![]() ![]() Who is allowed to travel, these images appear to ask, compared to which favoured objects? Just to continue the point, Chagas devises a fictional name for each subject – Salvador Kimbangu, Pablo Mbela – European-African hybrids recalling Angola’s past as a Portuguese colony. But each sitter wears a highly expressive Bantu mask of the sort historically favoured by western collectors. The show considers the camera as an imperial device throughoutĪngolan artist Edson Chagas’s fantastical photographs are posed exactly as if for a passport photo. ![]() Some of the 36 artists in the show are justly famous – Samson Kambalu (last seen at Modern Art Oxford) Fabrice Monteiro, shortlisted for the Prix Pictet the venerable James Barnor, whose joyous and uplifting studio photographs of post-independence Ghanaians were shown at the Serpentine Gallery in 2021. Given the population of Africa, now more than a billion, and the sheer number of images that might have been included, judicious selection was crucial. ![]() © Lazhar Mansouri, courtesy Westwood Gallery NYC Untitled, from the series Portraits of Aïn Beïda, by Lazhar Mansouri, c.1960. Lazhar Mansouri’s black-and-white photographs, taken in his village studio in north Algeria in the 50s and 60s, offer staggering glimpses of Bedouin and Berber sitters, some posing with radios, as well as villagers got up like Marlon Brando. Here are girl biker gangs in Marrakech and gay picnics in South Africa, haunted Cameroonian landscapes and dense streets in the megacity of Kinshasa, Mauritanian migrants trying to reach the shores of the Mediterranean. It is a vital experience, just in terms of pure knowledge alone. The art is exhilarating, dynamic, compelling, profound. These portraits are a record of the present but also the past.Ī World in Common: Contemporary African Photography presents Africa through its own lens. Yet the monarchs of these subsumed kingdoms continued to exist, as they do today. When the British colonised parts of Africa in the Victorian era, hundreds of tribal kingdoms were merged to form the artificial boundaries of Nigeria. George Osodi’s dazzling photographs of Nigerian monarchs, of whom the west knows so little, were taken this century. ![]()
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