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New Positions in Contemporary African Photography


http://www.miamiartcentral.org/
New Positions in Contemporary African PhotographyNontsikelelo "Lolo" Veleko. Cindy and Nkuli, from Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder, Johannesburg, 2003-04. Courtesy the artist, International Center of Photography, New York.

July 4, 2006 found at art daily

african photography MIAMI, FLORIDA.- Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography is the first major U.S. exhibition in a decade to examine current photographic works from Africa. Organized by the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, and curated by Okwui Enwezor, this exhibition will be on view at Miami Art Central through August 27, 2006.

Photography has maintained a vital presence in African culture for over a century. But the recognition of African photographers and their unique visual language has come about only recently. When Western photography engages Africa, it seems often to evoke pathological images of disease, corruption, and poverty.

The global media almost never depict contemporary Africans in ordinary situations; images of crisis frequently eclipse other representations. In response to this partial view that overlooks the complexities of daily life across a vast continent of over fifty nations, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography forces a recognition of the contradictory and varied forms of photographic practice that are now arising across Africa.

This exhibition is in part devised to ask pertinent questions about the role of images in the public narratives of the African self and spaces within a changing global image ecology. It is not centered on a specific dispute, nor is its critique simplistic. The exhibition comprises discreet, modest, and forceful propositions on how to look at Africa, how artists work with the tool of photography to trace the arc of a different social reality that is both deliberately pictorial and narrative in approach and at the same time questions the historical dependence on narratives of anomie. African artists and photographers are looking at the unfolding drama of contemporary life and experience in Africa with a fine-tuned alertness. They are examining and analyzing the dizzying processes of spatial transformation, massive transition, and social adaptation that make up the varied realities of diverse groups: urban and rural, formal and informal communities. The artists’ penetrating insight provides the remarkable story of this project.

Reflecting the increasingly close relation of photography with other forms of experimental art in Africa, Snap Judgments will include not only photographic works but also multimedia installations and documentation of performance art