random goodness, 8/28

COLOPHON: Do not attempt to adjust your monitor you have come to the right place. I am just continuing my search for a suitable theme for this site. Not overly thrilled with this one either, so I will be dusting off my rusty config skills to tweak it to suit.

Screenshot of Carol Pineau’s film “Kenyan Stories”

FILM: Kenya National Business Plan Competition. Carol Pineau’s work in progress film about 100 aspiring Kenyan entrepreneurs who get to pitch their business concept to a panel of sponsors before the 2007 elections and the fracas that followed. I am no fan of reality shows like “The Apprentice” which is how the story was shot/edited, but I suspect that presenting this story as an earnest documentary style wouldn’t generate much notice for the film either. [via Kenyan Pundit]

PHOTOGRAPHY: JR: Women are Heroes. Guerilla photographer has taken photographs of women in Kenya, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Brazil. He usually asks his subjects to make exaggerated/humorous facial expressions and shoots them up close with a wide angle lens. Hen then posts the images he has taken (often illegally) in the environments where his subjects can see them (as opposed to a gallery/museum). Most recently he has posted his images on the sides of homes in the Providencia favela of Rio de Janeiro. [via rion.nu]
Previously: Portrait of a Generation previously featured here.

Obama – Extra Golden feat. Opiyo Bilongo

MUSIC: Extra Golden: “Obama”. Kenyan-American Benga/Rock group pays tribute to a prominent American of Kenyan ancestry.

Stephanie McKay performs “Tell It Like It Is” live for the Darfur Olympics at BB King NYC

MUSIC: Stephanie McKay: Tell It Like It Is. Bronx native McKay’s new album has me digging back in the crates for that old soulful funk from the early to mid 70’s. Prediction: this will be one of the standout releases of 2008.

Go See: Goings on about town

NYC in the summer is all about the embarrassment of riches that is free concerts and events. Seun Kuti was at Central Park, Salif Keita, Oliver Mtukudzi and Habib Koite played in Brooklyn. Big Daddy Kane and Slick Rick played nearby, and I am sure I missed a myriad of other events at other smaller venues. That is one of the reasons of the paucity of posts around here (that and the humidity-free sunny days we have been blessed with recently). A sample of Africa-related events this past week follows (photos mine):

Mahmoud Ahmed and the Either Orchestra at Lincoln Center

Lincoln Center Out of Doors
Extra Golden: Benga/soukous/rock hybrid sound with lyrics in Dholuo (as far as I can tell). The most popular was a song called “Obama”.
Mahmoud Ahmed: It would be impossible to reproduce an after hours club in 70’s swinging Addis on a stage outside Lincoln Center 30+ years after the fact. But the Either Orchestra filled in quite well (their horns were more big band than military/funk band). No matter, that soaring, soulful voice pretty much stands alone. Ahmed is a giant of African music.
Celebrity sighting: Liya Kebede in the audience.

Africa Day Parade in Harlem

Africa Day Parade
… was late in starting.
Tiny, but enthusiastic parade. There were promises from organizers of bigger things to come. I hope so, Africans here in the States are otherwise quite invisible.
Highlight: The Hamalali Wayunago Garifuna Dance group from Honduras. NYC (the Bronx) has the largest community of the Afro-Carib Garifunas anywhere.
Overheard along parade route: “What? African Parade? Not the African-American parade? (keeps walking down the street).

Technorati Profile

Photographers I Like

Screenshot from “Afrocentric” slideshow featured in New York Times Magazine

PAOLO ROVERSI: Afrocentric [NYT, registration req'd]: Paolo Roversi’s visual style is unmistakable: painterly colors, camera blur, timeless-looking subjects and clothing, resulting in images that look more like 19th century painting than 21st century photographs. His breathtaking images and deep knowledge of photography/art history put him in the elite of elite fashion/editorial photographers globally. I really liked the images in “Afrocentric” when they appeared in the NYT last year; although apart from Liya Kebede, there wasn’t much that was African about the images (it looked more like “pan-cultural ethnic chic”).

Screenshot of e-book of images taken in Namibia by Richard Renaldi

RICHARD RENALDI: 5 Days in Namibia [PDF]. Richard Renaldi along with Alec Soth have a style of image-making with a very strong social documentation element. They typically photograph those people and places in America between the coasts, that most of us “fly over” literally and metaphorically. Renaldi’s book Figure and Ground, has images taken coast to coast, while Soth’s book Sleeping by the Mississippi is the result of trips up and down that iconic American river. Soth and Renaldi work with large format film cameras that require a slow methodical process, leading to images that are more introspective and contemplative than those taken rapid-fire style with a digital SLR, or the compact Leica favored by William Eggleston, for example.
See also: Renaldi’s photography blog.

random goodness, 8/13

M & G Soul Food Diner, 125th Street Harlem

PHOTOGRAPHY: Invincible Cities, Camilo Vergara photos of the “unmaking of a ghetto” taken in Harlem from 1970’s to 2007.

ILLUSTRATION: Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas

Screenshot from Aperture web site

PHOTOGRAPHY: The Black Panthers: Photographs of Stephen Shames. Great book.

africa.photography

Screen shot of Jean Depara’s images from the Fifty One Fine Art Photography website

Jean Depara: Angola-born photographer who documented la dolce vita in Kinshasa in the 50’s and 60’s; he was also Franco’s official photographer.

Screen shot of Samuel Fosso’s series “African Spirits” at the Jean Marc Patras Galerie website

Samuel Fosso: African Spirits. Samuel Fosso started out taking pictures of himself to send back to his mother in Nigeria. His self-portraits have since evolved into increasingly complex character studies of archetypes in society (male and female). Not sure why Fosso does not have the same level of recognition as Cindy Sherman, that other chameleon-like self-portraitist.

Screen shot of Okhai Ojeikere’s images from the Fifty One Fine Art Photography website

J.D. Okhai Ojeikere: Hairstyles. Ojeikere has documented, Becher-like, about 1000 different hairstyles worn by the women of Nigeria. [via Conscientious]

Soldiers

Screenshot of Tillim’s child soldier image series on Michael Stevenson gallery web site

Guy Tillim: Soldiers.

Guy Tillim is one of South Africa’s foremost contemporary photographers. Learning his trade as photojournalist nearly two decades ago, Tillim’s oeuvre has proven to be far more than that of orthodox reportage. His photographs have become increasingly recontextualised as art object within the space of the artbook and gallery.

Source: Artthrob
[via Conscientious, a great contemporary art photography blog which incidentally is doing a series of posts on African photographers. Check it]

Screenshot from Jan-Joseph Stoke’s multimedia photo essay

See also: “War Without End: Congo”

DRC symbolises the promise of Africa as much as it does its desolation. Its soil is full of diamonds, gold, copper, tantalum and uranium. The waters of its river could one day power the continent. Yet because DRC is so rich in resources, its problems, when left to aggravate, tend to suck its neighbours into a current state of abuse and chaos. Fixing Congo is essential to fixing Africa.

Jan-Joseph Stok

B(l)ack to Invisibility

Detail of the July issue of Italian Vogue
I recently picked up a copy of the July Italian (”A Black Issue”) Vogue to see what the big deal was. There are few places better than the fashion rags to see the current state of fashion/editorial art, so at the newstand I occasionally reach over the Economist or Fader to crack open a Vogue to see what photographers like Annie Lebowitz or Steven Meisel are up to.

The editorial images in Vogue.it/07 feature many African diaspora models past and present (including Somali/Canuck Yasmin Warsame and Ugandan/Angelino Kiara Kabukuru). The concepts are not self-consciously ethnic, they are of beautiful women who happen to be Black (personal fave is an homage to Grace Jones and Jean-Paul Goude). There are are features (in Italian, natch) about Black women of note (Donyale Luna the first Black cover model, Michelle Obama, Ebony editor Linda Johnson Rice, South African Afro-soul diva Simphiwe Dana, and art from Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu). However, as has been pointed out elsewhere, it is hard not to notice that most of the ads feature non-Black models. Unsurprisingly, the August issue of Vogue Italia is bereft of Black models a reversion to form, even on a mock tribute to Yves Saint Laurent who was one of the first designers to feature Black models on the runway as well as being the first to use a black woman as a fashion muse (Martinique born, Paris resident Mounia).

Ugandan-born model Kiara Kabukuru is among the models featured in the July issue of Italian Vogue