Going through photographer Roger Ballen’s Boarding House series, each portrait made me wonder: “but what are these people in the photographs doing after the shoot?” Ballen’s portraits are detailed, staged pictures of unnamed human figures, often with out-of-place props (rats, crosses, dolls…) in the same frame, always against a dead cold grey background. I failed to imagine them to be alive, real, or moving. Watching the music video that Ballen directed for South African crew Die Antwoord (“from da dark dangerous depths of Afrika” — their words) changed that a little. The figures do come to life. But I never imagined them dancing to an old beat.

I didn’t imagine them freaking out to hardcore bass drum gabber beats, that Dutch sound which flooded the clubs in the nineties — those records now safely stored somewhere in my basement. I imagined the figures as puppets in an American-South African photographer’s play, hinting at what he believes is an undiscovered surreal mental wasteland, that of poor whites, poor white South Africans, poor Afrikaners. It’s the same trope Die Antwoord played with, and it’s a trope we won’t write about again.

Although some people are still tempted to consider them as being exemplary of white South Africans’ (and Afrikaners in particular) “liberation” through art after Apartheid (as this article in the New York Times suggests), I don’t believe Die Antwoord’s essence lies in their projected identity, nor is the latter a useful concept to explain their runaway success.

I don’t think they ever wanted to be regarded as ‘Afrikaans artists’; they are only Afrikaans in so far as the press, blogs and online trolls believe them to be Afrikaans or poor Afrikaners. The new album, tellingly, hardly has any Afrikaans lyrics on it.*

Ninja makes sure to keep that to a minimum on the album as a whole though. Sure, there’s some swearing and a skit in Afrikaans, but when Ninja for example raps how they broke with the American record deal that got South African press hyped up, he does so in English.

What they always did want though, is to play with the spectacular to get people’s attention. As one does as an artist, I assume.

Die Antwoord play the game well; whether they play it fair is open for interpretation.

What they still do badly is “borrowing” from other people’s work. Ripping Jane Alexander’s sculpture Butcher Boys in the album trailer — without the South African artist’s knowing — is one example, while ‘I Fink You Freeky’ not just seems to take the title and the sound of LFO’s track ‘Freak’ but also an idea from this video made for that same LFO track. And maybe for good reason. If your songs don’t differ much from what kids growing up in the nineties listened and danced to, you better come up with striking visuals and clever marketing.

And this is how Diane Coetzer, in an “interview” for the South African version of Rolling Stone (which put them on the cover), deals with questions of appropriation and race. She has it in for “South African critics who accuse the group of cultural appropriation (or worse) and spend hours analysing why two white South Africans shouldn’t be stepping over the border into [coloured] Mitchell’s Plain or Fietas to mine the lives of those who reside there.” We learn that Die Antwoord’s “ruthless loyalty to their imagination are the sole boundaries.” Yes.

Anyway, good PR helps. And it helps to be well connected. (Diane Coetzer’s partner is Die Antwoord’s music publisher.) The PR worked last time, and so it will this time. The New York Times fell for it (including misrepresenting their critics) and fashion designer Alexander Wang flies them in for his new spring campaign.

By the way, I see Welsh rock band Feeder’s using a Ballen portrait for their cover art too. It’s becoming a trend. And it sells.

* That is, unless you don’t count the odious lines “Ek’s ‘n lanie, jy’s ‘n gam/want jy lam in die mang/met jou slang in ‘n man” in ‘I Fink You Freeky.’ For those who don’t understand Afrikaans, translated that reads “I am a boss, you’re a child of Ham/’cause you’re locked up in jail/with your snake [penis] inside a man.” Let me break that down. “Lanie” is colloquial coloured slang for a white boss. As for Gam, it’s the Afrikaans for Ham. That’s the Biblical Noah’s cursed son Ham. In Apartheid’s theology coloureds were deemed children of Ham, i.e. the cursed ones. The rest is self explanatory and recalls the homophobic lyrics on their last song.

Back in the ‘90s I remember Ralph Lauren’s lavish spreads in magazines for his safari collection, which included a perfume (what would that smell like? Wood fire, Hemingway, Baroness von Blixen, and a hint of Masaai cattle?), and leopard dinnerware, sold at Dillards.

Kors, like Lauren, isn’t known for taking fashion risks; he caters for a core glam-fame nouveux-riches audience, so neither his designs, nor his adverts are ever going to be cutting edge, though photographer Mario Testino is well-known for what goes as “risky” in fashion photography.

Kors’s spring 2012 collection, named “Afriluxe,” was “inspired by the ‘rustic modernism of the Lebombo Lodge,’ a reportedly $1,500 per night resort in South Africa, and featured dirty-looking earth tone caftans and cargo pants and cashmere sweaters with holes in them,” as Fashionista quips. That’s one of the images from the print campaign above. Here’s another from the look book.

It’s debatable if these images in the ad campaign are racist depictions of Africa and Africans, or just a repetition of the same old trope that reduces the African (and the woman) to props, and transforms everyone into commodities that advance the select consumer’s powerful subjectivity.

We’ve written about Kors’s runway show last fall. But frankly, we are bored by the “eternally popular and eternally misguided theme of ‘safari’” (fine words by the Guardian’s commentator, Hadly Freeman) in the fashion scene. It’s time to move on to coverage of more exciting African designers.

As a bonus, here’s Kors–during New York Fashion Week November last year–going on about “Africa,” mangles the name of the lodge where he “hides” in “the bush” and adds “if you’ve never been to Africa, here’s your chance to do so in a garment”:

Bhimji was born in Mbarara in Southern Uganda in 1963 to Indian parents, and was forced to move following President Idi Amin’s expulsion of all South Asians in 1972. Amin claimed that the Indian minority, who had been brought to Uganda during British rule to work in skilled jobs, were ‘sabotaging’ the Ugandan economy. Bhimji and her family moved to Britain, as many others did, and only returned to Uganda during the preparation for her first film, Out Of The Blue (2002).

Although she firmly denies that her work is concerned with the specificities of her own history, and that of Uganda (see this curt interview here), it is of course unavoidable for these histories not to form an important narrative in her work. In the first photographs exhibited, Bhimji’s eye brings the remnants of an earlier time into playful and ironic counterpoint with the present. In Rado Watch, Such Western Precision (2007), a dog lies asleep on the concrete porch of a government building, with the sign ‘assistant quartermaster’ hanging above him. Her title points toward the zealous bureaucratisation that the British brought with them, and together with the photograph shows the how these legacies are suspended, often strangely, surreally, within the contemporary moment. Perhaps the assistant quartermaster no longer exists, and a sleepy dog now occupies his watch? The possible narratives that Bhimji’s photographs suggest are both intriguing and playful.

Rado Watch, Such Western Precision (2007)

Similarly in Echo (1998-2007), a photograph of a school wall provides an explicit political tract that Bhimji’s work itself avoids. On the wall, children’s graffiti and drawings are mixed with political messages, ‘The man which came from Congo should be killed by the order of army!’ The title of the work, ‘echo’, and its relationship to the content of the image seems to exemplify Bhimji’s broader approach to her subject. Rather than looking back, and romanticising the Uganda she was forced to leave, Bhimji’s lens is unambiguously situated in the present, yet allowing the traces, echoes and residues of an earlier history inform that present. Her work is completely depopulated; instead, by treating objects as evidence of social life, her work becomes poetic, rather than documentary. She is creating an ambiguous visual history of the present via remnants of the past.

The objects she pays attention to; the frayed ledger books in an abandoned administrative building, decaying shutters still retaining the vibrancy of their original yellow paint, or an intricate yet crumbling statue of Queen Victoria (all seen in the film Yellow Patch) develops a poetics of forgotten colonised space. By filming walls, chairs, the exteriors of buildings, Bhimji examines what they might say about people’s lives, with an almost forensic eye. She sets your imagination running while you try to piece together location with objects, historical context with imagined narratives. This effect contradicts the empiricism that we would associate with historical ‘truth’ and forensic attention, her method cleverly contradicts its effect: she says of photographs that ‘they cannot give you concrete information’.

In her two films, Out Of The Blue (2002) made for dOCUMENTA 11 and Yellow Patch (2011), Bhimji further disjoints image from referent, using sonic techniques to successfully take the suggestions made in her earlier photography into a different realm. Where the image is rooted, situated, the sound haunts and inhabits them with echoes of life. In an abandoned administrative office, dusty and fraying, yet retaining some of its original colonial prestige, the sounds of radio announcements and chatter fill the space, yet, at a distance. Where her photographic captions point to the echoes of Uganda’s political history imaginatively, her use of sound loosens the bond between time and space, image and location, creating an ambiguous space in-between where her curiosity of objects and their histories can be examined freely.

A still from Out Of The Blue (2002)

In another scene, a large crack in a wall is accompanied by a tectonic rumbling, so loud it can be felt in your chest. Perhaps my imagination had run wild by this point, but it felt strongly suggestive of the ripping, shape shifting effect of time passing, particularly on a social scale, and even more specifically in the case of once colonised countries. Her evocative, highly textural yet sparse cinematic language is an arresting way of addressing the complex histories of objects, their spaces, and the people who once inhabited them.

* Zarina Bhimji runs at The Whitechapel until 9^th March 2012. Admission Free.

Ben Osaghae’s paintings of modern life in Lagos demand further attention. Pictures such as ‘Endurance March’ document social realities (the orientation day of the National Youth Service) with an eye-catching colour scheme. Much lies beyond the obvious attractiveness. ‘Blackout!’ moves towards the explicitly political territory of electricity supply, ironically confronting the problems with furious energy, evoking the awkward dance of figures moving through an unlit space. It is an angry and playful scene, poised between the celebration of the smallnesses of shared experience (you break something, stub your toe, light candles, make do) against the humiliating fact of hospitals’ reliance on generators in a country where international energy companies make their fortunes.

Osaghae’s ‘Vernacular Class’ sketches students at a class, quick and attentive as a Degas, moving between abstraction and representation, marks on the flat surface of the canvas and suggestions of three-dimensional space, mapping the interplay of inner and outer worlds. The painting configures the students’ mental geography: they inhabit the painting dilligently, bent over their work. The dark blue bodies take on a certain weight against the turquoise background, they appear suspended heavily in space. There is no motion in this picture, in the studied poses of these studious children. No time ever passes; this picture is inhabited by boredom. The objects placed above their heads may be the objects of knowledge or distraction. The scribbling on the surface of the canvas is unfinished, inconclusive. Heidegger claimed that boredom is, in its most essential form, the experience in which being and time unite, the critical experience which makes philosophy possible. Osaghae’s images are open to the question of being in the world, and responsive to the shifting boundaries of individual life. The gallery description of the work foregrounds its socio-political content:

The importance of education is underpinned here. The composition assesses the level of intellectual interest of the pupils – from the very enthusiastic to the lackadaisical. To the very serious amongst them, ‘education is costly, but lack of it is costlier’.

It would be interesting to know more about the vernacular class, but this well-intentioned description does not do the work justice. Perhaps this art feels it necessary to emphasise its own political content in order to sell itself within an international aesthetic community. The artist’s careful observations of shared and individual experience make this work rare and precious.

To return to the promise of the title: what is the tie that binds these artists together? Nigeria is surely too large and its artists too various for any claims for representativeness to be sincere. As always, I am curious to know the economics of the venture: where the money comes from and how it has influenced the selection of artists and works. Art spaces such as this have great obligations to the regions they propose to represent. With the range of work exhibited in this first show, and the ambition of their programme of talks and exhibitions, Tiwani promises to be energetic in their engagement with the challenges of this role, and this is an exciting prospect for contemporary art in London.

* “The Tie That Binds Us” at Tiwani Contemporary in London, till 21 January.

As part of a series of year-end posts–we’re taking a break from Friday, December 23, till January 5, 2012–we’re planning to post at least 10 “Lists of 10″ this week. (We’re trying to be cool by calling it “10×10″). So two lists per day. Orlando Reade, who blogs for us from London, starts us of with his list of 10 photographers to watch in 2012. He’s picked five African artists and five Europeans who have been working in Africa–Sean Jacobs and Tom Devriendt.

Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo’s (born Burkina Faso, 1978) L’enfer du Cuivre (image above) and Pieter Hugo’s (born South Africa, 1976) Permanent Error series both document life in and around the technology dump in Agbobloshie, Ghana.

Lien Botha’s (born South Africa, 1961) 2009 Parrot Jungle series, exhibited at this year’s Bamako biennial, explores the iconography of natural history. Her images, carefully and oddly juxtaposed objects, possess the aura of an old cabinet of curiosities.

Nii Obodai’s (born Ghana, 1963) work, From the Edge to the Core, was exhibited at the Bamako biennale. The 2009 series, Who Knows Tomorrow, a collaboration with the Algerian-French photographer Bruno Boudjelal explored the political legacies of Kwame Nkrumah’s independent nation through landscape portraits of urban and rural Ghana.

Daniel Naudé (born South Africa, 1984) makes portraits of animals in strange relation to their landscapes. His Africanis series focused on the wild dogs of the Karoo.

Cecile Mella’s (born France, 1983) series ‘Fictional Cape Town’, captures the misfigured and fantastical portraits of the city at the edges of advertising photo-shoots and film-sets.

Jordi Cami’s (born Spain, 1955) images of the industry of manual transporting at the border of Spain and Morocco, and infant refugees in Sudan, make intimate reportage of physical life in these communities.

Four years ago, Yan Gross (born Switzerland, 1981) started making a series on a group of skateboarders in Kitintale, a suburb of Kampala, who built what Gross claims is the first skatepark in East Africa. The project is ongoing.

Andrea Stultiens (born Holland, 1974) has been working and teaching in Uganda for the last few years, engaging with local artists through the Bayimba Photography Workshops. The Kaddu Wasswa Archive is a series devoted to one man’s life, compiling documents from his past with new photographs. This work, made in collaboration with Wasswa’s grandson, the photographer Arthur C. Kisitu, indirectly makes a history of the first fifty years of independent Uganda.

Alfredo d’Amato’s (born Italy) series, ‘The Sound of Kuduro’, explored the Kuduro (translated as “hard ass”) music scene in Luanda, Angola. It was exhibited at this year’s Lagos Photo. Amato’s ‘Early Days of Spring’ contains eloquent portraits of Tunisia after the end of Ben Ali’s regime. His recent work in Mozambique can be seen here.

Andrew Dosunmu is always on the move. I first met him here in New York City when he had just returned from South Africa where he had shot a few episodes for the second season of the popular TV series “Yizo Yizo.” (At the time, I was organizing a film festival.) Shortly afterwards, by chance, I ran into him on the subway. He was plotting to make a feature about female bank robbers in Lagos. Then I got invited to a reading for a story about complicated family relations in an African immigrant clan in the Bronx that he had workshopped at Sundance Lab. Neither project came off. Which is fine, since that frustration led him to take the initiative and make his most recent film, “Restless City.” I finally got to see it this summer (at the Urban World Film Festival). The story, part American dream narrative, revolves around a young West African immigrant, Djibril, who lives in Harlem, trying to start his record career, while selling CDs and delivering packages and mail on his moped. Djibril (played by Sy Alassane) falls for a beautiful woman, Trini (Nicole Grey), who also happens to be a prostitute. Djibril wants to rescue her from her pimp, with devastating consequences. But the narrative is only part of the story. This film is also about how New York City is framed. This is a beautiful but hard city for the growing African immigrant population who reside in its margins. And the city is a star of the film; whether the small uptown apartments, subway cars, dance clubs, hairdressers, etcetera. The actors speak in Wolof, English, French and Yoruba. The pace is slow but engaging, there’s a certain lyricism to it, it’s beautifully shot (that’s the work of director of photography Bradford Young), it is stylish (the costume designer is Mobolaji Dawodu of The Fader) and it has a soundtrack of Don Cherry‘s jazz.

In my book it is the best African film this year.

As usual Andrew is on the move. Word is he is already working on his next film. Turns out it’s the film I mentioned above about that immigrant family, now titled “Ma’George.” Isaac de Bankole and Angelique Kidjo are among those in the cast and Bradford Young will be the d.p.

* We have some top 10-lists coming next week, but I wanted to get in a word first.

The proliferation of photographers documenting poor whites in South Africa is something to behold. This is significant since poor whites are only a fraction of the total white population — 450,000 out of  4.5 million live below the poverty line and 100,000 are struggling just to survive. We’ll spare you the numbers on black South African poverty. Of the recent ones, Finbarr O’Reilly’s series on Coronation Park is probably the most celebrated. It has been splashed all over mainstream international publications and websites. Less well-known is the work of Kim Ludbrook, Ben Krewinkel’s Toe Witmense Arm Was, Riaan Labuschagne, Lisa Skinner, Jordi Burch’s Poor Boers, Dean Saffron’s Poverty has no colour, Susanne Schleyer and Michael Stephan’s Bitter Fruit and Nadine Hutton’s I have fallen. There are probably some we’ve missed. Not all of them went to Coronation Park.

Further back, there’s the work of David Goldblatt (his “The Afrikaners” and “The Afrikaners: Revisited”) and Roger Ballen.

But every time we see a new project on poor whites we’re taken back to a post done a while ago by John Edwin Mason –he writes one of the best photo blogs– on work made by South African Constance Stuart Larrabee on poor whites in late 1940s Johannesburg. We keep returning to the post because of Mason’s take on Larrabee’s photographs. Her work appeared in an “illustrated magazine” aimed at white readers and is probably still the best and most original series on the subject.

Photographs on poor whites were usually presented as straightforward commentaries on their welfare. But as Mason points out, there are larger issues at stake. He quotes E.G. Malherbe, a rising social scientist at the time (who also took photographs), writing in 1921 that poor whites were

a menace to the self-preservation and prestige of our White people, living as we do in the midst of the native population that outnumbers us 5 to 1. (…) a skeleton in our cupboard, raising questions about the capacity of the ruling white race to maintain its dominance.

Mason argues that the photographs, especially those with black and white subjects in the same frame, captures too well the anxiety that white South African elites felt when they contemplated the “poor white problem.”

Like these two: in the first, above, a black woman looks down at a white man “with revulsion, pity, or some combination of the two” (in Mason’s words); in the second, a black man brings “aid (…) to whites”:

The original captions for the photographs which appeared in Libertas in 1947 make no mention of the black subjects. One caption reads: “Homeless man, 1947-48.” Another photo of the same man reads:

On a bench in the heart of Johannesburg a hobo lies sleeping. Little can be done to make him useful to society. But by influencing the young child and curing his personality defects, social welfare workers can prevent this waste of human material.

The caption for the second photograph reads:

Although food and other assistance are given under poor relief scheme, the poor are helped to help themselves.

As Mason writes:

From the point-of-view of mid-twentieth-century white South Africans, this photo is less fraught –nobody here is physically defenseless, incapacitated by drink– but it would still have been troubling. Black is again positioned above white; a black man is bringing aid and succor to whites. The fact that the man is dressed in laborer’s clothes would have lessened the tension only a bit.

Mason wonders “how aware Larrabee was about making images that captured so precisely the anxieties that poor whites evoked. My guess is that she knew exactly what she was doing.”

Read the whole post, which also discusses Larrabee’s contemporaries and her other work in the Libertas series here.

Blogger and broadcaster Mikko Kapanen visited the ARS11 exhibit of contemporary African art in Helsinki. These are his impressions written for AIAC: 

I am no contemporary art expert. Sometimes one has to start with a disclaimer. The term and whatever definition whoever gives to it have been on that awkward zone where I have felt that I should be equipped with more specific knowledge to say even something quite generic about it. Also, my intuitive and somewhat outdated direct connection between the idea of contemporary and fine art has always had this self-manufactured inner conflict with my identity relating to counter culture. Even if the conflict wouldn’t really exist, I have imagined it. I think I have been quite elitist in avoiding certain kinds of art, so I found myself rethinking a few things as I was going to see ARS 11 exhibition in the Kiasma museum of contemporary art in Helsinki, Finland. This year the tag line promised that the exhibition “changes your perception of Africa and contemporary art”.

Of course, first I had to figure out what exactly is my–let alone everyone else’s–perception of Africa. Isn’t it false-advertising to promise to change something that you can’t universally define and which varies from individual to individual? The use of this misguided slogan is hardly the fault of the many artists featured in the exhibition, so I thought, for my benefit  and just in general, let me have an open mind. Perhaps that is the prerequisite for art anyway.

The museum is bang in the city centre overlooking the brand new state of the art music house (also, regardless of the official version, built largely for the purposes of fine art) and the nine tents of Occupy Helsinki that are standing in the rain next to it. It’s all very Global Village.

My experience of the art was pretty much as I expected; some works were great, some not to my liking which is understandable considering the quantity of art in this exhibition, but admittedly, very little of it did much to change my perspective of the African continent and cultures. I don’t know if it did more to someone else. Generally speaking a lot of recycled materials had been used and waste was a recurring theme that was approached from many angles. A lot of beautiful photography (some examples of my favourites were Samuel Fosso, Kudzanai Chiurai and Maïmouna Patrizia Guerresi), various installations and sculptures were scattered around the five floors of Kiasma.

For me, by far, the most interesting parts of the exhibition were the work of Nigerian photographer J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere and South African artists Mary Sibande.

Ojeikere‘s photography collection titled ‘Moments of Beauty’ consisted of beautiful black and white images recording the Nigerian history. I found it interesting that in an exhibition that is supposed to change my view of something, the items I most enjoy, and which I think may work the best in delivering the promise of performance the curator has made, are the ones that are not abstract at all. It is just straightforward snapshots of real events in history. If reality changes our perspective, then what is our perspective based on to begin with?

Mary Sibande’s art had more layers. She is playing with the idea of South African (and perhaps beyond) maids and their role in society. There were some beautiful photographs, but the piece that really stole the show was a large dressed up statue of a maid wearing a Victorian style royal blue dress riding a stallion reaching to the sky (my image at the top of this post). Whether by design or by accident this horse riding maid was separated only by a window from the native horse riding statue of the Finnish war marshal and former president C.G Mannerheim (see in the background). Next to each other, quietly they ooze thousands of meanings from different struggles; one from the top of his local food chain and the other from the bottom of her own. Yet, and this might be largely due to my own values and interpretations of history, the one on the inside, the maid, was the one whose horse was to ride her to triumph, even a modest one if such an expression exists, as the historical narrative becomes less Euro-centric.

I still see Africa as I did before this show, but I enjoyed much of the art. Perhaps the exhibition mainly changed my idea of contemporary art which it also promised to do. So that’s okay, but if this exhibition really changed the perceptions of its viewers on Africa, I think we should move to an area that is closer to my main interest and ask why–and media I am looking at you now–is it that these works would change the way anyone sees a continent that is frequently in the news? Perhaps there are more people than I’d care to imagine who view the whole continent of Africa as 90% disaster zone with disease and corruption sprinkled over it desperately relying on the kindness of Bob Geldof and Bono, and on the other side, 10% safari game drive utopia with animals and poor, but smiling locals and Out of Africa settlers. If that was your idea, then perhaps it was high time for it to change.

The image problem that Africa has, to a large extent, is a result of the terrible geo-branding warfare by the global north which is an extension of colonial attitude that created the realities on the ground in the first place. If the low expectations that are in our midst change because of an art exhibition we shouldn’t expect anyone to thank us, but rather we should say sorry this didn’t happen sooner.

Is African studio photography, Cape Town art writer Sean O’Toole asks in frieze magazine, dying out? The answer, non-subscribers, is maybe. Everywhere in the modern world the business of professional photography is in decline. O’Tool argues that studio photography has suffered the economies of the ‘digital revolution’ and the rise of the mobile phone camera. According to him the easy publishing of social networking sites has dealt a death blow to the popular African institution.

Studio photography has been the medium of many of Africa’s most internationally renowned artists. Malick Sidibé’s (b. 1935) joyful shots of independent Mali, are celebrated in this year’s Paris Photo and the ninth biennale in his native Bamako. Similarly, the virtuosic monochrome portraits of Seydou Keïta (1921-2001) have gathered acclaim since his first exhibition in Paris in 1994. The two Malian photographers are often coupled together in indexes of African photography, but there is an critical distinction between their practices. Sidibé went onto the streets of Bamako, and used his talents for reportage. In 1962, two years after Independence, Keïta was nominated official photographer of the single-party socialist state. In a 2008 interview with lensculture, Sidibé spoke about Keïta:

People showed me his photos, but I didn’t go to his studio. Many things prevented me from going to Seydou’s. With my notoriety from reporting, going to Seydou’s studio … They all had it in their minds I might put a spell on them, or something like that, to make them lose customers, so I never went to the studio. … It was Seydou who came to me to bring cameras to be repaired. Back then, Seydou had almost finished at his studio. He was now working for the government, taking ID photos of prisoners, and so on. So I did not go to Seydou’s studio. No.

Sidibé is clearly troubled by the medium they share, and tries to establish distance between his work and Keïta’s along the lines of professoinalism and politics. The spirit of radical dissidence inhabits Sidibé’s work, which is difficult to place into the categories of the professional photographer. This art is haunted by the camera’s availability as a tool for state control.

Photography has always been deeply involved with politics. Early photographs which celebrated the brief life of the 1870 Paris Commune were later used to identify and prosecute the communards. In the first scene of Athol Fugard’s monumental play, Siswe Bansi is dead, a man arrives at a studio in provincial South Africa to have a photograph taken. It is, he says, to send his wife in the country. The play shifts back in time and it transpires that this man is Siswe Bansi, on the run from the police. Bansi and a friend discover a dead man in an alleyway and decide Bansi should steal his identity. The play ends back at the beginning, and Bansi is photographed for his new identity papers. In this studio, photographs are not only taken for personal portraits but passport photography, and the camera is as much an apparatus of state control as a joyful commemoration of life. At the end of the play, Siswe Bansi is dead and the photograph is the document which tells his wife he is still alive; the photograph is a technology which wakes the dead, and kills the living.

The young career of Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou (b. 1965), whose work is currently on display at the Jack Bell gallery in London, makes an interesting engagement with the traditions of studio photography. A year ago Agbodjelou was making work which looks unexceptional against the backdrop of post-modern African image-making: grinning men wearing sunglasses and brightly coloured clothing pose against patterned wallpaper. It is clear that the subjects of these photographs are their maker’s clients. Agbodjelou learnt the trade from his father, Joseph Moise Agbodjelou (1912-2000), a photographer well-known in and outside of his native Benin. A small picture by Joseph Agbodjelou sits opposite these smiling men. In this a woman poses in front of a torn studio backdrop which hardly covers the bare wall of the building behind. Leonce Agbodjelou’s most recent series, the Engungun Project, represents a return to these stark and humble beginnings.

The Engungun are masqueraders in the Yoruba traditions of Benin and southern Nigeria who ritually cleanse the local community. The actors wear costumes made out of furs, found fabrics, imitation shells and sequins, designed to adorn the motion of their performance. As Charles Gore’s exhibition notes explain, these figures embody ‘both named and unnamed’ ancestors, which often ‘vary from recent deceased and historical forbears, to acting as community executioners of criminals and witches’. No one in the community is permitted to know who the actors are; they become the walking dead.

The project of gathering these images was not an unpolitical act: Agbodjelou was sent home from one trip to southern Nigeria by the police, threatened by the presence of his camera. The exhibition notes also mention recent threats to the Engungun traditions:

the rise of Pentecostal churches in the 1990’s across West Africa [presented] a new challenge to Engungun masquerade … as these churches sought to demonise indigenous religions (and their pantheons of deities) as pagan and dangerous and, as such, to be vehemently rejected. Engungun has responded in elaborating a counter-narrative of localised Yoruba memories, personalised histories and ritual through public performance that upholds the ethical values of the community.

The photographs displayed in the gallery are not labelled, and the viewer is thus denied even their subjects’ namelessness. The streets and rural areas in which the figures are placed are carefully lit to highlight the texture of this studio en plein air. The intended effect of this project is, it seems, not to catalogue this spectacle with an ethnographic lens, but to make its curious spirit manifest.

The thesis of O’Toole’s article, that non-specialist publishing on social networking sites endangers the life of African studio photography, demands further thought. The claim recalls a belief, after the invention of the daguerrotype, that painting would become obsolete. Photography did not murder painting, which responded with Impressionism and the birth of a revolutionary avant-garde. It is apparently one of modern art’s most cherished lies to declare a medium bankrupt in order that the next generation of artists inherit the task of reinventing it. O’Toole refers to the work of Cheik Diallo, Santu Mofokeng and Kwame Apagya as exponents of an art-form which is not so much artistically dead, as financially defunct. This argument does not consider the crucial distinction between photography as art and as business. The significance of vocation is concretely proven in Bamako. Seydou Keïta retired in 1977 at the age of 56. O’Toole notes that this was “around the time ‘colour photography took over’ and machines started doing the work”. As it turned out, colour film did not bring about the end of art photography but has contributed to its expansion. Malick Sidibé still practices in the studio he established in 1958.

Commentators have often warned of the vulnerability of social networking to abuse by governments and corporations. There are not many countries in which political dissidents may use the internet without some fear of supervision. It is important that photography – in digital and film, in the street and in the studio, on websites and gallery walls – negate the camera’s use as an apparatus of state power and corporate interests. It is difficult to predict how social networking will influence art in the future, but the photographers whose vocation it is to document life in Africa will without doubt continue to confront the politics of image-making with energy and self-consciousness. There is hope within the ethical ambivalence of photography; a camera in certain hands becomes the weapon that disarms itself. Joseph Beuys recognised the same when he called for art to heal the knife that cuts the wound. Leonce Agbodjelou’s odd, faceless images are useful reminders that some things may be photographed but not captured.