“One has to choose between engaging in stylistic research or the mere recording of facts. I feel that a filmmaker must go beyond the recording of facts. Moreover, I believe that Africans, in particular, must reinvent cinema. It will be a difficult task because our viewing audience is used to a specific film language, but a choice has to be made: either one is very popular and one talks to people in a simple and plain manner, or else one searches for an African film language that would exclude chattering and focus more on how to make use of visuals and sounds.”

Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegalese film director.

In the early 1990’s, I remember being especially impressed by an image series from a Dolce & Gabbana fashion/ad campaign featuring a smoking model photographed around Sicily. They were fashion images but then again they weren’t. I never really processed why those images stayed with me; I thought it was the model’s, you know, pulchritude that made them memorable.

There is a reason for their dual nature. According to the book 20 Years Dolce & Gabbana, those images had come after some soul searching by the two fashion design partners who were were looking for an Italian “soul” to inform the core of their design. They had been researching their Italian (Sicilian) roots when they contacted Magnum documentary photographer Ferdinando Scianna to shoot a concept D & G called neorealismo. They collaborated with southern European looking Dutch model Marpessa to shoot images, documentary style, incorporating people and places in Palermo that were the inspiration for the clothes of that season. Scianna shot sans authenticity-robbing “fashion” styling and production values. Although this shooting style amounted to staging reality, where the photographer manipulated certain elements, the final results retained the authenticity and reality of the environment in which the image was being taken. What D & G were looking for in the design of their clothes, they found in their collaboration with Scianna and Sicily. That collection turned out to be a breakthrough one for the up and coming fashion house.

This is also what draws me to the work of Andrew Dosunmu whose work has genuine glamor (he was a design assistant at Yves Saint Laurent), even though he shoots in decidedly unglamorous cities like Lagos, Accra, Jozi and Bombay. To me, no other African photographer has been more successful at re-shaping the African visual aesthetic using neorealismo and his passion to positively portray the vitality and glamor of actual people and places in Africa. Genius.

this is not a political blog and i have been too disconnected from the political scene in kenya to comment intelligently on the current situation. yet i was captivated by these raw, loosely coherent pro-ODM youtube rants delivered before the elections by martin ngatia who is based in sweden. something in his voice/delivery points to a level of genuine disquiet (even among kikuyus) about the status quo that i was completely unaware of and have watched with horror lately in the media. the tone of the rants is somewhat strident, so YMMV.

the nation of kenya has unfinished business that has always been swept under under the rug all in the name of “moving on”. but i suspect it all the stuff under the rug (land reform, kikuyu-luo rivalry, murders of JM, Mboya, Ouko) bursts forth every once in a while wrapped up with more recent grievances (urban poverty). kenya needs to return to whatever normal means now, but it’s time to pull back that rug and as a nation start to grapple with the issues under there.

Dedan Kimathi Never Betrayed - Vote out Home Guards

Kill the Myth: All Kenyans Can Lead the Country

p.s.: love the matt drudge/classic reporter hat, trench coat. cool.