Surely photographs are presented to convey a message, and if there’s anything I remember from my introductory photo classes as a youth, is that a photograph is all about the “frame.” In a post called “How to Photograph Africa“, John Edwin Mason, a photographer and history professor at the University of Virginia, plays with the framing of a photo essay on Africa to question the types of messages that are continually portrayed about the continent. Mason criticizes Getty Image grant winner Stefano de Luigi’s photo series “This is Africa” by offering the essay up as an example of satire, in the vein of Binyanvanga Wainaina’s “How to write about Africa,” and shows that the way the images are presented reinforces negative stereotypes.
I have to admit Mason had me fooled at first, so if there’s still any question: Stefano de Luigi’s photographs aren’t meant to be a satire, they’re serious, but John Mason’s re-framing is satire, and a brilliant critique of the photo essay!
For more examples of the re-framing of images from Africa in photography, see this post at the Africa.Visual_Media Blog.–Boima
I’m a pretty obsessive amateur photographer and this post raised so many issues that in a small way I am always wrestling with. I have lived in Africa for just over four years, and it is visually overwhelming in its variety, its beauty of landscape, nature, and culture and individuals. It is inspiring and at the same time daunting — no way to capture what captures me about any single scene or moment. Even worse, I am always inhibited by my own dislike (almost disgust) for a tradition of exhibitionistic, fatalistic, objectifying images of the human Africa, which contrasts so sharply with all that noble wildlife. I don’t want to be a part of that. So, how to respond authentically to Africa from the other side of the lens? This essay only makes it harder. I imagine the photographer is proud of these images and that for that person, they represent a certain truth. Must be kind of devastating to have your work received with such anger and used in a savage parody. I guess art isn’t for sissies.
I have it in mind to barf after seeing Stefano de Luigi’s work this morning. Talk about disgust.
I’ve already found out the hard way that a number of self-styled philanthropists, who I hoped would help support my NGO’s projects in Tanzania, don’t want to see Africans looking happy. I wonder what they would make of some of your Music Breaks?
Neither do big-time media publicize the confidence and ambitious self-help spirit motivating countless African grassroots development organizations, although the stories of these little organizations with large dreams deserve telling. In the June 16 post to my own blog, I recounted the harrowing survival of the 1994 Rwanda genocide by the Project Manager of Les Enfants de Dieu (http://www.enfantsdedieu.org/), which works in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. I met Rafiki Callixte in 2009 after my son had completed four months of work at Les Enfants de Dieu, teaching English to the one hundred thirty young “children of God” no longer living on the streets since Rafiki and his colleagues took them in.
With Rafiki now in California for a week, I’ve had a chance to hear again about the remarkable work of Les Enfants, whose deeply democratic management by the boys themselves particularly impresses me. (Originally the children of God also included girls but, as Rafiki told me somewhat delicately last year, “the bushes did much shaking” so he and his colleagues found a home elsewhere for the girls.) This past Sunday, Rafiki reminded me that he had obtained the computer in his office only after a visitor to Les Enfants asked the boys how they had acquired their striking self-assurance. “It happened when we told our Project Manager that he could not buy a computer,” one of the boys answered.
Absolutely true. From among their own ranks the boys elect Ministers to lead seven departments dealing with different aspects of life at Les Enfants. In 2007 the Minister charged with approving expenses, supported by his Secretary General, turned down Rafiki’s application for money to get a computer on the grounds that buying food had to take priority. Therefore the visitor, who saw Rafiki doing his paperwork with a pencil, bought him the needed computer—a full year after the boys had said no.
That seems like an admirably democratic model for Africa or for just about anywhere else. Maybe even rich self-styled philanthropists could learn from the Les Enfants model.
I realise everyone wants to criticize Stephan’s photo essay as stereotypical etc. but he did find these images in Africa, and there IS alot of suffering and poverty and corruption in Africa. As a continent it is not doing well in terms of treating it’s people like people. The continent is littered with despots who deprive their citizens. There is also drought and devastation.
It is hard to ignore, and seek out only the happy faces and visions of normalcy or representations of the middle class, when it is such a miniscule portion of a massive continent.
Also – what he photographed got him the next grant, so someone out there appreciates his work.
Living in Ghana for the last 15 years, I see images like these, and I also see the beauty and normalcy of life. But striking images always get people’s attention and that is what people photograph.