John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

David Goldblatt: ICP Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award, 2013

There's no such thing as "the greatest photographer in the world," but, if there were, it would be David Goldblatt.

Goldblatt is also something of a paradox.  How is it that someone who has been honored so often by so many is still relatively unknown outside of his native South Africa?

Tomorrow night, Goldblatt will receive yet another well-earned accolade -- the International Center of Photography's prestigious Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement award.  Photo District News asked me to mark the occasion by examining his long career and, along the way, explaining the paradox.  You can read what I have to say, here.

 

PDN Pulse, 30 April 2013.

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The New African Photography: A Documentary in Six Parts

"Don't photograph what you see, photograph what you feel."  --Emeka Okereke

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The New African Photography is bad for you.

Let me explain.

If I say the word "documentary" to my African history students at the University of Virginia, most will want to run screaming from the room.  As far as they're concerned, documentaries are things professors like.  Like medicine, sobriety, and a good night's sleep, they're good for you, but not a whole lot of fun.

If the first episode of this new six-part documentary from Al Jazeera's Artscape and Resolute Films is anything to go by -- and I think it is -- The New African Photography is going to be bad for you.  That is, it's going to be hugely entertaining and often very, very funny.  Here's a preview:

 

 

 

Please don't tell anybody, but the series is also sharp as a tack.  Its goal, as the filmmakers say, is to show how a new generation of African photographers are using their cameras to celebrate, question, and represent a continent on the rise.  Historically, few regions of the world have been more misrepresented in photographs than Africa.  These photographers, however, are taking control of Africa's image and creating a more nuanced picture.

The first episode -- the one I watched last night -- features the well-known Nigerian photographer Emeka Okereke and the Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project.  The show follows Emeka and fellow Nigerian photographer Lilian Novo on the most recent journey, from Nigeria through Cameroon and Gabon.  It's simply brilliant.  (And bad for you.)  You can watch the whole thing below.  It's about 25 minutes long and definitely worth the time.

 

 

 

Subsequent episodes will be showing up on Artscape's website over the next few weeks.  Here's what to expect:

2.  The Red Dress (29 April 2013)
Barbara Minishi is a leading fashion photographer in Kenya. For her latest project, Barbara swapped skinny models for normal people, photographing a wide range of women all wearing the same red dress, as a symbol of unity and national identity in the aftermath of the 2007 post-election violence in which more than 1 000 Kenyans were killed. Barbara says: "Don't look at Africa and think one thing. How come this view of Africa is always the soldier or the starving child?"

   3. George Osodi (6 May 2013)
Nigerian George Osodi is a former Fuji African Photographer of The Year Award winner who's also been shortlisted at the Sony World Photography Awards. He's renowned for his hauntingly beautiful pictures of the oil devastation in the Niger delta.  "I think it's my responsibility as the man with the camera to find a way to represent this [situation], so that it becomes appealing to whoever sees it. At first sight you're like, `What a beauty,' but then behind it is a huge Armageddon." He hopes his latest project, in which he photographs Nigeria's traditional monarchs, can offer a more positive way forward.

   4. Neo Ntsoma (13 May 2013)
South African Neo Ntsoma is the first woman recipient of the CNN African Journalist Award for photography. She revisits DJ Cleo and the stars of South Africa's new democratic dawn, to take new portraits and discover the effects of 20 years of freedom. Neo moved away from news because she didn't want to reinforce African stereotypes. "My dream was to be an advertising photographer and take pictures of beautiful things. Black people feeling good about themselves, dressed well. But it was a picture that the apartheid regime didn't want to show to the world. They wanted to paint black people as barbarians."

   5.  Congolese Dreams (20 May 2013)
Executive produced by Viva Riva director Djo Munga, Congolese Dreams follows photographer Baudouin Mouanda as he explores the idea of marriage in Congo. The Congolese photographer burst onto the global photographic scene with his colourful photographs of Brazzaville members of SAPE (The Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People). As Baudoin says, "Africa will surprise everyone. There are lots of images of war, so I want to show another image of Africa."

   6.  Mario Macilau (27 May 2013)
Emmy-winning documentary director Francois Verster follows former street child Mario Macilau, as he uses photography to investigate the growing gap between rich and poor in Mozambique. "There is no longer a middle class in our country," says Mario.

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"Africa Let's Go Crazy": Coke's Other Africa

No one is crazier than Africans, because it's crazy to be kind.

That's the premise behind Africa Let's Go Crazy, Coke's new advertising campaign across most of the continent.  It's geared, Coke says, "towards inspiring and celebrating individuals who spread happiness on the continent by performing random acts of kindness in their daily lives."

The video below, which features the Ugandan pop star Maurice Kirya, is part of the campaign.  Oddly enough, I like it.

 

 

Africa Let's Go Crazy.

Yes, I know.  I should be ashamed of myself.  After all, Coke makes most of its billions in profits from selling health-destroying sugary soft drinks and environmentally harmful bottled waters.

And, as allAfrica points out, the campaign's goals are to entrench Coke's connection with its customers across the continent and tighten its stranglehold on the market.

But I still like it.  I like it for the way that it shows ordinary people doing a wide variety of perfectly ordinary things.  I like it because is shows happy people being kind to one another.  I like it for its celebration of unsung heroes.

I also like it because of what it doesn't show -- hatred, war, famine, disease, brokenness, and incompetence...  That is, it doesn't show the stereotypes that still shape the ways that westerners and other non-Africans view the continent as a whole.

 

 

Coca-Cola Crazy for Good:  South Africa.

Sure, Coke romanticizes the everyday.  (And the inclusion of the Peugeot pickup truck in the first video is pure nostalgia.)  But Coke's Africa is also an Africa that works, an Africa that isn't on its knees begging for help.  It's an Africa that represents the daily lives of the majority of its people much more closely than the tired old stereotypes that were invoked during, for instance, Invisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign.  I'll bet that, as an ad campaign, it will be a huge success.

As far as I know, these ads won't be seen broadcast in the US or anywhere else outside of Africa.  That's too bad.  They would be part of a growing effort to give Americans and non-Africans generally a more complex and challenging vision of the continent.  While the people behind, for instance, blogs like Another Africa and Everyday Africa, and websites such as The Other Africa, are out to confront stereotypes and misunderstandings, they would never deny that Africa has its problems.  They would insist, however, Africa's story needs a multitude of voices and visions to tell it.

The effort to create a more honest understanding of Africa goes on at least as much within popular culture as it does in the classroom.  It's there that Coke's campaign, for all of its contradictions, can play a positive role.

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Many thanks to Independent Global Citizen for the heads-up about the campaign.

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Chinua Achebe, 1930-2013

I was very sad to hear that Chinua Achebe died yesterday.  I had never met him, but it was a bit like losing a friend.

Achebe was one of my favorite novelists.  Re-reading his books is always a pleasure.  It's something I do at least once a year because I assign one or another of them in my introductory African history classes.  Their seeming simplicity masks a depth and complexity that makes them wonderful to teach with.  And wonderful to go back to time and again.

 

Carlo Bavagnoli/Life:  Chinua Achebe, 1966.

You can read the New York Times' obituary of Achebe, here.  And the young Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a wonderful appreciation of the man, here.

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Cristina de Middel and the Signifying Afronaut

...signifying is a "technique of indirect argument or persuasion," "a language of implication," "to imply, goad, beg, boast, by indirect verbal or gestural means."  "...signifying... the language of trickery."

--Henry Louis Gates quoting Roger D. Abrahams in "The 'Blackness of Blackness':  A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey."

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I didn't plan to be the last person in the photo-blogosphere to write about Cristina de Middel's recent book, The Afronauts.  I wanted to be the first.  After all, it's about Africa (sorta) -- a phantasmagorical recreation of the Zambian space program of the 1960s.  And Africa is my beat.  One of them, anyway.

Besides, I was lucky enough to spend time hanging out with Cristina, last June, at Look3, the Festival of the Photograph and figured that the book would be much like its author -- smart, funny, and provocative.  Should have been easy to write about.  It wasn't.  At least, not for me.

Yesterday, The Afronauts won the International Center of Photography's 2013 Infinity Award for Publication (a very big deal).  I took the opportunity to re-read something Cristina said about the work to my friend and fellow blogger Pete Brook, and I finally got it.  The Afronauts is signifyin'.

 

 

 

(Before we go any further, check out the wonderful video about the book, above.)

Ok.  You're back.

Cristina said that she was signifying?  Well, not precisely.  But darned close.  She told Pete that

The images are beautiful and the story is pleasant at a first level, but it is built on the fact that nobody believes that Africa will ever reach the moon.  It hides a very subtle critique to our position towards the whole continent and our prejudices.  It's just like saying strong words with a beautiful smile.

The Afronauts, in other words, is about us -- we non-Africans -- and the stereotypes and prejudices about Africa that we carry around in our heads.  It's about challenging those stereotypes and beliefs, on the sly, with humor, and with a sleight of hand.

I once heard someone say that oppression is not a competitive sport, so I won't tell you that Africa is the most stereotyped continent on Earth.  But it's surely one of the most, and Africans are among the most stereotyped people.  Among the most pervasive stereotypes are those that suggest that Africans are innately backward people who can't cope with the challenges of the modern world.

But how exactly do you go about changing prejudices and misconceptions that are so widespread?  One strategy is to replace mistaken ideas and images with more accurate ones.  Nothing wrong with that.  If you want people to believe that Africa is more than mud huts and tribal masks, you've got to show them something else -- say, creative modern Africans at work and at play.

Stuart Hall, one of the best known writers on the question, suggests another approach.  We should look for ways, he says, "to occupy the very terrain which has been saturated by fixed and closed... stereotypes and turn the stereotypes... against themselves...."

Hall's advice is sound but superfluous for anyone who has a passing familiarity with Louis Armstrong and Flavor Flav or with Richard Pryor and Tracy Morgan.  All were and are masters of the African-American art of signifying.  It's an art form that has roots as deep as the minstrel shows of the nineteenth-century.  As Amiri Baraka wrote fifty years ago,

The black minstrel shows were... what might be called parodies, or exaggerations, of certain aspects of Negro life in America.  But in sense the colored minstrel was poking fun himself, and in another and probably more profound sense he was poking fun at the white man.

It seems to me that this is Cristina's strategy as well.  She takes what seems to be a playful look at the silly idea that Africans can build rockets and lures her readers into wondering why the idea seems so absurd.

All strategies have their risks.  Some people undoubtedly looked at Louis Armstrong and saw nothing but a confirmation of their prejudices.  Many more did not, as his astonishing career and continuing legacy confirm.

I imagine that The Afronauts will have similar effect.  Some people will embrace the stereotype.  Others -- many others, I hope -- will find themselves questioning it.

The Afronauts is signifying of the highest order and a virtuoso display of trickeration.

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Joerg Colberg's quite positive review of The Afronauts, on his Conscientious photo-blog, travels a different path than mine.  It's a good read.  You can find it, here.

Copies of Cristina's book, which she self-published, are nearly impossible to find.  You can, however, buy beautiful prints from the series at 20x200, here.

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