User:Munfarid1/Photography in Africa

Photography in Africa is... (description)

historical photography of Africa

Richard Vokes

Susan Sontag On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others

"At the end of the book, she proposes that 'photographs with the most solemn or heart-rending subject matter' - Matthew Brady's dead soldiers from the Civil War, the walking cadavers at Buchenwald and Dachau photographed by Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller, perhaps also Nicholas Nixon's Aids victims - should not be exhibited in galleries or museums, where like 'all wall-hung or floor-supported art' they become incidental to a stroll, displayed as if they were plates on a sushi railway which we can sample or ignore as we please. The 'weight and seriousness' of images like these is more aptly honoured privately in sober silence, she believes, in a book."

the German media critic Rainer Rother wrote "Riefenstahl viewed [the Nuba] as potential models and scanned the world before her eyes for spectacular images. Photography became someting intrusive, a form of hunting."

review of Jennifer Bajorek Unfixed. by Drew Thompson (2021) Tools for Decolonizing Photography, Art Journal, 80:1, 130-132, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2021.1872317

"In Unfixed Jennifer Bajorek traces the relationship between photography and decolonial political imagination in Francophone West Africa in the years immediately leading up to and following independence from French colonial rule in 1960. Focusing on images created by photographers based in Senegal and Benin, Bajorek draws on formal analyses of images and ethnographic fieldwork with photographers to show how photography not only reflected but also actively contributed to social and political change. The proliferation of photographic imagery--through studio portraiture, bureaucratic ID cards, political reportage and photojournalism, magazines, and more--provided the means for west Africans to express their experiences, shape public and political discourse, and reimagine their world. In delineating how west Africans' embrace of photography was associated with and helped spur the democratization of political participation and the development of labor and liberation movements, Bajorek tells a new history of photography in west Africa--one that theorizes photography's capacity for doing decolonial work"

2023 exhibition A World in Common at the Tate Modern in London.