Rendition(s)

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Excerpt #1 /
From the earliest recorded history of the photographic encounter, Africa has made for a fascinating and elusive subject, at once strange, intoxicating, carnal, primitive, wild, luminous. At first the desire to record the exotic, mysterious beauty of the black continent may have provided the incentive to invent a kind of sport in which a hunterlike figure wielding congeries of instruments stalks a gamelike subject — suspended between an abyss of indeterminacy and plenitude — waiting to be literally captured. This early phase of the photographic sport (dominated by ethnographers, prospectors, speculators, prosecutors of the colonial enterprise) yielded a huge archive of visual tropes about Africa that have persisted in the popular imagination. Today, hunter and game remain more or less the same, except that the result has become not only outlandish but also has acquired a quality of myth impossible to dislodge from the real. In this latter phase, Africa has been transformed into a wasteland of the bizarre and outrageous.

No other cultural landscape has had a more problematic association with the photographic medium: its apparatus, various industries, orders of knowledge, and hierarchies of power. As already mentioned, the act of photographing Africa has often been bound up with a certain conflict of vision: between how Africans see their world and how others see that world. In a way, this is a clash of lenses, a struggle to locate and represent Africa by two committed but disparate sensibilities — one intensely absorbed in its social and cultural world, the other passing through it, fleetingly, on one assignment or another. The latter sensibility has come to represent specters that haunt Africa. It is constituted around an accumulation of myths. This photographic sensibility works on assumptions based not so much on what it sees but on a preordained, fragmented, and internalized view of the world Africans seem to occupy. This view feeds a phantom essence and releases it as a readymade canon of fascination and repulsion. The image of Africa that I am describing, and which has overwhelmed every other pictorial value, has been produced as much from processes of estrangement as from positions of engagement.

/ By Okwui Enwezor, ICP Adjunct Curator. The text belongs to the catalogue for the exhibition Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography and has been taken from icp.org, the image belongs to the movie la noche de los girasoles and is taken from the presskit for that movie.

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