Recently in Africa Photo Books Category

Interview with David Pace Winner, Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Work-in-Process Prize.  The full interview is here.  Very interesting.  Great photos.  Look carefully... in one of them a guy is wearing a typical full-on Barack Obama shirt!

The images in Friday Night seem formally quite different from your other work, such as Re: Collections, or even the series Kiosks and Market Day from Burkina Faso. Would you agree?

You are quite right that the images in Friday Night are different from my other work. I am by nature very formal in my approach to composition. I favor simplicity and symmetry in an attempt to foreground my subjects, whether they are people or objects, and emphasize their similarities and differences. This is clear in the Re: Collections project and in the Kiosks portfolio. Both are classic typologies in the tradition of August Sander and the Bechers. I think my African portraits fall into this category as well.

But I also like to experiment with the element of chance and challenge myself to move outside my comfort zone. That is what is behind Friday Night. I am literally shooting in the dark. I can see my primary subjects dimly, but the background of each image is unseen until my flash fires. Everyone is in constant motion, including myself, so every image is a surprise. The juxtaposition of contorted bodies, hands and feet, shadows and expressions is not something one can predict.

Another thing that distinguishes Friday Night from my other work is that I am an active participant in the process rather than an objective observer. I am caught up in the music, moving and sweating alongside the other dancers, reacting and interacting. This was not possible the first two or three times I visited Bereba. I had to get to know the villagers and earn their trust. I now feel very much at home in the village and an insider at the dance. Everyone expects me to make photographs and they are delighted with the results. I should add that I take back and distribute all the images that I make on each subsequent trip. I have more than 500 prints that I'll be handing out when I visit Bereba in December.

We can't say enough about how much kids like these photo books produced through the Santa Clara University Reading West Africa study abroad program.  Except that we need your help to print more and make them widely available.  Consider approaching someone who has the means, and ask them to make a large donation ($5,000) so we can print books and distribute them to all the public libraries in larger towns in Burkina Faso!

(Photo: David Pace, Children in Bereba village hold RWA books, 2010)

Article sur l'etat de la photographie au Burkina Faso:

L'homme s'est fait un nom dans la photographie burkinabè. Aujourd'hui, Warren Saré veut exporter la photographie burkinabè, à travers la création de son Centre de photographie de Ouagadougou (CPD), et surtout une caravane de l'image jusqu'à Bamako.

Sidwaya (S) : Comment se porte la photographie burkinabè ? Warren Saré (W.S) : La photographie burkinabè ne se porte pas bien. Parce qu'elle est absente des instances de la photographie mondiale. En dépit des efforts, deux photographes, Seydou Dicko et Nestor Da essaient d'être sur la scène internationale. La photographie burkinabè peut s'imposer sur la scène internationale, si nous avons des acteurs convaincus qu'ils peuvent à travers leurs appareils, contribuer au développement de leur pays.

David Pace has won the 2011 Daylight / CDS Photo Work-in-Process Prize for his Friday Night series.  From the website:

In recognition of a mutual interest in documentary and fine art photography, Daylight Magazine and the Center for Documentary Studies started an international competition in spring 2010, the Daylight/CDS Photo Awards, to honor and promote talented and committed photographers, both emerging and established.

The full panel of jurors will choose one First Prize Winner. Each Guest Juror will also select one photographer to receive a Juror's Pick Prize and write a short statement about why he or she choose the work. 

The First Prize Winner will be featured in print in Daylight Magazine and CDS's newsmagazine Document, as well as in Daylight and CDS online galleries and be part of a group exhibition at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Congratulations David!

Image: From Friday Night. Photograph by David Pace, 2011

FAVL received some wonderful new books from Kathy Knowles of Osu Children's Library Fund.  We sent them off the Ghana for the libraries in Bolgatanga area.  But one foto struck me- the orange cap belongs to our wonderful FAVL/RWA driver Francois.  See Kathy's complete catalog here.

David Pace had another photo essay published in Lens Culture magazine featuring photos of the Friday night dance in Bereba.




 

An excellent reflection from Glenna Gordon.  But I think the idea of one photo representing a complex phenomenon is kind of a non-starter to begin with.  And I don't think an  understanding of the complexity of Cote d'Ivoire is something that can be known... it *has* to be a narrative imposed by the analyst, a contingent narrative.  Too many actors are involved, and in "two kings" situations duplicity of motives and actions has to be the strategy of many, and even loyalists (to someone, to a cause) sometimes have to pretend they are disloyal, so the actors themselves do not know the strategies of others and have to infer or guess or go with intuition.  So the conceit that one is going to understand the situation is a little alarming.  Especially since acting and not-acting means being aware of the limitations of understanding at the moment one writes a blog post, snaps or distributes a photo, angers a visiting foreign negotiator, pays off a second-tier militia leader, orders a civilian killed, etc.

This is what David Campell has to say about the visual representations of the referendum in Sudan. The last paragraph is especially poignant and I think it's important to try and imagine what a photograph that captured these complexities would look like. A group of South Sudanese in heated debate, perhaps with political posters on a wall behind them framing their engaged expressions? A voter leaving a polling station with a look of dismay, confusion, or trepidation on his or her face, rather than the stock happy voter images we're seeing over and over? I'm not that either of these theoretical images, or any image for that matter, might do the trick. Perhaps this isn't the kind of complexity that can be captured through spot news photography.

In Ivory Coast, an equally complicated political situation is being widely photographed. In yesterday's New York Times, a story about civilians paying the price for political tumult is accompanied by two photographs by different photographers of dead bodies.

The question is what each photograph tells us about the politics of the situation, and the answer, I fear, is very little.

I strongly believe this has far more to do with the demands of newspaper photography and news imagery than any shortcoming on the part of the photographers. Both snappers are well established image makers who have worked in West Africa for many years and undoubtedly know far more about the politics involved than either of these images lets on

....

The photographs coming out of Sudan and Ivory Coast at the moment mainly reflect instances of these known visual codes. This is partially because they are all news photographs, which are constrained by factors like time, budget, and logistics, and partially it's because this is what newspapers think that readers want. They are documents of the situation, verification of what's happening and when, rather than explanations or commentary.

Readers, what do you think? Do these types of photos do the trick when it comes to illustrating what's going on? Or do you want to see something else? Also, can anyone point to examples of images that illustrate politics, in Africa or elsewhere, more effectively than these do?