, said Awam Amkpa, the exhibition’s curator, who described the images in the show as an illustration of “how Africans want to be seen rather than how they are forced to be seen.”
The Chinese “don’t know the diversity, the robustness of African culture,” Mr. Amkpa, a Nigerian, said. “I think it is an opportunity for us to show this Africa that is a very modern and diverse continent…. We are not always at war. We are not always starving.”
[...]
The Chinese “are going to be the new colonialists. After the Europeans, they are going to be the next. It is happening,” said the Cameroon photographer Ms. Essamba, referring to what she says is the “staggering” number of Chinese moving to Africa. “Africa is like the new Eldorado for them. I am happy that they come and that they plan to build things, but it would be great if they could involve our own people. This is the idea, actually.” (source)
{by Delphine Diallo (Senegal) 2010, "Back to Africa" series}
{by P. Maimouna Guerressi (Senegal) 2008, "The Giants, a.p." series}
{by Hassan Hajjaj (Morocco) 2000, "L.V. Posse" series}
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5 comments:
Thanks for sharing this, Kameelah. It's a great post, but I'm a sucker for fresh-faced kiddos, so I'm especially enthralled by the photos on your blog, which capture the mundane aspects of daily life as if to say, “See—this happens here, too. We are people, too--see us as that, first.” Perusing those and reading the post reminds me of a (TED) talk that Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave some years back about what she called the “dangers of a single story.” She made a number of pertinent points. As an African, I especially appreciate that she acknowledged the ugliness in which too many of us on the continent are mired in/victims of, but she also said:
-->“All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
--> “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, 'secondly.' Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have and entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.”
-->“The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her southern relatives who had moved to the north. She introduced them to a book about the southern life that they had left behind. ‘They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.’ I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”
Love it. And love this. Thanks.
I am really looking forward to this exhibit and wish I could be in China to see these photos!
Thanks starshineandclay ! Whenever I visit, I have these long conversations with my friends about the photos I bring back. I think what you said captures what I was trying to do--the mundane aspects of everyday life...no photos or death and decay; just people in their spaces in all their banal glory :) Re: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie--exactly!
www.wix.com/SymbolikdeAfrique/SA-Mandalas
I Absolutely LOVE This!!
Where have you been All my Life?!
www.wix.com/SymbolikdeAfrique/SA-Mandalas
Thank you for sharing this with us.
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