Guest Post by T.J. Tallie and Maria Hengeveld
This week BBC News reported on the rise in Cape Town’s status as a premiere international gay tourist destination. The article itself went on to report at length from gay South African hoteliers and organizers, many of whom lavished praise on the progressivism enshrined in the country’s constitution, and the comparative sense of freedom that South Africa in general (and Cape Town in particular) provided for LGBT-identified people. While it is undeniable that South Africa can boast one of the most inclusive constitutions in the world, particularly in regard to protecting the rights of those with different sexual orientations, the BBC article and much of the rhetoric surrounding ‘Cape Town as gay paradise’ obscures far more complex realities.
Pinkwashing South Africa
My favorite photographs N°3: Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann
Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann, a photographer and filmmaker working in her hometown, Nairobi, is our latest guest for our series where we ask photographers to pick their favorite shots from their own portfolio . She was born in Bonn, Germany, in 1985 with German and Kenyan parents. In April 2011, The Sundance Institute exhibited a selection of her work at MoCADA (Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art) in New York City. Philippa has recently begun a new documentary project, “We Want Development,” and is working towards her first feature film, “Two Princes.” First up she explains her approach to photography:
Livetweet Recap: NYT (and Vogue Italia) “Rebrands Africa” (again)
From a series of tweets I did on the New York Times story “Rebranding Africa” which you can read here. [Read more...]
The ‘passing’ of Ernest Cole
Information on famed South African photographer Ernest Cole’s decision to ‘pass’ from ‘African’ to ‘coloured’ in Apartheid South Africa’s kafkaesque “race classification system” is not readily available beyond the ready-made theories and rationalizations repeated in museum catalogues or on websites. From those sources we get glimpses of his anxiety or the stress the decision brought on his family in short scenes from the only documentary film on Cole’s life, that by the photographer Jürgen Schadeberg. But even then, Schadeberg’s film neatly sidesteps the issue of passing by not probing Cole’s motives. Like with play-whites (coloureds who passed for whites), we won’t know how many ‘play-coloureds’ there were. What the writer Zoe Wicomb has said of play-whites applies: “We don’t even know how many of them there are. There’s no discourse, nothing in the library, because officially they don’t exist [anymore].” [Read more...]
Exhibition. Cape Town in France
Cécile Mella (remember her portraits of the Cape Town ad world) will be showing her photography series ‘Dreamland’ in Montpellier, France this month (at the Galerie Saint Ravy). Come through if you’re in the area.
The magazine as Tumblr
Globetrotter is one of those vaguely defined, international, cosmopolitan culture and fashion magazines. With connections to Chicago, Lagos, and Jakarta, the magazine consists of an eclectic pastiche of commentary on various international trends organized into four sections: Art/Design, Movements, Style, and Music. The publication is the brainchild of Kennedy Ashinze and published through his company, Fuse Creative Agency. The articles contained in Globetrotter’s first issue cover a seemingly incongruous mix of topics.
Photographer Gregory Chris: Shooting Nneka, Meta and Just a Band
A few weeks ago I sent an email to established French photographer Gregory Chris (see his website) and asked him about featuring his photographs of African music stars on AIAC. He kindly obliged and also responded to questions. Photographer Gregory Chris shot African music stars Nneka, Meta (of Meta and the Cornerstones) and Just a Band in and around New York City. “I wanted to shoot the artists in the streets of the city, in the neighborhoods where they live, their favorite places, inside their homes, in a place they feel comfortable. Basically, I wanted to shoot them as they are.” The photographs were made a few months ago while he was spending time in New York City. A South African magazine, One Small Seed, had asked him to do something for them and he decided on making photographs of “African artists living in New York City.” Below we feature some of the photographs and Gregory’s descriptions of how he came to shoot the specific artists, what he tried to convey. First up is Nneka.
Photography. ‘Addis Ababa Diary’ by Mahesh Shantaram
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A while back we featured a random photograph of Indian photographer Mahesh Shantaram (I think Achal Prabhala got me onto Mahesh’s work). Email contact led to me asking him if we could post some of his “Addis Ababa Diary” series on AIAC. Shantaram, who also works as a wedding photographer from his base in Bangalore, explained what led him to photograph in the Ethiopian capital: [Read more...]
What Pieter Hugo’s photographs stand for or what they can and cannot tell
Guest Post by Andrea Stultiens
I recently went to see the Pieter Hugo retrospective at The Hague Museum of Photography (The Netherlands). His series ‘The Hyena and Other Men’ looked more grainy than I expected, based on online publications. The scale and resolution in web prints remove the grainy quality of the big, framed images. I also finally realized that Hugo followed only one group of men, with one hyena, a monkey, a dog and a snake. Somehow, I used to think that the single images I saw were simply an example of a larger number of similar men and animals photographed by Hugo as he traveled through Nigeria. The exhibition in The Hague also made me realize that I am not the only person overestimating and at the same time underestimating what Hugo’s photographs stand for or what they can and cannot tell with what they show.
In Pictures: 19th New York African Film Festival
Directors Andy Okoarafor ("Relentless") and Charlie Vundla ("How to steal 2 million").
