This year marks the 20th anniversary of the New York African Film Festival. The Festival–from April 3rd to the 9th at Lincoln Center–is still the longest running, and probably most significant, African film festival in North America. (I’ve helped out on the festival in the past, so I’m biased.) It is worth remembering what the […]
In Egypt earlier this year I was taken by my host to a nightclub in downtown Cairo where I was introduced to a cosmopolitan group of friends — musicians, artists, poets — all drinking beer and dancing until the early hours of the morning. When the DJ played the songs of the revolution they punched […]
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 […]
I am shooting these on my iPhone. They’re short, no-frills interviews done in my office. The format is simple: The subjects sit on a chair in my office while I point the iphone at them. They decide what 5 things they want to talk to about. The first guest is Glenna Gordon, photographer and blogger based in […]
Preview (and more information in French) of images from the exhibition, “The Ritual of the pose–Africa in black and white in the 1970s,” consisting of studio photographs by Malian photographer Malick Sidibe and his Senegalese counterpart Oumar Ly, now on show (till November 27th) at the Musée des Arts Derniers in Paris. The one above is […]
The German photographer, Rainer Elstermanns, imagined an old photo studio set in rural Kenya in his studio in Berlin. He dressed models in period costumes. The result is a 17-minute film and a series of 40 recreations. Elstermann writes that he was inspired by the work of the great African photographers and artists, Samuel Fosso […]
Two weeks ago the results of the World Press Awards were announced. The prize winners included a number of striking images about and by Africans.
