Women and Photography in Africa by Newbury, Darren; Rizzo, Lorena; Thomas, Kylie;

Short description:

This collection explores women’s multifaceted historical and contemporary involvement in photography in Africa.

Long description:

This collection explores women’s multifaceted historical and contemporary involvement in photography in Africa.

The book offers new ways of thinking about the history of photography, exploring through case studies the complex and historically specific articulations of gender and photography on the continent, and attending to the challenge and potential of contemporary feminist and postcolonial engagements with the medium. The volume is organised in thematic sections that present the lives and work of historically significant yet overlooked women photographers, as well as the work of acclaimed contemporary African women photographers such as Héla Ammar, Fatoumata Diabaté, Lebohang Kganye and Zanele Muholi. The book offers critical reflections on the politics of gendered knowledge production and the production of racialised and gendered identities and alternative and subaltern subjectivities. Several chapters illuminate how contemporary African women photographers, collectors and curators are engaging with colonial photographic archives to contest stereotypical forms of representation and produce powerful counter-histories.

Raising critical questions about race, gender and the history of photography, the collection provides a model for interdisciplinary feminist approaches for scholars and students of art history, visual studies and African history.

‘From the early committed generation of African female studio and press photographers to the contemporary generation of artists and curators, this long-overdue book is a stimulating invitation to further investigation into the rich and unique contributions of African women to the field of photography, and brings new perspectives to research.’

‘This book opens an unprecedented aperture on the diverse photographic practices of women in Africa – as authors, curators, custodians. The scintillating essays urge us to rethink the ways in which history, photography, and gender have inflected each other in the past, and how they might yield new possibilities for envisioning the future.’

Jean Comaroff, Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Table of Contents:

Preface ; 1. New lines of sight: Perspectives on women and photography in Africa ; PART I: WRITING WOMEN INTO PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORIES ; 2. A working woman’s eye: Anne Fischer and the South African photography of Weimar women in exile ; 3. Curating images, performing narratives: Women and photography in the Usakos old location ; 4. Women photographers in Angola and Mozambique (1909-1950): A history of an absence ; PART II: PHOTOGRAPHIC DIALOGUES WITH THE PAST ; 5. ‘Don’t touch’: Inheriting the Deo Gratias Photo Studio in Ghana – an interview with Kate Tamakloe-Vanderpuije; 6. Photographic representations of Tunisian women from the late 1940s to the present: A transgenerational palimpsest ; 7. Some collaborative readings of personal and cultural photographs from Southern Africa in the 1980s ; PART III: GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICE ; 8. ‘We own the night’: Youth and self-fashioning in Fatoumata Diabaté’s Sutigi ; 9. Photographs and memory making: Curating Kewpie: Daughter of District Six ; 10. Beyond the frame: Zanele’s Muholi’s queer visual activism ; PART IV: FEMINIST AND POSTCOLONIAL PRACTICES ; 11. Affective archives: Re-animating family photographs in the works of Lebohang Kganye and Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi ; 12. Visual currencies: Performative photography in South African contemporary art ; 13. Héla Ammar’s Tarz: An affective and imaginative memory upon dispossession