We’re starting a new weekly series today. We ask photographers who make portraits of African subjects to introduce us to their work. Basically they pick their five favorite photographs, describe the subject matter, what brought them to the image and what kind of mood they were trying to capture. Our first guest is Zachary Rosen, an American documentary photographer who has worked in The Gambia and Lesotho as a Peace Corps Volunteer. His photos live at zacharyrosen.com and he blogs (occasionally) here.
Lucy Liu’s Safari

At the moment when Africa is once again reduced to a cesspool of panga-slashing child soldiers and the abode of the world’s most dangerous man, a vanity piece on where Lucy Liu goes when she wants to get away (safari) is harmless enough.
Thrones no one wants to sit on
In Search of Maputo
* Guest Post by David Patrick Lane
Somewhere along the architectural and art deco eye candy scale between Miami Beach and Mogadishu sits Maputo. Mozambique’s capital wears its decorative dress well. It may be a touch over accessorized with Marxist Leninist Avenues and side street dwellings may be less about curvy shapes, lines and pastels than the practicalities of providing shelter and cheap pedicures, but even now as Chinese cranes create condominiums, the city retains an ornamental cache that continues to attract students of architectural history and post modernist design. In ‘Searching for Pancho’, a short film by South African filmmaker Christopher Bisset about the work of Pancho Guedes, perhaps the most renowned of all building designers — about five hundred structures all told — in what was then Portugal’s piece of the action, Lourenço Marques, is surveyed. The film is a cute piece of work.
The business of selling beer
In the last two decades, SABMiller become one of the world’s biggest beermakers by buying domestic labels and marketing them locally. They’ve hired anthropologists, historians, and sociologists to help sell ‘local intimacy’ for 200 plus brands in 75 plus countries and demonstrated that regional branding can be competitive on a global scale. Their domesticating efforts in African, Asian, and Latin American markets have given the London-based multinational a reputation for daring. But now that SABMiller has launched the first ever commercial cassava-based beer with its subsidiary in Mozambique, there’s just one question—why is Impala Beer’s branding so bad?
Wonder Woman can beat breast cancer
The Mozambican Associação da Luta Contra o Cancer (ALCC) enlists female superheroes to raise awareness around breast cancer. If you can’t read the small print copy: “Nobody’s immune to breast cancer. When we talk about breast cancer, there’s no women or superwomen. Everybody has to do the self-examination monthly. Fight with us against the enemy and, when in doubt, talk with your doctor.” The local Maputo branch of a multinational ad agency designed the campaign. Here’s a few:
The Economist’s Africa
In May 2000 The Economist ran a cover story: “Africa. The Hopeless Continent.” People couldn’t stop talking about it for a long while afterward. It spawned countless op-eds about Afro-pessimism and -optimism. It even became the basis for “Contemporary African Politics” college courses for a while. Now last week, they ran this feature cover (above) –complete with silhouetted boy with kite running across the savannah– where the magazine predicts a more hopeful scenario for the continent’s 54 states. [Read more...]
Found Objects No. 16
Recycling Rubbish
Many of you know those spectacular images of burning computer parts and beautiful, sad young men, taken in some God-forsaken corner of polluted Ghana where the ‘West’ has dumped all its obsolete toys to be ‘recycled’.
Now, here’s Southern Africa’s answer: we can do apocalyptic burning and degraded human beings on rubbish tips, too. Portuguese photographer Jose Ferreira’s images of the “Trashland of Maputo” , taken in the dump of Huléne (just a few meters from Maputo’s airport), are supposedly meant to make us move beyond the “caricatures of the poor and homeless, who are often camouflaged between common jokes and cartoons from the civilized world.” He adds that the people in these images, “who have empty eyes and shapeless smiles,” make the experience of their lives “more human.”
It’s not that lives like this do not exist; it’s not that this is a compelling subject (why do we allow such suffering? Why permit such degradation in fellow human beings?), or unworthy task to force those who are either ignorant of such suffering, or usually like to turn the other way to really stand and contemplate the lived reality of these Others. It may be that Ferreira makes us think about all that we discard. But there’s something that’s rehashed here – too much of the whiff of exploitation, for the value of shock, rather than an invitation into a space of contemplation (and possibly, towards action).
And please: I know this isn’t about computer parts, or the discards of the West. But if you want to make your mark as photographer, why copy Pieter Hugo’s “Permanent Error“?
June 25th, Mozambique
We had much fun selecting recent videos coming out of South Africa last week, so we decided to follow up on this. At the occasion of each country’s independence day, over the next months we’ll try and collect songs (and videos, if we can sleuth them) we find interesting. We’ve already missed some this month, but if all goes well we’re ending this series May 24th of next year, with Eritrean music. Today is June 25th, Mozambique’s Independence Day. We couldn’t leave out the “ball grabbing, bikini-clad videos” Davy Lane spotted last year, but there is more than that.
Iveth:









