spotlight africa
Contemporary photography in the context of the African continent, comprising 56 countries and over 3000 languages, has offered an extremely rich and vast panel of visual-narratives over the last 150 years, which would be impossible, counter-productive and misleading to try to encompass and summarize here.
As a starting point, we should be reminded that photography on the African continent is not a contemporary factor, quite the contrary. Photography was introduced in Africa soon after having been discovered in Europe, offering today a wide range of archives dating from the late 19th century and deploying the medium of photography as a pseudo-scientific, instrumentalist or liberating tool, ranging notably from imperial colonial classifications and ethnographic studies to portrait studios. These early modes of representation alternate between, or sometimes combine, fantasies, dreams and desires projected onto African bodies by European settlers, as well as empowered, urban and modern presentations created by, for and in collaboration with local African communities.
Photographers active on the continent today are numerous, dynamic, and often self-reflexive. They respond and feed into to their local visual repertoires, socio-political contexts and cultural heritage, tackling global topics shaking the art world, and fields of representation and approaches crafted and shared online, while engaging with new technologies in image making. In this digital age, images, ideas and concepts travel from, to, across and within Africa’s borders. They provide new topics and lines of questioning for photographers and artists based in Africa and its diaspora, who create artworks which, in turn, circulate and offer their local audiences and international viewers insightful perspectives and fresh takes on our shared, global and cross-cultural present moment.
It is without surprise that lens-based practices by African artists have raised the interest of cultural institutions, notably in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States, while being championed by a prolific range of institutions, festivals and art fairs, on the continent itself. Photography from Africa is increasingly being collected, exhibited, loaned and published, slowly but surely shifting what has been considered as the ‘mainstream’ geographical focus of contemporary photography. Artists active in Africa are often described as reclaiming narratives that have, too often, been told and exploited by others, and deploying the medium of photography to re-imagine the continent and reinvest the power of looking. Approached as a whole, their images offer international collectors, established or new to collecting photography, a vast range of artworks to appreciate, be inspired by and learn from.
In the context of international display and championing of contemporary African photography, photo basel is no exception, including for its 2024 edition and for the first time three galleries exhibiting artists originating from and active on the African continent. Visitors at photo basel will have the opportunity to discover a selection of works brought together by Doyle Wham (London), The Bridge (Paris) and Inside Out (Brussels) respectively. These three European-based galleries cultivate a similar wish to champion African photography, especially works by young and/or emerging practitioners, with interesting price-ranges for collectors embarking on their collecting journey.
In the work of Morgan Otagburuagu (Lagos), Lee Ann Olwage (Cape Town), Sarfo Emmanuel (Koforidua) and Justin Dingwall (Johannesburg), to name a few, collaboration between the artist and the photographed-subject is central to the image making process and the stories being visually transcribed. Deploying collages, photo montages, layering and stitching, often using bright colours, each lens-based artist creatively plays with the genre of portraiture. The resulting portraits, shot with a camera or a mobile phone, blur the limits between fashion, editorial and documentary photography, as well as between ‘reality’ and ‘performance’, opening up the medium of photography as a space of experimentation, care and re-interpretation of site-specific narratives. Far from being the only photographic ‘genre’ engaged by artists from or active on the continent, these portraits will offer photo basel visitors a glimpse into one of the key ramifications tackled by contemporary African photographers today.
Dr. Julie Bonzon
Julie Bonzon (PhD) is an art historian, photography curator and published author, specialised in South African photography and interested in lens-based practices created on the African continent.
