Contemporary art now counts with African photography
On the rise of African photography in the international art market.
"It seems to me that we are living in an extraordinary moment of creative flourishing in African photography. The critic and curator Ekow Eshun testifies this month in the contemporary art magazine Artpress to the formidable dynamism of a photography that is as aesthetic as it is committed, which Africans from the continent and the diaspora are seizing upon. A growing number of African photographers are using their art to explore African histories, cultures and experiences, as well as to address important social and political issues.
The art market for contemporary African photography is thus in constant evolution, with a growing demand from collectors and art lovers to buy the works of art for sale by new African talents. It must be said that the photographs reproduced in Artpress magazine are indeed dazzling: from Athi-Patra Ruga's Night of the Long Knives I, Ayana V. Jackson's Take Me to the Water, to African Boy Sitting on a Chair, to the African Boy Sitting on a Chair, to the Jackson's Night of the Long Knives I, Hassan Hajjaj's African Boy Sitting in Front of the Lens or Zanele Muholi's Ntozakhe II, Parktown (whose journalist Aurélie Cavanna provides a comprehensive portrait in this issue of Artpress)... the photographic works of art of this new generation of artists are astonishing in their power.
Unlike the generations that preceded them, the African photographers who are now making contemporary art have "the possibility of showing their work and being seen all over the world thanks to social networks", Ekow Eshun points out. This was of course much longer and more difficult for artists such as Malick Sidibé (1936-2016), Seydou Keïta (1923-2001), Mama Casset (1908-1992), James Barnor (born in 1929) or Samuel Fosso (born in 1962). It took the latter being discovered by Western collectors and exhibiting their artworks for sale in Western art galleries to attract international attention. One thinks, of course, of the Parisian gallery owner André Magnin, nicknamed the "kingmaker" by Julie Chaizemartin in Artpress, who devotes a fine portrait to the man who was one of the great transmitters of African photography, He met Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta in the early 1990s in Bamako, but also discovered, for example, the colourful and encyclopaedic pictograms of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré in 1988 in Abidjan, whose exhibition was shown last summer at MoMa in New York. ..
It was during the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles in 2012, that the gallery owner who spent twenty years building up the immense collection of African art of Jean Pigozzi (the heir to the Simca firm) discovered the portraits of black figures combining the aesthetics of a fashion studio and the tradition of painted portraiture, signed by Omar Victor Diop... taped to the gates of the Boulevard des Lices. The Senegalese photographer's works of art are now on display in his Parisian gallery. "The studio photography of the 1960s and 1970s has an enormous resonance today", Ekow Eshun can only observe, as the work of Omar Victor Diop resonates with that of Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso.
Born in 1921 in Bamako, the Malian photographer Seydou Keïta became famous for his black-and-white studio portraits capturing the daily life of Bamako's inhabitants, workers, shopkeepers, families, musicians, newlyweds and girls in traditional dress. He began working as a professional photographer in the 1940s, opening his own studio in 1948. His work was discovered abroad in the 1990s, when the French art gallery MAGNIN-A organised an exhibition of his photographs. Since then, his work has been shown in exhibitions around the world, and he has become one of Africa's most famous photographers. In 2001, the year of his death, he was awarded the Hasselblad Foundation Prize, one of the world's most prestigious photography awards.
Like Malick Sidibé, who began working as a photographer in the late 1950s, after studying at the Sudanese Craftsmen's School in Bamako, and before opening his own photography studio in 1962, to finally become the first African photographer in 2007 to receive the Golden Lion for the whole of his work at the Venice Biennale, Seydou Keïta is thus one of the "first photographers to have completely freed themselves from the Eurocentric gaze and to have chosen not to represent their subjects in the formal style of their former colonial masters, but rather as lively, chic and central figures", explains Ekow Eshun. "For example, the Moroccan photographer Hassan Hajjaj cites Sidibé as a key influence on his work. Sidibé's photographs captured the vibrancy and optimism of Mali at the time of independence, and Hajjaj's models are also engaged in their own form of struggle for liberation. His works are characterised by an explosion of colours, patterns, logos and found objects. Signs, symbols and people from all over the world rub shoulders without hierarchy or presumed superiority of a Western worldview."
Ekow Eshun also mentions "the work of the Nigerian-British photographer Ruth Ossai, who regularly portrays the Nigerian communities in which she grew up, depicting them with empathy, style and loving intimacy. Ossai often shoots her subjects in the studio, referring to the lineage of African studio photographers. To these we should add the Nigerian J.D.'Okhai Ojeikere (1930-2014), 'who captured the lives and aspirations of ordinary Africans with delicious panache', as Ekow Eshun describes him, who also wishes to draw attention to the influence of Samuel Fosso, 'whose dandified self-portraits of the 1970s make male identity a perpetual performance rather than a fixed way of being of the body. Fosso's research into the shifting nature of gender anticipates a subject increasingly represented by black portrait photographers. For example, Paul Mpagi Sepuya's fragmented studio images assume that gender is fundamentally complicated and that its representation can only be partial, nuanced and subjective."
When you consider that of the 54 African nations, 34 have outlawed homosexuality, and that in Mauritania, Sudan, southern Somalia and northern Nigeria it is punishable by death... we understand that "in countries where queer and trans identities are considered the antithesis of normality, the work of photographers such as Zanele Muholi, Athi-Patra Ruga, Ruth Ossai, Eric Gyamfi and Sabelo Mlangeni plays a crucial dual role", says Ekow Eshun. "It is both an expression of individual artistic practice and a political affirmation of minority visibility in potentially life-threatening circumstances.
Illustration: Athi-Patra Ruga - The Knight of the Long Knives I, 2013