Trailer for “Jamel Shabazz Street Photographer” a film by Charlie Ahearn
“As a street photographer, he was breaking all the traditions, of the Robert Frank traditions of street photography, having to do with spontaneity, and having to do with capturing images…
“Yes, he did everything that they would say was wrong. He would spend time with his subjects first. He would the pose his subjects, and in a very theatrical way. To which the earlier idea, it destroyed the life of what it was about. But I immediately perceived that this was an expression that was essentially hip hop. I had seen flyers of people posing like this from the late ’70s. In other words, the way he posed these people was not something that he made up. These were, in a sense, traditional cultural signifiers. They go back to the street culture of the ’70s.”
“He made these folks visible the way rap made them audible. He took everyday people and turned them into icons. Nobody told him to do this. He just went out and struck gold.”
Bill Adler, hip-hop historian and photography aficionado on Jamel Shabazz’s work.
In order to present various dimensions of the work of African artists and artisans worldwide, The Global Africa Project is organized around several thematic ideas. These include: the phenomenon of intersecting cultures and cultural fusion; the branding and co-opting of cultural references; how art and design is promoted in the international market and the creative global scene; the use of local materials; and the impact of art-making on the economic and social condition of local communities.
Relatedly: Interview with Ivorian fashion designer Emeka Alams here.
WEBSITES: Another Africa: Unravelling a Hidden Continent. Founder Missla Libsekal’s beautiful site serves as a “contemporary vision of Africans, Africa and those related to the continent and its peoples in the areas of culture, art, fashion, architecture, design, music, photography and more ….”
Screenshot from home page of Another Africa web site.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Delphine Diallo: The Great Vision Franco-Senegalese graphic artist/photographer’s portfolio site. Still love “Magic Photo Studio” series after first seeing it in Clam magazine a while ago.
PHOTOGRAPHY: The Destruction of Sophiatown: Rare Color Photos, 1959 Great essay by John Edwin Mason illustrated with images on the cultural/racial significance of Sophiatown an interracial Jo’burg suburb destroyed in 1955 to make way for white residential area. By the way, if you are not a regular at Mason’s blog or following him on Twitter, I suggest you do that now. He is an eloquent voice on the photography scene in general, but Africa in particular.
“A new synthesis of urban African culture sprang up here, shouting for recognition. Materially poor but intensely social; crime-ridden and violent but neighborly and self-protective; proud, bursting with music and literature, swaggering with personality, simmering with intellectual and political militance, Sophiatown was a slums of dreams, a battleground of the heart in the war for the city’s and even the country’s suppressed black soul.
“Sophiatown produced leaders in many fields, enough to create a ‘Sophiatown Renaissance’ comparable to New York’s Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Africans in other cities looked to Sophiatown for inspiration, and the location became a symbol as well as a partial realisation of their aspirations.
“Even as government bulldozers were leveling its houses, Sophiatown generated a cultural flowering unequaled in the urban history of South Africa.”
On Nov. 30, National Geographic photographer Brent Stirton presented his photography from his and Peter Gwin’s reporting trip to Timbuktu at Dateline: Sahara, an event held at the National Geographic Headquarters and co-sponsored by the Pulitzer Center.
Per the South African Journal of Photography Ernest Cole, South Africa’s first black photojournalist was born as Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole. He started out his photography career as a studio assistant to a Chinese photographer; it took off when he asked Jurgen Schadeberg for a job at Drum magazine. It was while taking a correspondence course with the New York Institute of Photography that the staff there encouraged/helped him to start taking pictures of life under apartheid in South Africa. By tricking the government to reclassify him as a colored (enabled by the name change to “Cole”) he was able to get access to places other blacks would not have had. As a colored he was also able to sneak his images out of South Africa, that were made into the book “House of Bondage”. He never returned to South Africa, dying in exile and isolation in New York in 1990 a week after Nelson Mandela’s release.
RELATEDLY: BBC’s The Strand discusses the life and legacy of Ernest Cole[audio, 0:35 to 7:48] in the wake of the exhibition of his work in Johannesburg. Includes quotes from Cole himself as well as David Goldblatt who worked with the Hasselblad Foundation to get the photos finally shown in South Africa.
SEE ALSO: Click on the image below to view additional images that Cole took that are now part of the Hasselblad Foundation’s collection.
Screenshot of selection of Ernest Cole’s photographs in the Hasselblad Foundation’s collection.
David Campbell: The New Visual Stories of Africa starts with the “single story” theme that Chimamanda Adichie struck in her seminal TED talk and takes image makers to task on their dualistic portrayal of Africans as good or bad, primitive or modern. This viewpoint evidently has not progressed much from that espoused in the early days of colonization where it was important for image makers to show Africans as inferior to Westerners so as to justify colonial/missionary forays into the continent.
Asim Rafiqui: How to Take Photos Of Africa: Binyavanga Wainaina’s legendary essay “How to Write about Africa” made Rafiqui question how he took photos, looking for complexity in the portrayal of the subjects. He contrasts Malick Sidibe’s humanizing, complex images with British photographer David Chancellor’s award winning photo essay “Elephant Story”. To Rafiqui Chancellor’s story dehumanizes its subjects reducing them to “maggot-like” creatures picking clean an elephant carcass; failing to raise or answer questions about the people in the images.
See Also: How to Photograph Africa, a Satire by Getty Images & Stefano de Luigi: Photographer/blogger John Edwin Mason also uses Wainaina’s essay as a starting point to illustrate humorously if a little harshly how otherwise well-meaning, beautifully executed work can just become a cliched rehash of the stereotypes of dark, f**ked up Africa.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Greg Constantine: Slum Warriors: Kenya’s Nubians. Kibera’s 100,000 strong Nubian community has lived there for over 100 years on land give them as compensation for fighting in the Kings African Rifles. “Nubian” is not officially recognized as a Kenyan tribe, so unless they are “vetted” at age of 18 to get Kenyan ID cards they become essentially stateless.
PHOTOGRAPHY:: Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Visions. Studio Museum in (the sweet village of) Harlem brings together a number of Mthethwa’s large scale images. Go see.
Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views brings together three series by South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa (b. 1960). “Interiors” and “Empty Beds” document the domestic lives of migrant workers around Johannesburg, South Africa, while “Common Ground” focuses on the shared experience of natural disasters in urban areas, featuring houses in New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina and on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, after wildfires.
See Also: Talk between Mthethwa and Okuwi Enwezor last year at Aperture gallery at the launch of Mthethwa’s monograph.
To that effect, black female artists exhibiting more rebellious styles are consequently shunned by black audiences for being “too weird,” and ignored by other audiences as not being authentic rock musicians. This is where the Afro-punk movement comes in: a blindingly boisterous collection of musicians whose general style makes them “misfits of society.” However, in the eyes of many, their style of dress and sound simply makes them copycats of white musicians. In other words, with the argument that rock music originated with people of color, some believe that black females choosing to go the Afro-punk route are ultimately suppressing their African-American roots.
What makes me really root for black women who rock is their willingness to carve out their own niche, to follow their artistic muses despite all the expectations, private and public, of what a black woman should and shouldn’t do. Artists like Santi(o)gold, Janelle Monae, Meshell Ndege’ocello have achieved a measure of success and recognition, but most black female rock artists (random sample below) do their thing away from the attention and approval of mainstream of black culture.
SHINGAI SHONIWA: Zimbabwe-born, UK-raised bassist and frontwoman for The Noisettes.
The band’s rapidly growing audience has a special significance for Ms. Shoniwa, who said her father wanted her to be an ambassador. “My private achievement is when I look out at the crowd and see a rainbow tribe, all different ages and colors,” she said. “Music should be about breaking down contrived divisions.”
Singer/Songwriter/Rapper/Violinist, “JOYA BRAVO” is a New York native born in Queens and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. Conceived by Jamaican parents, Bravo’s upbringing was conservative, but musically charged. Bravo began playing the violin at age nine. Her success eventually earned her a chair in the Metropolitan Atlanta Youth Symphony Orchestra (a highly accredited youth ensemble in the southeast region).
Image of Peter Beard on the shores of Lake Turkana, 1965. From Guardian web site.
Controversial diarist, artist, photographer, writer, conservation activitist Peter Beard links my two worlds in New York City and Kenya. I always thought he was a Kenyan, a Kenya Cowboy to be sure but Kenyan none the less. Growing up, I remember his photography and the publicity it generated around wildlife conservation. The picture of him on the shores of Lake Rudolph (Lake Turkana to the kids) with half of his body in the mouth of a crocodile has always been part of my visual landscape.
In truth Peter Beard was born in these United States. He first developed an interest in Africa through visits to the Museum of Natural History in NYC. After graduating from Yale, he moved to Kenya working on game conservation, as documented in his book “The End of the Game“. The book featured the carcasses of mostly elephants that were dying in Tsavo from a combination of drought and overpopulation brought on by population pressures. Here in the US, Beard hung out with the art/social elite of NYC. Beard’s US base in Montauk (far east Long Island) was the place folks like Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Richard Avedon, and Jackie Kennedy spent time. He also counted luminaries like Mick and Bianca Jagger, as well as Francis Bacon among his circle of friends.
Excerpts from “Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond”
Beard’s mixed media diaries and installations make use of a lot of the ephemera of Kenya’s past and present. From coins, to images of Presidents Kenyatta and Moi, from old photos of colonial Kenya to current images of the land, people and animals of Kenya, there is so much that that is part of my visual and cultural landscape. That his work was inspired by artists like Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon, and his fashion images were featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair, places him squarely in the art scene in the New York of the 60s and 70s.
What one cannot deny about the work of Beard is that he appreciates the raw beauty of Kenya and incorporates it in his art. He can see the beauty of a Turkana woman untouched by modernity and say that it is the same beauty as that of a Vogue model. That bold viewpoint, informed by his life-long love of nature and natural history, challenges the connotation of Africa as that “dark” and primitive place and links the notion of beauty in Westernized, modernized, removed-from-nature New York with that of Africa (and all nature in general).
Beard, after all, is the man who introduced the world to one Iman Abdulmajid, claiming he had discovered her while she was herding camels in the Northern Frontier District (North Eastern Province to the kids). Iman’s arrival on the beauty scene of the early 1970’s completely and irrevocably upended the notion of African beauty in the world of fashion, which is pretty revolutionary come to think of it.
Paradoxically, apart from the Maasai and Turkana who live in the wild (in nature), the rest of us modern Africans are “doomed” for our wanton reproduction and desire for progress. In the debate over the battle of man vs nature in the competition for resources, Beard falls firmly on the side of nature. This quote from the film “Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond” in the mid-90s seems to imply that diseases like AIDS are nature’s retribution for our profligacy:
“Coming to Kenya is coming to unspoiled, and unscrewed up by human beings (at least in the 50’s), … a frontier that extends right back in time to the Stone Age. Human beings are not going to stop, they don’t know when to stop. The only thing that can stop them are these diseases that everyone is spending all their money to fight. We are sucking the juices out of the earth to fight the diseases that nature wants us to have because we are too greedy and we have taken over too much.”
This is a position that is hard to abide considering that as post-colonial Africans we are free to screw up our environment (or not), without the moralizing of people whose ancestors destroyed their environment and big chunks of other peoples’ to boot. It is the romantic, outmoded “Out of Africa”-era fetishistic attraction to Africa the primordial and the repulsion at Africa the modern with its complex, intractable problems that makes it hard to have unalloyed admiration for Peter Beard’s art, as much as he has contributed ecologically, culturally and visually. However, I suspect that is the essence of the man, who while decrying the superficial nature of modernity, has no problem doing fashion shoots for magazines that embrace that same superficiality. The world is full of contradictions.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Pictures taken from the not so recent African Day Parade. The main parade was rained out but folks still turned out on 116th St. for a soggy, abbreviated celebration.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Speaking of Harlem; Amy Stein: Halloween in Harlem. One of my favorite photo essays. One of my favorite photographers.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Critique: WHITE PEOPLE ARE LOOKING AT YOU BY SEBASTIEN BONCY. Speaking of Amy Stein she recently posted some images from South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s series on Nollywood. The post led to a response by Sebastien Boncy (who happens to Haitian). Among other things he contends that the way Hugo portrays his subjects is no different from a long history of colonial photography (and current documentary/war photography), whose aim was to make brown skinned subjects “the other”, somehow not human in the same way as Westerners.
Snip:
MAYBE IT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE WAY HUGO AND HIS DEFENDERS ARE SO QUICK TO DISMISS OR MINIMIZE CONCERNS ABOUT THE RACIAL CONTEXT THAT THIS WORK TRAVELS IN. HUGO HIMSELF DENIES ANY CLAIMS OF OTHERING BLACK AFRICANS AND TURNS THE TABLE ON HIS ACCUSERS BY CALLING THEM “CONDESCENDING” “WHITE LIBERALS” THAT DENY HIS SUBJECTS ANY REAL AGENCY IN THE FABRICATION OF THESE IMAGES, BUT WE KNOW THAT PERMISSION DURING PROCESS DOES NOT MEAN CONTROL OR EVEN APPROVAL OVER THE FINAL PRODUCT. LARRY CLARK AND DIANE ARBUS HAD PERMISSION, YET THE ETHICS OF THEIR WORK IS ALWAYS FRONT AND CENTER OF ANY SERIOUS DISCUSSION ABOUT THEIR LEGACY. IT IS NOT JUST ABOUT WHAT GOES INTO THE WORK, IT IS ALSO IMPORTANT TO CONSIDER WHERE IT’S HEADED, WHERE IT COMES FROM AND WHO’S DOING THE BUYING.
More …
HUGO IS WORLDWIDE. HE HAS A GALLERY IN SOUTH AFRICA, ONE IN THE USA, ONE IN ITALY, AND ONE IN THE NETHERLANDS. NONE OF THOSE COUNTRIES ARE KNOWN FOR THEIR HAPPY, WELL-INTEGRATED BLACK POPULATIONS. THE PEOPLE SIPPING WINE AND SPENDING MONEY AT MOST HUGO OPENINGS ARE HIGHLY UNLIKELY TO HAVE ANY SIGNIFICANT KNOWLEDGE OF NIGERIA OR EVEN FIRST-HAND KNOWLEDGE OF BEING PART OF THE BLACK-BEANS-FOR-DINNER-THREE-NIGHTS-IN-A-ROW CLUB. AND THESE PICTURES DO NOT OFFER ANY SORT OF EDUCATION FOR ONE UNFAMILIAR WITH NIGERIA. NOW IN A NIGERIAN GALLERY OR MAGAZINE THESE WOULD BE VERY DIFFERENT IMAGES: THE AUDIENCE WOULD BE ABLE TO DECIPHER AND DISCUSS THE REFERENCES, THE MEANINGS OF THE FICTIONS AND ICONS THAT ARE SPECIFIC TO NIGERIAN LIVES, NIGERIAN ECONOMIES, NIGERIAN HISTORIES, NIGERIAN RELIGIONS. WHAT IS AN ITALIAN ARISTOCRAT THINKING WHEN CONFRONTED WITH A MOOLIGNON VADER WITH HIS DICK OUT? I THINK IT IS BEAUTIFUL THAT HUGO TRUSTS THE AUDIENCE TO COME UP WITH COMPLEX AND INSIGHTFUL CONCLUSIONS, BUT I ALSO THINK IT IS NAIVE IF HE THINKS HE CAN JUST TOSS THESE PHOTOGRAPHS AT SOCIETIES THAT CONTINUE TO OPPRESS THEIR BLACK POPULATIONS AND NOT EXPECT NEGATIVE READINGS OF RACE TO STICK TO OR BE AMPLIFIED BY THE WORK.
