Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Abstract

The study of African photography is a continuous process of exploration and discovery. Originating in the symposium Photographs Beyond Ruins: Women and Photography in Africa, which took place at the University of London, the newly published Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges, edited by Darren Newbury, Lorena Rizzo, and Kylie Thomas, makes a significant contribution to our understanding of African women's photographic practices and provides an innovative way of reflecting on a historically specific articulation of gender and photography in Africa.The 1980s witnessed an enthusiasm for the study of photographic representations of women in Africa. Malek Alloula, for instance, analyzed the colonial representations of Algerian women on early twentieth century postcards, attempting “to subvert the stereotype that is so tenaciously attached to the bodies of women” (1986: 5). There is no doubt that Alloula's work was pioneering for its timely response to the visual absence of African women in photographic history; however, with a focus on female body under “colonialist gaze” (1986: 5), his study remained concerned with how African women had been seen instead of how they themselves see the world. In the past decades, African women photographers are attracting increasing worldwide attention with their remarkable achievements: Felicia Abban (1935-), for example, noted for her pioneering photographic practices in Ghana, won international recognition and reputation at the Venice Biennale in 2019; the works of twenty South African female photographers were exhibited first in the 2016 China Pingyao International Photography Festival; and academic monographs and periodicals appeared such as MFON, dedicated to spreading the collective voices of female photographers of African descent. Inspired by these outstanding practitioners, the editors state in the introductory essay that they intend to “shift their attention from the semiotic analysis and critique of dominant images of African women to shine a light on the multifaceted nature of women's photographic practices in Africa” (p. 4), a theme that is central to this book.The book is composed of thirteen essays selected from papers presented at the symposium, as well as additional invited chapters written by academics and practitioners in related fields. These essays outline the trajectories of women's photographic practices through case studies across the continent and provide new perspectives for reflecting on the visual representations of gender and history in Africa. The papers are divided into four sections in terms of different topics: Women into Photographic Histories; Photographic Dialogues with the Past; Gender and Sexuality in Photographic Practice; and Feminist and Postcolonial Practices. Additionally, as visual evidence, a number of images from personal or institutional collections are included. These photos, some as early as the 1930s, document the lives of ordinary people and witness many significant moments in Africa's history, creating memories and connecting the past and the future. The works of nonbinary photographers and new media artists extend our understanding of photographic practice by challenging the privileged domain of race and gender, presenting comprehensively the diversified tendency of contemporary photographic art.Essays in Part I, beginning with Jessica R. Williams's paper “A Working Woman's Eye: Anne Fisher and the South African Photography of Weimar Women in Exile,” address women's broader experiences as photographers, collectors, and curators in Africa in the early twentieth century. Anne Fischer (1914–1986) is considered one of “the top-ranking portrait photographers” (p. 23) in South Africa; however, little is known about her photographic practices and personal experience, not to mention her two Weimar women colleagues Else Hausmann (n.d.-1971) and Mittag-Fodor (1905–2005). Forced into exile by a White nationalist regime, the three Jewish women escaped from Hitler's Third Reich for Cape Town, and each began a career as photographer in her own way. Focusing primarily on Fischer, Williams's chapter explores her active participation in Cape Town's leftist activities and examines a series of photographs that she produced in Langa, one of South Africa's earliest racially segregated locations. With a faithful record of the local people, her documentary work subverts dominant racist discourses and racial stereotypes. Compared with Fischer's political progressivism, the other two women photographers are more conservative, but both of them challenge the male domain and gender norms as working mothers.Lorena Rizzo's chapter, “Curating Images, Performing Narratives: Women and Photography in the Usakos Old Location,” promotes our understanding of photographic practices through the discussion of the remarkable work of collecting, preserving, and curating done by four local women in Usakos, a small town in central Namibia. Reviewing the historical period between the 1920s and 1960s, during which Usakos was subjected residential segregation and apartheid urban planning, this paper demonstrates that women's preserving and curatorial work is not only “an aesthetic and cultural practice that helps mitigate traumatic experiences of segregation and apartheid” (p. 60) but, more meaningfully, participates in the reconstruction of historical narration in Namibia. From the historical perspective as well, the paper “Women Photographers in Angola and Mozambique (1909–1950): A History of an Absence” by Inês Vieira Gomes investigates how some White women, with privilege and power, were able to travel and produce photographs in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. Their photographic practices, according to the author, contributed greatly to reshaping visual imaginary of the Portuguese colonies; however, a “structural invisibility” of women's photography still exists in the present. In particular, Black female photographers in many colonial countries remain in the shadow of African history, which should draw more academic attention.As the title of Part II, “Photographic Dialogues with the Past,” suggests, the first paper in this section is an interview conducted by Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann with Kate Tamakloe-Vanderpuije, a Ghanaian photo studio manager who has devoted herself to “telling the Ghanaian story” by way of family photographic archival collections. Inheriting her family photographic business, Tamakloe-Vanderpuije has been working on the collection and preservation of photographs, as well as studying the rich “material heritage” of great value. The interview begins with Tamakloe-Vanderpuije telling her family stories, then extends to an in-depth discussion of her collections, her approach to photographic archive collections, and some pressing issues concerning with private and family collections in Ghana today. Throughout the interview, Tamakloe-Vanderpuije shares her personal experiences, understanding, and response to the use, study, and preservation of her photographic archives. Her “heritage practice,” as the interviewer concludes, is “much more than the historical or aesthetic presentation of images from the colonial period” (p. 84); rather, she provides a tangible access of interpreting Ghanaian history through visual representations. In “Photographic Representations of Tunisian Women from the Late 1940s to the Present,” the intergenerational dialogue continues with Dora Carpenter-Latiri revisiting the photographic legacies left by her father Moktar Latiri, one of the main contributors to the infrastructure of postindependence Tunisia. In exploring her father's private family albums, Carpenter-Latiri compares different photographic representations of Tunisian women at important historical moments and examines the changing status of women in Tunisia over the past decades, a turbulent period with the succession of presidential power from Habib Bourguiba to Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. With an emphasis on the complex conflicts and negotiations of gender equality and religious identity, modernity and tradition, the chapter expresses concern about the process of feminism as well as the present situation of women in Tunisia, a country still confronted with political instability and divisions. As part of a collaborative project of photography sharing, the photo essay “Some Collaborative Readings of Personal and Cultural Photographs from Southern Arica in the 1980s” by Biddy Partridge, a former editor from South Africa, describes her conversation with two collaborators, Breeze Yoko and Ntsiki Anderson. Their discussion, which focuses on Biddy's photographic works of Jimmy Cliff and Winston Mankunku Ngozi, reflects on the ways that gender and racial injustice are “haunted” in almost all the photographs of South Africa under apartheid.Part III comprises three essays that address gender and sexuality in photographic practice. In “Youth and Self-fashioning in Fatoumata Diabaté's Sutigi,” Tina Barouti compares Malian female photographer Fatoumata Diabaté's series Sutigi—À nous la nuit with the work of her predecessor Malick Sidibé (1936–2016) in terms of subject matter and style. By studying three important themes— youth, the night, and self-fashioning—in Sutigi, the paper argues that Diabaté, as the representative of younger generation of photographers in Mali, inherits the legacy left behind by the great studio portraitists of the twentieth century and engages herself in a riveting dialogue with those predecessors in mutual attention to the body, beauty, and youth culture. In “Photographs and Memory Making: Curating Kewpie: Daughter of District Six,” Tina Smith and Jenny Marsden, two curators of the photographic exhibition Kewpie: Daughter of District Six, provide a detailed exposition of their curational work as well as reflection on queer culture in the context of the forced removals period in South Africa during apartheid. The paper first introduces the context, including a short biography of Kewpie and an overview of her photographic collection, then investigates how Kewpie's photographic archive was used as a memory object to make the forgotten history of District Six accessible. Including more than 700 photographic prints, the Kewpie Photographic Collection, in the curators’ view, is not merely a way to memorialize this important figure of queer culture, but also “a manifestation of collective loss, pain, and struggle” (p. 188). Moreover, the collection provides a space for visitors to “reflect on contemporary LGBTQI+ activism and participate in the act of remembrance as a form of solidarity that unites against any form of inequality, discriminatory politics and bigotry”(p. 188). “Beyond the Frame: Zanele Muholi's Queer Visual Activism” by Tessa Lewin looks at the work of acclaimed Black queer photographer Zanele Muholi. As one of the most prominent visual activists in postapartheid South Africa, Muholi focuses on Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people living there and creates work that “documents and makes visible Black lesbian communities in South Africa” (p. 190). Based on a historical retrospection of visual activism and LGBTQ+ struggles in South Africa, the paper reflects on the strong connections between artists and activist organizations during the apartheid period, arguing that visual activism is located not only in the image but also in the social structures or communities created through artistic practice. Therefore, Muholi's visual activism, as presented in their photographic project Faces and Phases, is far beyond the work of “semantic and epistemological interventions … [it is] the mobilization of the visual image to provoke, support and sustain campaigning for social and political change” (p. 193).It is entirely appropriate to conclude this book with the fourth section: Feminist and Postcolonial Practices. Marietta Kesting's paper concentrates on the work of South African artists Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi and Lebohang Kganye, who creatively animate still photographs from family photo albums and document the “intertwined history” of African migration and diaspora. Nkosi's animated film The Beginning of Stories (2017), for instance, by redrawing photographs primarily from her family's archive, artfully interweaves official historical narration with personal history through the adaption of a Zulu tale of homecoming; Kganye's photo-film Ke Sale Teng (2017), on the other hand, places the cut-out parts of photographs from her family photo albums in minimalistic theater setting, attempting to build directly affective connection between generations by recalling haunted memories from the past. Taking family photo albums as source materials, the works of both Nkosi and Kganye seek to reconfigure the established history narrated exclusively by “great men” from the Western world and to retell the missing and invisible African history of diaspora in the United States. The production and dissemination of art photography in the cultural production market is the main concern of Nomusa Makhubu's “Visual Currencies: Performative Photography in South African Contemporary Art.” Adopting the idea of visual currency and the conceptual language of recurrence, repetition, circulation, and exchange, Makhubu examines the performative work of Tracey Rose, Athi Patra Ruga, Kudzanai Chiurai, Thania Petersen, and Lebohang Kganye, clarifying that photographs, like currencies, “circulate and disseminate on the basis of the shared belief in its symbolic and volatile value”(p. 229); therefore, how to avoid the circulation of apartheid images and prevent the consumption of the Black body is still a big challenge for contemporary new media artists in their creative artwork. Anna Rocca's “Héla Ammar's TARZ: An Affective and Imaginative Memory upon Dispossession” refines our understanding of the complexities of photographic practice through a gendered interpretation of the installation Tarz (2014) produced by Héla Ammar, a visual artist, jurist, and feminist in Tunis. Taking its name from the Arabic word for “embroidery,” Tarz is a photographic representation of the ancient handiwork symbolizing feminine domesticity and laborious work. From a feminist approach, the chapter emphasizes the important role that female art plays in counteracting destruction by means of care, affection, and the ability to promote dialogue with something or someone who is distinct from us. As a result of Ammar's reflection on the function of art, archives, and memory in postrevolutionary Tunisia, Tarz opens up an interpretive space of rethinking profound connotations of women's ordinary acts and offers a new conception of photographic practice in Africa.Abounding with insightful ideas and valuable historical evidence, this book provides a comprehensive overview of women's diverse contemporary and past engagements with photography in Africa, bringing the works of African women photographers, curators, and custodians out of the shadows to be increasingly acknowledged. Furthermore, in response to the turn of “intersectionality studies” of feminism and contemporary arts, this volume provides more than a plain discussion of aesthetic value of photography; instead, it provokes essential dialogues about representation, sexuality, gender, and identity with profound reflection. As an innovative work of interdisciplinary research, this long-overdue book enriches the understanding of African women's photographic practices and opens up new ways of exploration for both photographic artists and scholars.