le regard interieur vs. le regard exterieur

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Excerpt #2 /
I want us to direct attention to the multiple ways of representing African life and space, to enunciate forms of visual practice that open us up to the facts that we not only share the same space but also the same time. In other words, I am speaking about visual practices that recognize coevalness, that reach beyond the stock images that have endured until now as the iconography of the “abandoned” continent.

In light of this exhibition inquiry, how might the photographic apparatus — that is, any digital or mechanical, duplicating instrument — engage the continent's vast and complex visual world without resorting to the clichéd metaphors of the media's horror index? This inquiry is as much about photography as it is about representation. Wherever and whenever photography engages Africa, it invents a pathology of spectrality and transience. Each pathology in turn invents its own panacea: pity, infantilization, paternalism, or the reanimation of the grotesque. It could be said that photography's greatest accomplishment is the vast encyclopedia of cures that have followed each of its forays into the continent. Whether we are witnessing visual splendor or astounding civil disorder, Live Aid and other charity events will always be on the near horizon to intercede. This exhibition is not about any of that. It is not about disorder. Nor is it about the collapse of civility, nor genocidal wars. It is not a recapitulation of pathologies.

/ 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 images belongs to the movies hunger and waltz with bashir. they have been taken from the presskits for these movies. the bookcover of johnny mad dog has been found in a blog about bookcover design.

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