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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
Hugo is one of a new generation of savvy young photographers who have emerged from post-apartheid South Africa with work that challenges our preconceptions about their country. Alongside the likes of Guy Tillim and the young Magnum photographer Mikhael Subotsky, Hugo represents what might be called a new photographic consciousness as regards the representation of Africa to the West.
Screen shot from Mobolaji’s Dawodu’s portfolio site FASHION: Mobolaji Dawodu: Stylist. Nigerian-born, NYC-based Dawodu is a contributing style editor at The Fader magazine (and frequently stylist for Andrew Dosunmu and Marc Baptiste). He is also an up and coming designer.
Wiley is known for his stylized paintings of young, urban African-American men in poses borrowed from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European figurative paintings, a practice he started in the early 2000s while an artist in residence at the Studio Museum. Over the last two years, Wiley has expanded his project by living and working abroad; he temporarily relocates to different countries and opens satellite studios to become familiar with local culture, history and art. His “The World Stage” series is the result of these travels.
New York Times slideshow of Jamel Shabbazz’ images PHOTOGRAPHY: Chronicle of Urban Life: More Jamel Shabbazz goodness.
New York Times slideshow of Alix Dejean’s images PHOTOGRAPHY: Harlem Lens. Haitian-born, Brooklyn resident Alix Dejean has been taking pictures of Harlem’s residents for decades.
Screenshot of “Empire Strikes Back” images FASHION: The Empire Strikes Black: Part-time Malindi resident Naomi Campbell shoot around New York City with photographer Mario Sorrenti for V magazine. [via ffffound]
Evolution of cover image of of Grace Jones’ album “Island Life”
Like the image above, Grace Jones, the icon not the person, was a myth-making collaboration between Grace Jones the woman, and Jean-Paul Goude a French-born, New York-based illustrator, photographer, choreographer, costume designer, art director. Grace Jones (born Grace Mendoza in Jamaica) was a model and a budding disco singer, when she met Goude via Andy Warhol in the now legendary NYC downtown culture scene. In her live shows she was playing off her strong masculine features to present an androgynous, outrageous persona to the gay boys who were the mainstay of the disco scene of the time.
Together they built on the androgyny and played up the geometry/angularity of her masculine features (via hair and clothes) recalling the abstract forms on African masks that had so inspired European modern artists like Picasso. Jones and Goude also remixed all the cross-cultural influences (African-American, Puerto Rican, Jones’ own Jamaican background) coursing through the neighborhoods of New York. Add in Goude’s mentalspace and his personal obsession with the exotic/primitive/erotic aspects of African beauty filtered through his French sensiblities. Throw in the raw, sex and drug-fueled creativity/experimentation happening in New York at the time, sprinkle in the then new technology-driven music called New Wave. And unleash the whole mess in a cocktail of costume, props, fashion, performance, body movement, hair, video, music, attitude.
Grace Jones: Demolition Man, part of a performance art piece called “A One Man Show” from 1982
The results of this collaboration introduced a new post-modern archetype of the black woman in pop culture. It joined Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, the Supremes, icons who came before and Erykah Badu after. The image of Grace Jones was postmodern in how it fought sexual, racial, gender stereotypes and taboos by embracing and de-fanging them, postmodern in how it defiantly resisted any attempt at categorization since it was the dizzying combination of so many things.
I recently read the book “Jungle Fever” and came away impressed by Jean-Paul Goode’s groundbreaking art. But it was disturbing to read how he was so open in admitting his obsession with the exotic and erotic qualities of Black women and how much he let it drive his creative work. At best it was naive and presumptuous, at worst, racist. But really, artists are successful to the extent they make real what is going on inside their heads, making it both specific and universal, timely and timeless. In that respect Jean-Paul Goude was wildly successful, objectification of notwithstanding.
Jean-Paul Goude: Retrospective Those of us of a certain, cough, age must remember the surreal Chanel Egoiste ads.
PHOTOGRAPHY: WNYC Culture: Streetshots Jamel Shabbazz at work in Central Park.
Screenshot from 21st Century Maroon Colony website FASHION: 21st Century Maroon Colony Fall/Winter 2007 Collection. Great photography/styling highlighting this streetwear fashion collective repping the “Afro-triangle”. Not sure about pangas as props, though, (too much of a negative connotation to me, given the panga-executed violence in Kenya recently) [via EA collective]
Screenshot of slideshow on website for “Curse of the Black Gold” PHOTOGRAPHY: New book: Curse of the Black Gold: 50 years of Gold in the Niger Delta [quicktime movie]. Photography and audio commentary on the impact of oil on the land and people of the Niger Delta.
