Alexandre Pomar

João Francisco na 111, 2018

 

Transcrevo um mail do João Francisco sobre a exposição Mille-fleurs que hoje (10 de Novembro) chega ao fim.

"Eu não sei se posso dizer que o tema dos refugiados e dos naufrágios seja o principal ou o único da exposição [ não, não é o único, talvez não seja o principal, mas é aquele que mais intensamente atinge o observador, logo no espaço inicial da exposição, quando se começa a identificar a presença dos migrantes e dos mortos do Mediterrâneo; não é rápida essa identificação, ela é elidida pelo autor e talvez a evitemos, porque a arte não trata dessas coisas... Só mais tarde, ao tentar escrever sobre a exposição, o assunto se me tornou evidente, irrecusável.] O ponto de partida foram de facto as tapeçarias mille-fleurs, que realmente admiro e que me intrigam. A vontade de fazer algo a partir delas era já antiga. E o painel grande com as flores e os animais mortos foi o que inicialmente surgiu dessa referência (e que nesse sentido talvez se possa dizer que a ela mais esteja preso).

As outras pinturas da exposição surgiram autónomas a esta peça maior mas mantendo, para mim, esta procedência:

- por um lado na série mille-fleurs (as colagens sobre os desenhos de bordados reutilizados) onde se joga com a ideia de "cartão", ou seja, de algo que está a meio caminho entre a ideia e um outro objecto final a realizar, e onde sigo mais ou menos o aparato das tapeçarias referidas: um motivo central rodeado de elementos pequenos, mais ou menos parecidos, no que vejo também uma ironia com a repetição tão cara ao minimalismo. Interessou-me explorar a relação entre o que eu pintei e os elementos já existentes nas páginas encontradas, essa conversa entre o novo e o antigo, a passagem do tempo também, no fundo. Tudo isto tendo em conta a ironia e o anacronismo que consiste em falar hoje de uma forma de arte completamente morta e especifica como é a da tapeçaria. (que acresce também ao facto de ser já eu um pintor de "naturezas mortas" , um género "menor");

- e por outro nas pinturas a acrílico mais pequenas ("as paisagens"), que exploram temas que poderiam também ser motivos para tapeçarias (substituindo-se às cenas épicas de batalhas, mitologias, paisagens mais ou menos exóticas).

Tendo dito isto, o tema dos refugiados e dos naufrágios tornou-se bastante importante, aparecendo várias vezes, bem como pela primeira vez a inclusão de corpos, ou fragmentos deles (quase sempre o meu) , que interagem com os objectos estáticos da natureza morta, ou que parecem fazer um comentário à "acção".

É também como diz, senti que era um assunto delicado e melindroso, em relação ao qual tive muitas dúvidas durante o processo - se devia ou podia ser explorado - , e que achei melhor não nomear (embora o tenha feito indirectamente nos títulos: " o náufrago", "figura a observar um naufrágio", "no mediterrâneo", "sob as ondas").

Agrada-me também, como lhe disse, esse desafio de deixar, dando algumas pistas, que o espectador entre no jogo, em vez de explicar e dissecar por completo as imagens (prefiro que elas interpelem o espectador, que criem um diálogo). Interessa-me no fundo que as imagens vivam por si e sejam eficazes, e que não sejam meras ilustrações de uma ideia inicial ou literária. E daí as pinturas evocarem o drama dos naufrágios sem reproduzirem ou partirem das imagens deles com que somos regularmente confrontados (a construção no atelier destas amálgamas de corpos e ondas, em substituição dos reais, acaba por não me parecer menos trágica e inquietante). São no fundo coisas muito fora de moda e nada contemporâneas: símbolos, alegorias. Um pouco como as estátuas dos "duplos" do antigo Egipto.

Mais do que o drama específico no Mediterrâneo talvez seja a morte, e o tempo, um dos fios condutores da exposição. Ela aparece em algumas das paisagens (as paisagens onde surgem caveiras aludem às fantásticas imagens, maioritariamente medievais/renascentistas, do juízo final, onde o inferno é mostrado muitas vezes como um monstro de enorme boca aberta por onde entram as pobres almas condenadas....); no "Lázaro", que estando morto volta à vida; nas velas, acesas ou apagadas; nas flores, frescas ou murchas, reais ou artificiais; no Mársias, esfolado vivo como castigo; no próprio painel "mille-fleurs", no diálogo entre os animais mortos e as flores aparentemente vivas (ainda, mas isso é um jogo antigo da pintura de naturezas-mortas....).

Sem título - mille-fleurs (pinceladas numa paisagem/ Lázaro / as pinceladas flutuantes / debaixo das ondas), 2018

 

E antes leia-se na galeria a "folha de sala" escrita pelo João Francisco:

mille-fleurs
O assunto que talvez possa agregar o conjunto de pinturas recentes que aqui se apresentam é o da paisagem. Apesar de serem assumidamente naturezas-mortas, na medida em que consistem em objectos reais, dispostos e observados, estas imagens olham para o exterior, lá para fora. Falam de montanhas e desertos, do mar e de florestas, de ruínas, de jardins. Olham também através deles para o interior (não serão as paisagens aí ainda mais perigosas e sombrias?).

O título da exposição e muitas das peças apresentadas partem de um tema que importa explicar: mille-fleurs ou mil flores. É o termo utilizado para agrupar um conjunto de tapeçarias produzidas no norte da França e na Flandres sensivelmente entre o final da Idade Média e o início do Renascimento. O que as torna num grupo específico é o uso que fazem, de forma
repetitiva e obsessiva, da representação de flores e plantas que, rodeando por completo os elementos em destaque (que podem ir de damas com unicórnios a caçadores, personagens galantes ou mitológicas), criam um espaço mais mítico que natural, mais caracterizado por uma exuberância decorativa que pela sugestão de uma paisagem real onde as figuras se inserem. Estas representações de flora, a que muitas vezes é também adicionada a presença de pequenos animais, são no entanto extremamente fiéis: são reconhecíveis com facilidade as espécies de planta selvagens e de cultivo doméstico, o que anuncia a cultura humanista e científica do Renascimento.

Realizado ao longo de vários meses o vasto conjunto de pequenas pinturas mille-fleurs pode ser entendido simultaneamente como memória desse tempo que passa, e como retrato de um espaço específico, de um jardim, registando e mostrando o que lá cresceu e morreu. Assimilando a estrutura formal das referidas tapeçarias em que as plantas se encadeiam de forma regular criando como que uma grelha, esta peça é uma afirmação do fascínio que a natureza, por mais remota ou doméstica, real ou mítica que seja, continua a realizar.
A descoberta fortuita de um conjunto numeroso de esquissos utilizados para bordar despoletou outro conjunto de peças: nessa memória ou fantasma dos desenhos que foram passados para um outro suporte têxtil, reconheci a dos “cartões” das tapeçarias, modelos em tamanho real do que iria ser tecido e que, devido à constante e violenta utilização, raramente sobreviveram (e de que os cartões para os Actos dos apóstolos de Rafael são uma notável excepção). Criando um fundo relativamente homogéneo a colagem destes desenhos, todos referentes com graus diversos de realismo e estilização a plantas, permitiu a construção de um campo onde a pintura acontece. É neste jogo entre o que se oculta e o que permanece visível que estas páginas encontram sentido.
Falando das paisagens em si talvez as vejamos como pessimistas e escuras. Por vezes inquietantes e inóspitas. Possivelmente também irónicas ou ridículas. Talvez tenham de ser assim. Fazendo minhas as palavras de Bernard: (...) e saí para a rua sozinho, de impermeável vestido, e as montanhas eternas fizeram-me sentir enjoado e nada sublime (Virginia Woolf, As Ondas).

Se o João Francisco fosse um candidato a artista minimal-conceptual diria, ele ou algum curador por ele, que "reflecte sobre"... Mas ele não diz, nem sugere, pelo contrário, entrega-nos à nossa eventual vontade de atenção / interpretação ou à nossa cegueira. Quem pensará que uma obra de arte aborda (trata de..., tem por tema) assuntos sérios, e não é só a apropriação indiferente de uma imagem mediática ou um 'mero' exercício auto-referencial, dedicado à ideia de arte e à tradição da sucessão de formas (novas?), referido à 'soberania' da arte e ao 'Mundo da Arte' (como se lê com maíuscula e aparente convicção à entrada do ex-CAM, actual Museu Gulbenkian - "Anos 2000", dizem eles).

O João Francisco não explica sobre (o) que 'reflecte'; pelo contrário, vai apontando para outras pistas, que teremos de seguir antes e depois de descobrirmos o assunto mais forte das suas obras recentes.

 

Ele não refere os retratos e auto-retratos que lá estão; não sinaliza as 'vanitas' (variedade de naturezas-mortas que nos confrontam com a morte); não fala de pintura de história, que já não se povoa de mitologias e realezas mas se enfrenta ao quotidiano, à política, à história em que vivemos.

Alguém terá já tratado em pintura os dramas dos migrantes e refugiados africanos que se afundam no Mediterrâneo? É o que faz o João Francisco. E é muito forte.

 

Sem título - nas ondas / um náufrago / a torrente, 2008

 

Dez anos depois da 1ª exposição, já na 111, o João Francisco conserva algumas características centrais do seu trabalho: a natureza-morta, pintura e desenho de observação diante de modelos/paisagens que constrói, a partir de uma prática e recolector - coleccionador. E essa prática da natureza-morta é também comentário ou releitura da história da arte, com extensão às referências literárias. É uma produção erudita mas que se vê (também) como prática brincada, às vezes próxima da banda desenhada pelo grafismo das formas e perspectivas.

Aos actuais desastres e naufrágios mediterrânicos podem associar-se as anteriores paisagens marítimas de J.F. que já eram trágico-marítimas ("Atlântida" e "Tempestade em Trouville - para E. Boudin", ambos de 2008) e também, de outro modo, as Ondas e Objectos flutuantes de uma exposição de 2014, e ainda a instalação "Sem título - trazido pelo mar para Joseph Cornell", de 2005/2012. Tudo se prolonga e reactualiza com novas referências e circunstâncias. Entretanto - mutação muito significativa, que deixa abertos novos passos -, a observação pode ser também imaginação, a natureza-morta acolhe o retrato do natural, usando o espelho e já não a imagem prévia.

 

 

 

"Sem título - Tempestade em Trouville - para E. Boudin", 2008, óleo sobre tela, 160 x 180 cm.

 

 

Maio de 68 e os Anos Pop de Júlio Pomar

 

A coincidência entre a actual mostra do Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar ("O que pode a arte?"), programada a pretexto de Maio 1968, e a recente exposição 'Pós-Pop...' na Fundação Gulbenkian (em que não esteve representado) é uma oportunidade favorável para identificar os Anos Pop de Júlio Pomar, tema ausente dos ensaios sobre a sua obra. Um assunto que foi invisível no seu tempo próprio, e depois, até agora, já que as várias séries principais - em especial os Rugby, Mai 68 (CRS SS) e Banhos Turcos segundo Ingres, com continuidade em variações sobre outros quadros históricos e em retratos, até 1976 - nunca se mostraram em galeria ou em catálogo próprio, em Paris ou em Lisboa, e quase não foram expostas depois (*1). Um tema rasurado. Mas um tema necessário para entender a sequência das "fases" do pintor, e em especial a viragem decisiva do final dos anos 60.

Pode-se começar por considerar as telas que foram dedicadas aos Beatles, datadas de 1965-66 (reproduzidas no Catálogo Raisonné) e bem escolhidas no AMJP como representativas do "ar do tempo". Existem  duas telas intituladas The Beatles (I e II) que foram pintadas em Lisboa (*2) e expostas numa individual realizada em 1966 na SNBA, estando uma delas incluída na actual exposição e a outra nunca localizada; existiu pelo menos mais uma terceira nunca exposta até agora (*3), de produção posterior e mais rápida, mais "experimental" ou mais "solta" e talvez por isso indicativa da procura de novas orientações. Note-se, entretanto, que subsistiram registos fotográficos de mais quatro telas sobre os Beatles que terão sido destruídas pelo artista, certamente nos finais de 1966, num grande momento de crise e reconsideração da sua obra (vejam-se as fotos publicadas num dos catálogos "Void*" volume III, ed. AMJP, 2017 ). 

 

The Beatles I, 1965 / The Beatles III, 1966 / Catálogo da exp. de 1966 na SNBA

A exposição de 1966 na SNBA (Fev.-Mar.), foi a primeira mostra realizada em Lisboa depois de o artista se ter instalado em Paris em 1963, e aí surgiram em maior número as telas sobre dois dos novos temas parisienses, os "Metro" e as corridas de cavalos ("Courses"), ao lado de uma obra única sobre o Catch (luta livre francesa), de duas variações sobre uma pintura de Uccello e dos  referidos dois quadros intitulados The Beatles I e II.  Importará saber que a 1ª digressão mundial do grupo se iniciara em 1964 e contou com uma série de 20 noites no Olympia de Paris, a encerrar um programa de "music hall" com a participação de outros músicos.

Esses dois quadros expostos na SNBA foram reproduzidos em 1966 nas páginas do Século Ilustrado e da Flama, embora sem especial destaque, e a insólita aparição do grupo Pop não terá sido abordada pela crítica nem comentada depois. Poderiam ter sido objecto de estranheza, face à obra e aos interesses conhecidos do artista, mas passaram em silêncio (*4). De facto, ao contrário de todos os outros espectáculos representados por JP (cenas de trabalho, tauromaquias, corridas de cavalos, o catch, a par de inúmeros desenhos de observação de cenas e objectos variados), a série Beatles será a 1ª que o pintor aborda sem ter sido um espectador directo - mesmo que desde o início, desde o Gadanheiro, de 1945, usasse a fotografia como auxiliar da memória. A partir dos Beatles ele trabalha sobre imagens fotográficas encontradas na imprensa de cenas e situações (de espectáculos visuais)  a que não assistiu directamente. Imagens mediáticas, o que é um segundo ponto de contacto com a Pop, mesmo que não pratique a transferência directa ou a colagem, nem a apropriação de imagens ready-made. 

Uma referência a Rauschenberg, colocado a par de Velazquez, que aparece na entrevista de Adriano de Carvalho publicada em 1966 no Século Ilustrado, poderia ter sido também motivo de atenção crítica. Rauschenberg fora exposto por duas vezes em 1964 pela Galeria Ileana Sonnabend em Paris (*5) e  premiado nesse ano na bienal de Veneza - a repercussão da sua obra era então imensa, mas recebida com hostilidade em França, desalojada do seu lugar central.

Mas já numa carta pessoal de Outubro de 1965, enviada de Paris, JP referia bem explicitamente o seu interesse pela Pop anglo-saxónica: Sobre uma visita à Bienal dos Jovens (será certamente o Salon de la Jeune Peinture) destaca o interesse das "litografias de Allen Jones, bem como de uma maneira geral toda a secção inglesa", e também da representação alemã, apenas. Refere também a exposição 'Figuração Narrativa' (Galerie Greuze) "com algumas coisas boas: um Rauschenberg, o primeiro Oldenburg a interessar-me, Kitaj, Peter Phillips e um bom Arnal" (só François Arnal é francês, vindo da abstracção lírica e informal). Na mesma carta fala do interesse pelos filmes dos Beatles: com a estreia de Help! descobriu A Hard Day's Night, de 1964, ambos de Richard Lester: "Vi o novo filme dos Beatles e ao mesmo tempo o primeiro. São do bom cinema, e um reatar da grande linha do cómico" . Mas à data já deixara em Lisboa os dois quadros para a exposição de 1966 na SNBA.

Em 1967 (2 Março), num artigo-entrevista de Mário Dionísio, publicado no Diário de Lisboa, Pomar refere a sua "descoberta da América" e dedica ao artista norte-americano, habitualmente classificado como “proto-pop", um comentário alargado que traduz o grande interesse pela ruptura que a sua obra veio trazer. A este respeito importa ter em atenção que a apresentação da Pop norte-americana em Paris é particularmente tardia, para além de ter sido em grande parte rejeitada, num contexto focado na defesa dos "Novos Realistas" de Pierre Restany e depois das "Novas Figurações" de Gérald Gassiot-Talabot. A descoberta da Pop americana ocorre no Salon de Mai de 1964 e em "Art USA Now" no Museu de Arte Moderna da Cidade de Paris. (Ver 'Paris-New York', Centre Pompidou 1977).

Transcrevo o parágrafo desse diálogo: " 'Em pintura, a descoberta da América foi decisiva' (JP)... A 'pop', de que sorri, que falhou em Paris, não o inquieta muito. E gosta de Rauschenberg? (M.D.) 'Sim. É a integração da imagem num novo conceito plástico. Quando a arte abstracta  se preocupa com não distinguir o céu da terra, ele, partindo dos elementos mais corriqueiros, imagens gastas, batidas, consegue conferir um valor plástico áquilo que os nossos olhos anteriormente não viam. Uma roda, um movimento, funcionam da mesma maneira que um azul cobalto. Uma refusão total do mecanismo da visão' (JP)"

Vêm a seguir (primavera-verão de 1967, na praia da Manta Rota, Algarve) as assemblages de materiais encontrados, associações imprevistas e livres de fragmentos de objectos gastos ou usados pelo tempo, peças sem leitura figurativa, sem precedentes na sua obra, se não consideramos como tal as esculturas de ferros soldados do início da década. A ligação a Rauschenberg é possível, sem ser imediata ou directa.

Estava a chegar a série sobre o Rugby, trabalhada também a partir de fotografias, tal como os Maios de 1968. Depois do impasse (im)produtivo que justificou a destruição de dezenas de telas (“Void*” volume III, 2017), JP entrava num novo ciclo de criação, em que a admiração por Rauschenberg e o contacto com a pintura Pop anglo-saxónica terão exercido um papel decisivo, mesmo se não mimeticamente explícito: a dispersão-associação de fragmentos sobre a tela, num fundo liso e não perspético; a substituição da pincelada livre pelo recorte nítido das formas. Depois da "desfiguração" anterior, em diálogo pessoal com os abstraccionismos gestuais (Saura, Mathieu, etc), a figura ganhava outras condições de possibilidade numa diferente abordagem e construção, como representação de (ou a partir de) uma representação (fotográfica). Depois de a figura se ter dissolvido ou desvanecido sem remédio nos quadros destruídos, que eram "abstracções" falhadas.

Rugby's e Maios sucedem-se e coincidem no tempo, e surge logo a nova série dos Banhos Turcos segundo Ingres - onde a relação com Matisse se irá tornar eficaz. Numa carta de Maio ou Junho de 1970, diz: "A retrospectiva do Matisse veio-me a calhar e tem-me dado material de trabalho. Veio na altura certa". É conhecido o interesse dos pintores da Pop por Matisse, nomeadamente de Warhol (logo numa declaração de 1956) e de Wesselmann e Lichtenstein, que o citam com frequência.

Nos últimos Maios (agora expostos) aparecem formas recortadas que já estão nos Banhos Turcos. Seguem-se os retratos de Almada e Viana, ou de mulheres, e as variações sobre outros clássicos, Courbet, Van Eyck, Chardin. É ainda uma relação com a Pop, e com o cartaz. Em todo este período a referência ou relação nunca se estabelece com as "Mythologies Quotidiennes" e a "Figuration Narrative" francesas.

Aconteceu por variadas razões, especialmente por o artista preferir pintar a expor, que as séries Rugby e Maio não tiveram a oportunidade de exposições individuais, nem em Paris nem em Lisboa, sendo imediatamente absorvidas pelo mercado português, e quase totalmente por  Jorge de Brito - mas na retrospectiva de 1978 na Gulbenkian as obras da colecção Brito estavam inacessíveis e o enfoque principal estava já na série das colagens eróticas.

Em 1971, um Banho Turco (hoje na Colecção Manuel de Brito) foi exposto no Louvre numa mostra internacional sobre Ingres e as suas variações, mas a individual seguinte, 1973 na galeria 111, já não mostrou as séries Rugby e Maio, centrando-se nos novos retratos. Não era fácil acompanhar a sequência da obra de JP. Cada mutação desfocava a série anterior

A anterior Galerie Lacloche (onde expôs em 1964 e 65) passara a dedicar-se aos múltiplos, objectos e mobiliário de artistas mais ou menos Pop; a galeria seguinte, a Galerie Bellechasse, começou a expor JP apenas em 1979. Por isso os Maios de 1968 e os Rugbys coincidentes têm agora a 1ª oportunidade de serem vistos em extensão, embora a oportunidade se tenha bastante diluído nas condições da exposição colectiva, do seu título e do cartaz.

Maio de 1968, e a tensão política dos anos anteriores, tiveram uma expressão forte na arte desse tempo: foram anos de abandono da pintura em favor do cartaz, do múltiplo, da instalação e da acção, e em geral da contestação das disciplinas e estratégias expositivas habituais, condenadas como burguesas, consumistas, conservadoras. A relação de Júlio Pomar com Maio de 1968 é política, mas é também especialmente pessoal e estilística, vivida sob a aproximação à Pop britânica e norte-americana, que era menosprezada em Paris. Sendo obras políticas, pinturas sobre a história desse tempo, os Maios acompanham os Rugb's e os Banhos Turcos, e devem ser vistos nesse contexto que é em primeiro lugar formal ao mesmo tempo que é político. A mudança não é motivada por Maio de 68 e não determina o retorno a um tempo de activismo artístico de sentido político...

(versão revista)

Retrato de Fátima, 1968

Rugby, 1968

Mêlée (Rugby), 1968, Col. Museu Gulbenkian (não cedido para a exp. do Atelier-Museu)

Maio 68

Banho Turco, d'après Ingres

Notas a acrescentar: ...

*5 Na Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris: Rauschenberg, May 14–30, 1964. E "Untitled 1953-1954 and Thirty-Four Dante Drawings", Dec. 1964-Jan 1965.

 

Sobre o «Inquérito ao Retrato Português» no MNAA. Notas

 (15 Julho, Facebook. 4)  "El retrato español (del Greco a Picasso)", Museo del Prado, 2004-2005, catálogo.

A diferença de escala é arrasadora, a escala do país, da cidade, do museu, da galeria de artistas (com Zurbarán, Velázquez, Goya, etc), o que deveria ter justificado uma iniciativa prudente e séria. É certo que o título por extenso é algo cauteloso - "Do tirar polo natural: Inquérito ao Retrato Português" - mas a palavra Inquérito não basta para informar da modesta escala do projecto. Modesta e precária, modesta e aleatória, amadora, brincada, em muitas das escolhas e em opções de montagem. Convém carregar nas palavras: esta é uma exposição temporária que falha nos seus possíveis propósitos e que, nitidamente, falha em relação à qualidade habitual das mostras que o MNAA tem apresentado. Os comissários falharam, mas a mostra tem sido poupada (...) pela imprensa que existe, onde a crítica já não cabe.

Sim, vieram de fora do Museu, do Porto, de Aveiro, do Funchal, e de fora do país algumas obras, mas juntaram-se-lhe muitas outras de imprópria qualidade comparativa, ao mesmo tempo que, quanto à produção contemporânea, se desconsideraram artistas que na área do retrato têm nas décadas mais recentes o lugar mais destacável - aponto a pintora Graça Morais e o fotógrafo José M. Rodrigues. E o Ipad de Nuno Viegas em vez dos super8 de Ângelo ou Calhau, que envelheceram irremediavelmente, academicamente. Não é por acaso ou por falta de espaço - é porque a abertura ao chamado "contemporâneo" que aqui se quis exibir significa a prática da exclusão e da arbitrariedade.

Inclui o título da exposição o título de uma obra de Francisco de Holanda, autor nacional que não teve projecção externa, e a teve escassa em português, mas tratou-se aqui só de homenagear, sem responsabilidade nem consequências - «retomando, como homenagem, o título de um diálogo sobre a pintura retratística», diz o desdobrável. O que nele está em questão, porém, não é o retrato em geral, como género, mas o retrato praticado perante o modelo, tirado do natural, ou seja, a pintura de observação, «sur le motif», dirá Cézanne, «painting from life», dito em inglês.
Importava ao humanista que foi Francisco de Holanda a apologia do retrato do natural, que o Renascimento recuperou, e é a procura das respectivas regras que o ocupa, fundadas na presença do retratado diante do pintor, embora também ambiguamente abra espaço à idealização do modelo, à "fantasia" vista pelos olhos "invisíveis", na via do neoplatonismo que corresponde já ao entendimento de Miguel Ângelo.

Invocar Francisco de Holanda implicaria pensar a presença viva do modelo, a semelhança captada pela mão que é guiada (electrizada, dizia Avigdor Arikha) pela verdade observada, prática rara ao longo da história da arte, distinguindo a pintura do natural do retrato de imaginação, da produção de imagens. Distinguindo a melhor pintura. Poderíamos, em especial, ter visto como o trabalho com modelos mudou a pintura de Paula Rego (a estampa da "mulher cão" é insuficiente para isso). Mas não, perdeu-se a oportunidade, o retrato português não se safa.

 

 

(11 Julho. 2) Já voltei ao MNAA mas não consigo perceber este percurso, logo à entrada da exposição. A tela suja da Helena Almeida (cinema?); as 6 obras 6 da Lourdes Castro (sombras projectadas, silhuetas) com o recorte da Ana Vieira; os monstros pendurados do tecto, depois do belíssimo retrato de Henrique Franco trazido do Funchal ("Blusa Azul", cf. o quadro homónimo de Sousa Lopes); em frente, a apresentação amalgamada de algumas importantes pinturas.

 

(Henrique Franco, "Blusa Azul", uma obra trazida do Museu Henrique e FranciscoFranco, Funchal.)

   

(11 Julho. 3) Aqui sacrificam-se as obras ao efeito de montagem e ao desacerto das tabelas. As fotos de Carlos Relvas e Fernando Lemos - depois da notável prova vintage de João Cutileiro, o retrato da mãe, de 1964 - aparecem sem a indicação de que se trata de provas de impressão recente (o que é grave num museu que se quer sério - no caso do Relvas, que fica assim muito mal representado; podiam ter consultado o catálogo da exp. que o próprio MNAA lhe dedicou em 2003). E três das fotos do Lemos, mal impressas, aparecem desbotadas a azul.

Ao lado, a apresentação das esculturas variadas foi sujeita a uma bidimensionalidade fotográfica que as aparenta à parede de Relvas & Lemos mas resulta em prejuízo das obras. Em destaque, ao centro, fica o realismo rústico dos dois padres. Preferiu-se a anedota.

 

(Os bustos engaiolados de Sarah Afonso por Diogo de Macedo, ? de Tiago Alexandre (?), uma caricatura de J.A. França (João Cutileiro), Teixeira de Pascoaes (António Duarte) e Manuel Jardim (Francisco Franco) - da esq para a direita, em cima. Em baixo, da dir. para a esq., Canto da Maia, Cabeça de Rapariga; Soares dos Reis, Cabeça de Negro; Galiano, etc.)

 

(8 Julho. 1) A/o artista português contemporânea/o que tem uma mais forte relação com o retrato é a Graça Morais. Gostava de perceber porque não está na exposição do MNAA chamada "Do tirar pelo natural". (Foto de 2017, exp. na Fundação Champallimaud)

 

O Nuno Viegas também faz lá falta, por exemplo com uma das suas pinturas digitais. Em vez daquelas coisas académicas chatíssimas que exemplificam a fetichização dos vestígios escolarmente vanguardistas da Helena Almeida, Calhau e Ângelo. É que é notório que ninguém pára para os ver. Estão lá a marcar o terreno do "contemporâneo", entendido como espaço tutelado, feito de nomes cooptados e de exclusões.

ANTÓNIO LACERDA NOBRE (1937-1942

A fotografia por volta de 1940, a "Objectiva" e o "Panorama"

9 Dez 2013: https://apomargaleria.blogspot.pt/search/label/Panorama

Apontamentos

A. Sena não indica as datas de nascimento e morte, e tb. ainda não as encontrei.
...diz que "as fotografias de A. Lacerda Nobre são uma excepção na monotonia das imagens que se publicam ou expõem nos sucessivos Salões...", pág. 253, e refere-o na exp. "Uma viagem através de Portugal", org. O Século, 1936, pág.  246. (E apenas nestes dois casos.)

Lacerda Nobre (Dr. A. Lacerda Nobre, como é quase sempre referido) é um dos mais activos fotógrafos nos 12 primeiros números de Objectiva em 1937-38 (ano I, nºs 1 a 12, 15 de Junho 1937 a Maio de 38)
A produção posteriormente publicada é muito desinteressante: capa do nº 13 (1 Junho 1938), um retrato de criança; e fotos nas págs. 39 e 114, no nº 14, "Repouso na doca" e no nº 17, "Tarde no Mondego".
No nº 25, de Julho de 1941 (nº 4 da 2ª série) publica a foto de uma escultura de Manuel Mendes: um contraplongé sobre dois patos, de sentido humorístico algo intrigante.

Lacerda Nobre não comparece no I e II Salão Internacional do Grémio P.F.  (1937 e 38), mas foi em 1938 o vencedor destacado do  "I Concurso e Exposição de Estudo Fotográfico", organizado pela revista Objectiva de uma forma rigidamente "pedagógica", divulgado nos nº 14 e 15, de Julho e Agosto de 1938. Decorreu na SNBA de 16 a 24 de Julho. (Terá sido mais um fracasso para os propósitos renovadores da Objectiva). (não expõe tb a partir de 1941, tal como Alvaro Colaço)

publicado em
Images Portugaises, ed. SPN 1939 (não creditado)
Panorama, 1941 e 1942

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Publicado em IMAGES PORTUGAISES, ed. Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional, s.d. (1939), prefácio de António Ferro. in 4º, 72 p. não num.; 23 x 23 cm. Legendas em francês, "Index" em inglês. Fotógrafos não identificados, com larga presença de Horácio Novais e Mário Novais.

(ver leilão P4 de 1 de Junho e 9 de Novembro de 2006. Fotos postas à venda separadamente. Alguns dos autores são identicados nos dois catálogos.)

l'abondance des récoltes ? / le blé / quietude. ponte de Santarem

 

Images: "la beauté naive des poteries" - ? 

Panorama nº 4, Setembro 1941, pág. 5

 

Images: "l'abondance des récoltes" - ?

 

Images: "le blé"

 Images: "quietude. ponte de Santarem"

 

EM OBJECTIVA

 

 

 

"Escolha da sardinha" - fotografia do Ex. Sr. Dr A. Lacerda Nobre feita com "Superb Voigtlander", objectiva "Skapar" diafragmada a 5,6 - 1:100 de segundo, película "Verichrome" (filtro---" , 1935 (nº 1, capa - ou pág. 3?)

 

"Gradando", de A. Lacerda Nobre, nº 1, 15 de Junho de 1937, pág 13

 

 

 

Fotografias do Dr. Lacerda Nobre, nº5, pág. 76 e  77

Nudez, dr. A Lacerda Nobre, nº 12, Maio 1938, pág.190

 

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Panorama nº 4, Setembro 1941, "Feiras e Mercados", pág. 5-7. Artigo assinado por "PANORAMA" onde se propõe a realização em Lisboa da "Grande Feira do Outono", acompanhado por 14 fotos não creditadas em geral de peq. formato. No sumário indica-se a presença de fotografias de, entre outros, Dr Lacerda Nobre. Inclui a foto acima de "Images Portugaises" "la beauté naive des poteries" 

 

Panorama nº 7, 1942, Os telhados de Lisboa, por António Lopes Ribeiro, pág 25-27, fotos de Horácio Novais, Lacerda Nobre e Manfredo não identificadas.

 

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1936: exp. "Uma viagem através de Portugal", org. O Século

1938: I Concurso e Exposição de Estudo Fotográfico", org. Objectiva. SNBA de 16 a 24 de Julho (ver nº 14, de Julho de 38). 

 

seis fotografias nos 12 nºs iniciais de Objectiva (ano I, nºs 1 a 12, 15 de Junho 1937 a Maio de 38)(publica capas dos nºs 1 e 3, mais pp. 1, 13, 29, 76. 77 e 190) ?

capa do nº 13 (1 Junho 1938), um retrato de criança; 

fotos nas págs. 39 e 114, no nº 14:  "Repouso na doca" 

e no nº 17 "Tarde no Mondego".

No nº 25, de Julho de 1941 (nº 4 da 2ª série) escultura de Manuel Mendes: um contraplongé sobre dois patos, de sentido humorístico algo intrigante.

Lacerda Nobre (Dr. A. Lacerda Nobre, como é quase sempre referido) é um dos mais activos fotógrafos nos 12 primeiros números de Objectiva em 1937-38 (ano I, nºs 1 a 12, 15 de Junho 1937 a Maio de 38)
A produção posteriormente publicada é muito desinteressante: capa do nº 13 (1 Junho 1938), um retrato de criança; e fotos nas págs. 39 e 114, no nº 14, "Repouso na doca" e no nº 17, "Tarde no Mondego".
No nº 25, de Julho de 1941 (nº 4 da 2ª série) publica a foto de uma escultura de Manuel Mendes: um contraplongé sobre dois patos, de sentido humorístico algo intrigante.

Lacerda Nobre não comparece no I e II Salão Internacional do Grémio P.F.  (1937 e 38), mas foi em 1938 o vencedor destacado do  "I Concurso e Exposição de Estudo Fotográfico", organizado pela revista Objectiva de uma forma rigidamente "pedagógica", divulgado nos nº 14 e 15, de Julho e Agosto de 1938. Decorreu na SNBA de 16 a 24 de Julho. (Terá sido mais um fracasso para os propósitos renovadores da Objectiva). (não expõe tb a partir de 1941, tal como Alvaro Colaço)

publicado em
Images Portugaises, ed. SPN 1939 (não creditado)
Panorama, 1941 e 1942

#

PANORAMA, revista (1941 1949, 1ª série)

Aproximação a Panorama: uma nota de 8 Dez 2013 por ocasião de

• Israel Guarda e José Oliveira
  A fotografia e os fotógrafos na revista Panorama (1941-1973): 30 anos de propaganda? [Texto integral]
  Photographers and photography in Panorama magazine (1941-1973): 30 years of propaganda?

 

... Existe também a luxuosa revista Panorama, Revista Portuguesa de Arte e Turismo, onde a fotografia, na condição de ilustração fotográfica, tem um lugar respeitado e prestigioso, a acompanhar a representação alargada dos artistas modernos oficializados por António Ferro e a presença patrimonial da história da arte e da museologia. "A fase polémica do modernismo já lá vai" escrevia C.Q. (Carlos Queiroz) no nº de Fevereiro de 1944 (nº 19, vol. 4º, edição Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional) na notícia muito ilustrada da 8ª Exposição de Arte Moderna no SPN, onde os surrealistas estão representados por Cândido Costa Pinto, António Dacosta e António Pedro. Logo a seguir, mostravam-se "3 aspectos da casa do pintor António Pedro".

 

O Panorama é essencial para perceber como é complexa e abrangentemente moderna a ordem estabelecida, ou a sua cúpula cultural, ou apenas uma espécie de fachada artística onde se arbitra a moda e o bom gosto num país que escapava às devastações da guerra (e que lucra com ela) - não há vestígios do conflito mundial nem, aliás, de quaisquer outras tensões, nos números de 1944, 45, 46...  Quando se faz referência a "uma hora revolucionária", no nº do Natal de 1944 (nº 22, já editado pelo Secretariado Nacional de Informação e Cultura Popular - S.N.I.C.P.), é para qualificar "esta fase da vida turística em Portugal".

 

Bernardo Marques (director artístico não creditado), Ofélia Marques, Carlos Botelho, Thomas de Mello (Tom), Estrela Faria, Almada Negreiros são presenças regulares, mas também comparecem Manuel Ribeiro de Pavia (futuro ilustrador de neo-realistas), Eduardo Anahory, Diogo de Macedo (modernista histórico, director do Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, que então reabre muito remodelado - nº 24 de 1944), Cândido, Dacosta (este no nº especial 25-26 de 1945 sobre touros), Júlio Resende (nº 27, 1946), etc. 

 

Na fotografia - retratos, monumentos, paisagens, obras de arte, etc - os mais constantes são Mário e Horácio Novais (igualmente os melhores), ao lado de Fernando Vicente, o mesmo Tom, Manfredo (?), João Martins, sempre referidos na página do sumário e junto às imagens (de facto, o reconhecimento da profissão e da fotografia não é um facto recente). Também se publicam Alvão e a Foto Beleza quando necessário, ou um amador como Adriano Lopes Vieira, de Cortes, Leiria, irmão do poeta que também foi um interessante fotógrafo.

 

No nº 21, Junho de 1944, refere-se a exposição individual de Constantino Varela Cid no Estúdio do SPN, e anunciam-se futuras reproduções que não serão publicadas.

 

Se o 8º e o 9º Salões de Arte Moderna do SPN/SNI são objecto de várias páginas, o mesmo acontece "A propósito do 9º Salão de Arte Fotográfica" no nº 29, de 1946.

O título do breve texto de Américo Nogueira (?) continua na afirmação "A fotografia é uma arte" ... "na medida em que o fotógrafo é artista", defende depois o autor (a acção mecânica não é argumento, porque pode usar-se o melhor equipamento e fazer más fotografias, ou vice-versa).

As imagens são de Maria Luisa Viana Jorge, Eduardo Portugal (este um profissional ausente do Salão), Henri Albert (2 de um belga residente em Lisboa), A. Santos André e Álvaro Valente - todas elas fotos directas de paisagem, sóbrias, sem artifícios. Entre esta fotografia artística, em geral de amadores, e a arte dos profissionais da fotografia, que pouco frequentam os salões, existe uma fronteira invisível, e indizível.

 

 

"O 'F-3340'", Maria Luiza Huet Viana Jorge (catálogo do 9º Salão, 1946)

 

A edição mais surpreendente do Panorama desses anos (a 1ª série vai de 1941 a 1949, até à demissão de Ferro) é talvez a que assinala a morte de Duarte Pacheco, homenageado por Ferro e por Cotinelli Telmo, retratado por Mário Novais, sendo a sua acção documentada por obras de muitos arquitectos e artistas modernos (Pardal Monteiro, Keil do Amaral, Maria Keil, etc.) - é o nº 19, Fev. 1944.

Entretanto, as páginas de publicidade não são menos significativas que as outras, com o seu grafismo  elegante e moderno. Aí se referem (Natal de 1944) outras publicações relevantes do regime como O Mundo Português - Revista Colonial de Arte e Literatura, com páginas de "fotografias de arte, etnografia e iconografia", edição da Agência Geral das Colónias e do S.N.I.C.P., com 130 nºs publicados, então dirigida por Augusto Cunha; ou Atlântico - Revista Luso-brasileira de Cultura e Literatura, 5 nºs publicados, edição S.N.I.C.P. e do Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda do Brasil. Todas elas têm morada em S. Pedro de Alcântara.

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MARIA LAMAS FOTÓGRAFA

 

Em 1947, quando Maria Lamas dá início às suas viagens pelo país para a publicação de 'As Mulheres do Meu País', tem 53 anos, e fora até há pouco directora de 'Modas e Bordados', jornalista e romancista. "Resolvi arranjar uma máquina e ser eu, também, fotógrafa", lê-se numa notícia publicada no boletim 'Ler - informação bibliográfica', Publicações Europa-América (Maio-Junho 1948, pág. 1

"A obtenção de fotografias, confessa, foi uma das maiores dificuldades que encontrou, pois queria-as ‘verdadeiras, expressivas, com valor documental e inéditas’. Acabará por assumir-se como repórter fotográfica, num trabalho pioneiro" – 'O Primeiro de Janeiro', Porto, 28 de Abril de 1948 (entrevista na pág. "Das artes e das letras").

Os seus inúmeros retratos de mulheres devem ser vistos como uma grande aventura fotográfica, com um sentido de documentário social, de denúncia e de esperança ou optimismo que tem de ser associado ao neo-realismo, como uma contribuição muitíssimo original (o neo-realismo nunca teve fronteiras conceptuais fechadas e pode/deve ser identificado como tal, ou como aproximação a, sem que os autores dele se reclamem).

Herdeiras de uma prática fotojornalística recorrente - o retrato individual que acompanha as notícias - , as fotos de ML têm uma verdade e uma energia contagiantes, que desde logo decorrem e comungam da situação concreta do inquérito e do voluntarismo da autora. Toda a ambição esteticista ou artística está ausente: são documento e testemunho, tanto das mulheres encontradas no terreno como na atitude da autora. Nunca foram expostas até aos anos 2000 (e seguramente não foram pensados como objecto de exposição, ou colecção, ou edição autónoma), e nem mesmo foram incluídos ou referenciados, ao que julgo, nas exposições documentais tardias sobre Maria Lamas.

Não referidos por António Sena na sua história, permaneceram como material não visto, não reconhecido, não valorizado, ignorado pelo neo-realismo oficial (o das EGAP de 1946 a 1950...) e também, naturalmente, pelos meios da "arte fotográfica", em que também o neo-realismo penetrou (Lyon de Castro, Cabrita e outros). Não um não-dito da fotografia portuguesa, que por vezes continua a incomodar quem se rege por etiquetas e não por dados visíveis.

São na maior parte das vezes retratos individuais e também de grupo. Retratos directos e frontais realizados nos locais de trabalho, como que interrompendo momentaneamente a faina. Noutros casos são mesmo momentos ou situações de trabalho que se ilustram, procurando registar a dureza do esforço físico. Totalmente despidas de efeitos de luz e sombra, feitas sob o sol directo e cru, as imagens prescindem também de toda a anedota ou nota de mistério, à beira de uma impressão de banalidade que se desmente na cumplicidade dos olhares trocados, na firmeza, confiança ou dignidade dos rostos, na eficácia documental das roupas, utensílios e outros objectos visíveis, numa objectividade enxuta e tocante. A banalidade, o banal (a suspensão da arte), é um tema essencial da prática e da teoria fotográficas, que se manifestara uma década antes durante a "polémica do flagrante" e foi tendo sucessivos afloramentos (Walker Evans, a Pop, etc)

Cada fotografia é acompanhada por várias linhas de texto que ultrapassam a condição de simples legendas para fornecer informações complementares e comentar o contexto económico e social de cada situação.

Realizadas por um fotógrafo-não-fotógrafo (nem profissional, nem "amador", no sentido habitual de aficionado da arte fotográfica), que apenas por necessidade recorreu por algum tempo a um "caixote Kodak", estas fotografias suplantam o interesse das restantes imagens do livro, assinadas por um heteróclito grupo de outros autores. Essa outra muito vasta antologia fotográfica documental que ML escolhe e inclui no seu livro comprovam a forte relação com o medium (com o acesso a importantes acervos e o relacionamento com fotógrafos, ou seja, uma cultura fotográfica assinalável) para além da produção própria.

No seu recente livro (Maria Lamas, Mulher de Causas - biografia breve, ed. Município de Torres Novas <corrijo o lapso>, 2017) e nos comentários que deixou escritos numa nota abaixo (facebook), José Gabriel Pereira Bastos acrescenta informações essenciais para se perceber o contexto ideológico e político, profissional e pessoal, da obra de M.L.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Dois, três pontos: 

1. os pintores e os teóricos do NR não reconheceram a fotografia senão como documento para artistas ou informação (mesmo que vários deles fotografassem: Lima de Freitas, Cipriano Dourado e outros - ver "Ciclo do arroz"). Colocando a prioridade no 'neo' (realismo) e logo na fuga ao naturalismo, entendem a 'deformação' como índice do moderno - a fotografia não deforma, copia. 

2. o NR plástico que se inicia em 1945, com pioneirismo em relação à França ou à Inglaterra (que estavam mais ocupados com a Guerra e a reconstrução), depende em especial da informação norte-americana que é amplamente distribuída durante a 2ª Guerra (Biblioteca americana, Academia de Belas Artes, etc), com foco nos realistas americanos de direita e de esquerda (Benton e Ben Shan), mexicanos e brasileiros: todos eles são à época a nova arte própria da América, antes de se afirmar Pollock e o expressionismo abstracto. Não há lugar para falar em realismo socialista de imposição soviética antes de c. 1948, ou mm 1952, e aí começa a divisão no campo NR e afins, que é até essas datas um espaço pluralista e livre. 

3. Até c. 1952 e à querela dos intelectuais, e o 'desvio de esquerda', não se pode atribuir à linha do PC a condução da criação intelectual e artística; as estruturas são frágeis e as figuras que se destacam como criadores, mesmo entrando no PC, têm mais importância que os controleiros e que uma direcção fraca e distante. É necessário não ver Stalin por toda a parte antes de se extremar a Guerra Fria. 

4. O destino soviético de M. Lamas, por um lado, e as afinidades titistas de Adelino Lyon de Castro (com Piteira Santos, a Ler, Mário Soares, etc), para mais morto por doença muito cedo (1953), devem ter inviabilizado ou pelo menos demorado o reconhecimento das suas contribuições fotográficas durante décadas. Para além do que deriva da escassa cultura visual reinante, como se observa neste "caso" Lamas levantado por uma experiêrcia ensaística do Manuel Villaverde Cabral.

Xingu, o livro

Irreal, 14 Dez. Apresentação de Xingu, desenhos de Júlio Pomar, ed. FJP. Com Catarina Vasconcelos e Margarida Rego (Estúdio Ilhas), A P, Marta Mestre e Rute Valadares. Foto Nuno Engstrøm Guimarães

Fotos R e  Irreal

O novo Museu Gulbenkian para 2018

A grande reforma de Penelope Curtis. Passou a haver um museu. Com colecções permanentes rotativas. O CAM de Sommer Ribeiro e Azeredo Perdigão ganhou uma estratégia.
Dia 7, Dez., a directora apresentou à imprensa (de manhã) e a artistas incluídos na colecção (de tarde) o programa para 2018: a actuação como museu está definida, com rotação trimestral de algumas (bastantes) obras e também com exposições. Museu não é o mesmo que galeria (Kunstmuseum ou kunsthalle, Kunsthaus), mas é também um lugar a que se volta.

Falta avaliar o roteiro do museu agora lançado. Um itinerário pelas colecções, pela história da fundação, da arte em Portugal no século XX e até do país, feito pela directora, como um exercício certamente ainda precário e insuficiente de aprendizagem da matéria. Um curioso risco, que tem o interesse acrescido de ser um olhar estrangeiro.

A propósito, lembro-me que o Museu Berardo no CCB teve durante uns anos um excelente director que se chamou Jean-François Chougnet. Por vezes a gestão e programação de um museu não se confunde com uma política de gosto ou uma táctica de afirmação de tendência. Julgo que Serralves, por exemplo, nunca se "curou" do director Todolí (julgo, porque deixou de me ser necessário ou conveniente passar por lá). No caso da Gulbenkian não preciso de concordar com as escolhas para reconhecer uma estratégia, nem a discordância quanto às ausências impede uma resposta interessada.

Pays & Peuples d'Angola / Retour d'Angola, 1934 - 2011

pays et peoples d'angola 1934

2ª Missão Suíça (photo © Musée d'ethnographie de Neuchãtel, in dossier de presse: "Extraits de presse du 4 au 13 décembre 2007"). / Retour d'Angola - Expositions - Musée d'ethnographie de Neuchâtel /

Avec Retour d'Angola, l'équipe du MEN - Musée d'ethnographie de Neuchâtel - revient sur un épisode-clé de l'histoire de l'institution: la 2e Mission scientifique suisse en Angola (MSSA), qui fut menée par des chercheurs neuchâtelois de 1932 à 1933 et qui a fourni au Musée une part importante de ses collections africaines. ... (...) un ensemble d’objets et de photographies unique au monde, dont la majeure partie n’a plus été montrée au public depuis les années 1940

 

Retour d’Angola: 6 décembre 2007 au 31 décembre 2012

"Le dernier espace présente le retour d’Angola proprement dit, à savoir le processus qui, du déballage à l’étude, à la restauration et à la mise en valeur des objets, aboutit finalement à interroger le sens profond de l’expédition. La 2e MSSA s’inscrit dans le cadre des missions de collecte qui parcourent différentes parties de l’Afrique au cours des années trente. La récolte d’objets répertoriés sur le terrain représente alors le fondement de la démarche ethnographique. Les pièces retenues sont destinées à augmenter le fonds documentaire des musées, focalisés à cette époque sur l’étude de séries et de typologies d’objets. Présentés dans des vitrines ou mis en caisse, puis stockés dans les réserves, ces quelques 3500 numéros d’inventaire forment aujourd’hui un fonds majeur des collections du MEN."

 

Com catálogo: Retour d'Angola, dirigé par Marc-Olivier Gonseth, Bernard Knodel et Serge Reubi, 344p.

 

retour d'angola

 

 

http://www.men.ch/fr/expositions/anciennes-expositions/la-villa-depuis-1993/retour-dangola/

 

Retour d'Angola (06.10.2007 - 31.12.2012)

Avec Retour d’Angola, l’équipe du MEN revient sur un épisode-clé de l’histoire de l’institution: la IIe Mission scientifique suisse en Angola (MSSA), qui fut menée par des chercheurs neuchâtelois de 1932 à 1933 et qui a fourni au Musée une part importante de ses collections africaines. 

En s’intéressant plus particulièrement à Théodore Delachaux (1879-1949), artiste, collectionneur, scientifique, membre de l’expédition et conservateur du Musée d’ethnographie de 1921 à 1945, ses "après-venants" questionnent aussi bien le propos de la mission que les enjeux actuels liés à l’étude et à la conservation des matériaux récoltés. 

Du terrain aux réserves, entre objets "stars" et collections à peine déballées, les paradoxes de la pratique ethnographique et muséale s’esquissent et les débats consacrés aux moyens nécessaires pour assumer l’héritage refont surface. 

Un tel examen du passé requiert une approche critique, puisqu’il ne s’agit pas d’endosser naïvement les catégories de pensée en vigueur à l’époque, mais également une capacité de recul, puisqu’il ne s’agit pas non plus de juger les prédécesseurs à partir des postures intellectuelles contemporaines. Le dispositif choisi fait ressortir les singularités et les différences de sensibilité entre hier et aujourd’hui à partir des matériaux produits par les participants à la Mission eux-mêmes, la scénographie portant le regard critique de manière non péremptoire et le visiteur devenant le filtre à partir duquel le passé peut être à la fois compris et mis en perspective. 

Retour d’Angola offre par ailleurs à l’équipe du MEN l’occasion de faire découvrir un ensemble d’objets et de photographies unique au monde, dont la majeure partie n’a plus été montrée au public depuis les années 1940 et d’inaugurer une nouvelle sorte d’exposition temporaire de longue durée dédiée à la mise en valeur des collections du Musée. 

en-savoir-plus

"Portugal em flagrante - Operação 1"

Sobre "Portugal em Flagrante - Operação 1", na Fundação Gulbenkian - ex-CAM

(Ver "CAM", 2/08/2016 e 01/16/2017)

1

em baixo, a capa do nº 6, depois uma serigrafia de João Vieira, "Vieira 59", incluída no nº 5, ao lado da obra de Beatriz; a seguir a capa do nº 3, de 1958...

A quem de direito
No início de 2017 escrevi que a exp. "Portugal em Flagrante - Operação 1", apresentava melhoras, embora insuficientes . Publiquei então uma fotografia onde se podia ver uma estampa serigráfica de Maria Beatriz - assinada e datada "Beatriz 69" - que se encontrava (e encontra ainda) exposta dentro de um exemplar da revista KWY datados de 1959. Juntei então o comentário: "Há acidentes felizes, e (assim) a exp. do ex-CAM está agora muito melhor. Ao centro, a estampa de Beatriz Matias, 1969, fica ali muito bem."
Alguém podia ter notado o desacerto de uma obra de 1969 incluída numa revista de 1959; alguém podia ter prevenido algum autor, curador ou responsável, se existe; alguém podia ter sido alertado pela publicação acima, que eu não quis tornar mais explícita, porque a situação era divertida e para não fazer desaparecer a estampa da Beatriz, que é das imagens mais fortes que à data se faziam e por lá se vêem - uma estampa associada à exp de gravura que em Maio de 1969 ela fez na Galeria Gravura.
Antes que a exp. acabe (a 17 de Nov.), volto a alertar. Mas coloquem a obra da Beatriz noutro lugar, noutra década.

Agora preocupa-me mais a desatenção e / ou ignorância que por aqui se manifestam quando o texto de promoção anuncia:
"No piso inferior do edifício apresenta-se a Operação 1 constituída por obras realizadas sobre papel da coleção, complementadas por documentação proveniente da Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Neste espaço, e na publicação que o acompanha <qual publicação>, enuncia-se a espinha dorsal de toda a mostra com a apresentação mais aprofundada de algumas questões de âmbito político, social, cultural e artístico que permitem uma melhor compreensão do século XX e dos primeiros anos do século XXI em Portugal. A uma preocupação cronológica de base são associados dispositivos de informação que permitem uma compreensão alargada da criação artística enquanto motor e caixa-de-ressonância da história de Portugal desde 1900."

parte do catálogo da Galeria Gravura, Maio de 1969, de Maria Beatriz.

2

Uma oportunidade perdida...
Colocando lado a lado, noutra das vitrinas da  "Operação 1", os catálogos da exp. "50 Artistas Independentes em 1959", organizada na SNBA por uma comissão de artistas, e do "I Salão dos Novíssimos", da iniciativa do Secretariado Nacional de Informação, ter-se-ia oferecido uma visão eficazmente sintética e muito certeira da divisão que atravessa as décadas de 40 a 60, entre os artistas da SNBA e do SNI, sem que se trate então de uma fronteira nítida entre Oposição e Situação.

 

Os catálogos têm exactamente as mesmas medidas (a capa dos Novíssimos é de Sebastião Rodrigues; a dos 50 Independentes, não creditada, virá talvez do atelier Conceição Silva) e as exposições inauguraram-se precisamente no mesmo dia e à mesma hora, "arriscadamente", segundo escreveu J.A. França na sua História.
Estava-se em 1959, no tenso clima político que se seguiu às eleições a que concorreu Humberto Delgado (58), e a guerrilha no campo das artes encontava-se acesa, favorecida pela realização da 1ª Exposição Gulbenkian (57), quando estava já em curso o seu programa de concessão de bolsas. Em causa estavam também as representações nacionais nas Bienais de São Paulo, Paris e Veneza, naturalmente a cargo do SNI. Percorrer as lista dos premiados nos Novíssimos e dos participantes nas bienais traz muitas surpresas - a sucessão das gerações e a concorrência entre Lisboa e Porto eram tão ou mais importantes que as afirmações políticas.
Espaço para juntar os dois catálogos havia...

Gradhiva, Musée du Quai Branly, nº 19, 2014

‎revistas 2

« L’Atlantique Noir » de Nancy Cunard‎. Negro Anthology 1931–1934, 2014 issue 19

https://gradhiva.revues.org/2766

• Julie Jones
  Vers une image « authentique » de l’Afro-Américain ? Photographies, presse militante et documentaire social (1910-1940) [Full text]
  Moving towards an “authentic” image of Afro-Americans? Photographs, the activist press and social documentaries (1910-1940)

More about this picture

ISBN ‎978-2-35744-073-9‎

Negro anthology, semblable à une enquête documentaire, est une œuvre d’une grande modernité formelle et théorique. C’est en 1931, année de l’Exposition coloniale et de « l’affaire » des jeunes noirs américains de Scottsboro, que Nancy Cunard, née en Angleterre en 1896 et symbole de l’avant-garde anglo-saxonne et française des années 1920, se lance dans la réalisation de cette anthologie historique. Composé d’articles, d’archives, de photographies, de dessins, de portraits, d’extraits de presse, de poèmes, de partitions musicales, de témoignages ou encore de statistiques, cet ouvrage de huit-cent-cinquante cinq pages, compte deux-cent cinquante articles et cent cinquante auteurs. Les contributeurs sont des militants, intellectuels, jour­nalistes, artistes, poètes, uni­versi­taires, anthro­po­logues ; Africains-­Américains, Antillais, Africains, Malgaches, Latino-Américains, Américains, Européens, femmes et hommes. Y collaborent entre autres : Samuel Beckett, Georges Sadoul, Ezra Pound, Langston Hugues, Zora Neale Hurston, Georges Padmore, Alain Locke, Georges Lavachery, Jomo Kenyatta et Kenneth Macpherson. Nancy Cunard, poète, modèle, éditrice, collectionneuse, militante, journaliste, symbolise une époque où avant-gardes artistico-littéraires et engagement politique étaient imbriqués. C’est à travers la visite des grands thèmes abordés dans Negro Anthology que ce numéro de Gradhiva met en lumière les réseaux artistiques, littéraires, et politiques transnationaux tissés par Nancy Cunard dans les années 1910-1930, qui ont fait de cette anthologie un monument de l’histoire des Noirs.

This issue is available in open access on Cairn platform.
Read it

• Dossier « L’Atlantique Noir » de Nancy Cunard‎. Negro Anthology 1931–1934

  Edited by Sarah Frioux-Salgas
  • Sarah Frioux-Salgas
    Introduction « L’Atlantique noir » de Nancy Cunard, Negro Anthology, 1931-1934 [Full text]
  • Amzat Boukari-Yabara
    Les militants noirs anglophones des années 1920 à 1940 [Full text]
    Black anglophone activists from the 1920s to the 1940s
  • Emmanuel Parent
    « Nothing too old, or too new for his use ». Anthropologie du lore noir chez Zora Neale Hurston [Full text]
    “Nothing too old, or too new for his use”. Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropology of black lore
  • Yannick Séité
    L’inscription de la musique dans l’anthologie Negro [Full text]
    Music in the Negro Anthology
  • Julie Jones
    Vers une image « authentique » de l’Afro-Américain ? Photographies, presse militante et documentaire social (1910-1940) [Full text]
    Moving towards an “authentic” image of Afro-Americans? Photographs, the activist press and social documentaries (1910-1940)
  • François Bovier
    Paul Robeson et la représentation des Noirs dans le cinéma de l’entre-deux-guerres. Primitivisme et double conscience [Full text]
    Paul Robeson and the representation of Black Americans in films during the interwar period. Primitivism and double-consciousness

• Documents

  • Vladimir Pozner
    L’affaire des Scottsboro Boys [Full text]
    Extrait du livre de Vladimir Pozner, Les États-Désunis (Paris, Denoël, 1938), Montréal, Lux Éditeur, 2009, p. 117-127
  • Léon-François Hoffmann and Jacques Roumain
    Jacques Roumain et Nancy Cunard [Full text]
    Poème de Jacques Roumain dédié à Nancy Cunard et lettre de Jacques Roumain à Nancy Cunard, commentés par Léon-François Hoffmann
  • Anthony Mangeon and Claude McKay
    Lettres de Claude McKay à Nancy Cunard [Full text]
    Traduites et présentées par Anthony Mangeon

"Perspectives africaines en photographie", Africultures, 2012,

Revistas sobre fotografia africana (1) (reeditado de 11/19/2014)

"Perspectives africaines en photographie", Africultures, nº 88, 2012, ed. L'Hermattan

A fotografia africana vista dos Estados Unidos (Fr) // African Photography seen from the United States

Allison Moore

English

Français

La photographie africaine vue des États-Unis

Allison Moore

Quelles photographies africaines circulent aux États-Unis ? Et dans quels cadres ? Comment sont-elles mises en valeur et quels sont les enjeux de cette valorisation, aussi bien dans le milieu scientifique que dans celui de l'art contemporain ? Quels débats agitent les spécialistes aux États-Unis ? L'essai d'Allison Moore vise à éclaircir ces questions.

 

Appréhender la photographie africaine à travers le prisme de la recherche américaine, c'est se demander comment les œuvres de photographes africains circulent, comment elles se font connaître aux États-Unis ; autrement dit, qui soutient cette photographie en l'exposant, en écrivant à son sujet ou en documentant ses histoires, afin de permettre à un public le plus large possible de prendre conscience de ses développements actuels.
D'emblée, il faut se rendre à l'évidence : la photographie produite en Afrique ou dans la diaspora est principalement exposée et étudiée aux États-Unis et en Europe, même si cette évidence frappante est contrebalancée par des événements comme les Rencontres de Bamako au Mali ou le dynamisme de la scène photographique sud-africaine.
Par ailleurs, les expositions artistiques occidentales privilégient davantage la photographie d'art produite par les Africains de la diaspora que celle produite sur le continent, car les artistes de la diaspora ont plus recours à des concepts, des esthétiques ou même des médias (grâce à un accès facilité aux technologies numériques et aux logiciels complexes) qui séduisent un public international fasciné par la mode actuelle du "conceptualisme global" (1).

Aux États-Unis, hormis les expositions personnelles de noms comme Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé et Samuel Fosso, les deux seules expositions majeures entièrement consacrées à la photographie africaine ont été In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) et Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), toutes deux organisées par Okwui Enwezor (In/Sigh avec Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin et Octavio Zaya). Zwelethu Mthethwa et David Goldblatt ont également été célébrés individuellement : Goldblatt au Jewish Museum de New York durant l'été 2010 ; le Museum of Modern Art à New York a acheté des photos de Mthethwa, tandis que Tracy Rose a exposé au Walker Art Center de Minneapolis. Mais les artistes sud-africains occupent une position à part sur le marché de l'art international grâce au réseau de galeries et de musées de leur pays. Aussi, les expositions de photographie sud-africaine et leurs catalogues tels que Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present de Tosha Grantham (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009) pourraient-ils servir de modèles aux futures études sur la photographie entreprises sur le reste du continent, à la fois en limitant la "photographie africaine" à un contenu national et en approfondissant plusieurs aspects de cette photographie par des études critiques sérieuses.

À la différence d'Okwui Enwezor qui semble-t-il favoriserait les artistes africains issus d'une certaine élite intellectuelle, résidant pour certains en dehors de l'Afrique, les chercheurs ont tendance à privilégier la "culture visuelle", c'est-à-dire la photographie locale entendue comme entreprise commerciale et sociale, plutôt que purement artistique. Cela semble être par exemple le cas de la recherche allemande représentée par les travaux de Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl et Christraud Geary (qui vit et travaille aux États-Unis mais est d'origine allemande) (2). Cette approche met moins l'accent sur les individus que sur l'histoire culturelle du support. Le problème pointé par certains critiques est que cela ne différerait pas beaucoup des études anthropologiques qui relèguent l'art à une forme de production culturelle parmi tant d'autres. Bien que l'anthropologie ait réévalué son approche de "l'autre", par le passé, les anthropologues ont bien souvent manqué de discernement et d'autocritique, leur discours ayant entre autres servi de caution à l'oppression coloniale.

Il convient ici de souligner que la distinction faite entre la "photographie d'art" et la "culture visuelle" existe aussi dans les études sur les photographies occidentales et que ce n'est pas seulement vis-à-vis de l'Afrique qu'une approche plus "sociologique" ou "culturelle" est privilégiée. Ainsi, l'approche historique de certains chercheurs comme Geoffrey Batchen, Naomi Rosenblum et Michel Frizot couvre-t-elle l'intégralité de la production photographique, qu'elle soit scientifique, médicale, vernaculaire, journalistique, artistique ou conceptuelle (3).

En revanche, une approche plus classique adoptée par les historiens de l'art se concentrera uniquement sur l'étude des aspects esthétiques de la photographie considérée ici comme un art, allant même jusqu'à réduire l'histoire de la photographie du XIXe siècle à un discours purement esthétique. Il serait donc sans doute utile que les chercheurs et les commissaires de la photographie africaine, souvent en désaccord dans leurs approches méthodologiques respectives, reconnaissent qu'un schisme identique existe aussi au sein de l'histoire de la photographie occidentale et qu'il peut être pertinent d'étudier aussi cette photographie occidentale à travers le filtre de l'anthropologie ou de la sociologie, comme l'a fait Pierre Bourdieu dans Un art moyen. Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (4).

Aux États-Unis, les spécialistes d'art africain dit "traditionnel" se réfèrent également à la "culture visuelle", puisque la définition occidentale de l'art destiné aux musées ne s'applique pas aux objets ou rituels produits dans les sociétés africaines précoloniales. La préférence américaine pour les "traditions" précoloniales et la notion désuète d'"authenticité", construite à l'origine par les chercheurs occidentaux eux-mêmes (5), ont "détourné" pendant de nombreuses décennies la recherche africaniste des mouvements artistiques modernes et contemporains, y compris de la photographie, de la vidéo et du cinéma. En 1991, Susan Vogel organise Africa Explores au Center for African Arts à New York : cette exposition majeure va susciter une importante réaction de la critique, bien qu'il faille également noter le rôle joué par de précédentes expositions qui ont été moins remarquées (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974 ; Contemporary African Art, Howard University, 1977 ; Contemporary African Artists?: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum à Harlem, 1990).

Aborder l'histoire de la photographie en Afrique sous l'angle de la "culture visuelle" rejoint les approches méthodologiques des chercheurs spécialisés dans les arts africains précoloniaux et de certains historiens de la photographie. Mais qu'en est-il de la photographie d'art, celle qui est produite pour les musées occidentaux et qui aborde des questions en relation avec les préoccupations occidentales, internationales de l'art et de l'esthétique ? Bien que cette pratique de la photographie tournée vers l'Occident soit relativement nouvelle dans beaucoup de régions d'Afrique, elle gagne rapidement du terrain, surtout dans les centres urbains où existent des écoles de photographie, des regroupements d'artistes ou des centres d'art. Serait-il possible alors, tant dans le milieu de la recherche que celui de l'art, de combiner les facteurs esthétique et commercial, artistique et social ?

Abolir ces frontières est certainement ce que proposait Enwezor, en désignant Keïta comme un maître moderne, dans la veine du portraitiste allemand August Sander (6). Le fait est que le champ de la photographie est bien plus désordonné que nous suggèrent ces classifications tranchées. Presque tous les photographes dits "artistes" ont fait de la photographie commerciale et beaucoup de photographes commerciaux se considèrent comme des créateurs dans leur domaine. Dans Snap Judgments, Enwezor abordait également la photographie contemporaine comme un mélange de pratiques, comprenant la photographie de mode et le portrait documentaire (mais non commercial) parmi les œuvres à orientation plus artistique. En même temps, cette exposition avait pour objectif de fuir la vision hégémonique de la photographie africaine se résumant au portrait de studio commercial, pour ouvrir le public américain à d'autres genres et pratiques.

À long terme, on peut penser que la majorité des portraitistes du continent seront simplement appréciés pour le rôle qu'ils jouent au sein de leurs communautés, tandis qu'un petit nombre sera considéré pour son talent artistique, tout comme cela se passe dans les pays occidentaux. Par ailleurs, il est souhaitable qu'à l'avenir de nouveaux corpus de photographies soient valorisés, notamment ceux issus des sciences, de la médecine ou de l'anthropologie, ainsi que les fonds d'archives documentaires appartenant aux agences de presse. Le champ doit rester ouvert aux différentes approches méthodologiques et aux nouvelles découvertes, car il faudrait beaucoup plus de recherches pour combler nos connaissances lacunaires sur la photographie en Afrique. Les champs de la culture visuelle et de l'art ne devraient pas rester coupés l'un de l'autre, ni pris dans des désaccords insignifiants qui divisent. Un champ débattu est quelque chose de positif, mais les critiques acerbes ne sont pas nécessaires et ne font que dissuader les chercheurs voulant s'y engager, par crainte d'être attaqués. En ce sens, le travail pionnier d'Enwezor a été absolument essentiel dans le domaine de la photographie africaine et l'on ne peut sous-estimer son influence.

Aux États-Unis, la recherche universitaire sur la photographie africaine s'est surtout développée dans les départements d'anthropologie et d'études africaines, plutôt qu'en histoire de l'art. Ces nouvelles approches de l'histoire de la photographie, qui mettent l'accent sur les études culturelles et qui considèrent toute photographie comme de la "culture visuelle", en contraste avec une minorité de photographies envisagées comme de "l'art", signifient que les historiens de la photographie viennent aux photographies africaines avec une ouverture disciplinaire marquée. D'un autre côté, ils semblent ne pas avoir suffisamment développé de savoirs interdisciplinaires, pour être à même d'analyser toute production culturelle. De plus, à l'instar des spécialistes de l'art africain qui ont tendance à ignorer l'art contemporain, ceux qui travaillent sur la photographie africaine n'ont parfois pas la moindre connaissance des stratégies artistiques contemporaines, ce qui risque d'altérer leur compréhension de la photographie d'art visible sur le marché international, tandis que les commissaires, eux, s'intéressent moins aux productions photographiques qui ne se conforment pas aux normes esthétiques et conceptuelles dictées par le marché de l'art mondial.

À considérer ces différentes approches dans les milieux de la recherche et de l'art aux États-Unis, il devient clair que toutes sont nécessaires et qu'elles peuvent revêtir des fonctions différentes : montrer que la photographie contemporaine est importante afin d'ouvrir un nouveau champ ; que la recherche l'est tout autant afin de documenter l'histoire et d'élaborer des théories plus larges. Mais considérer les approches des chercheurs et celles des commissaires permet aussi de pointer quelques-uns des conflits qui ont eu lieu entre eux - des conflits qui ne devraient pas durcir les positions au point de refuser le débat et de mettre fin au dialogue, mais qui devraient au contraire remettre en cause les définitions et questionner les frontières de manière productive, en ouvrant ainsi d'infinies possibilités pour la recherche à venir.

Pour avoir travaillé sur l'exposition Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (International Center of Photography de New York, 2006) et mené des recherches sur les Rencontres de Bamako, je peux affirmer que ces deux événements avaient des perspectives très différentes. Snap Judgments a en effet été conçue comme la suite, dix ans plus tard, de In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present, présenté au Guggenheim Museum de New York. À la différence de la Biennale de Bamako, qui organise son exposition panafricaine sur appel à candidatures, celle-ci était le choix totalement assumé d'un commissaire, Okwui Enwezor, qui avait réalisé pour ce faire plusieurs courtes missions de prospection en Afrique et en Europe. Si cette exposition présentait peu d'artistes basés aux États-Unis, elle mettait par contre en valeur le travail de photographes basés en Europe et en Afrique, pour certains "nouveaux venus" (comme Mamadou Gomis ou Michael Tsegaye). Montée à New York tout comme In/Sight, même si le lieu d'exposition, ici l'International Center of Photography (ICP), avait changé (7), Snap Judgments était une exposition singulière, destinée à fournir un instantané, si l'on peut dire, de l'activité photographique contemporaine sur le continent et dans la diaspora.

Par la suite, en tant que commissaire adjoint de l'ICP, Enwezor a organisé Archive Fever (2008), prouvant ainsi qu'il était capable de varier les sujets et les supports et refusant d'être catalogué uniquement comme un commissaire pour l'Afrique contemporaine (8). L'impact de Snap Judgments, où les artistes sud-africains étaient fortement représentés, est bien entendu difficile à mesurer, surtout en Afrique, mais l'un de ses principaux effets a été de donner davantage de visibilité internationale et américaine à certains artistes. Ainsi, Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko est probablement l'artiste qui a le plus bénéficié de Snap Judgments : par la suite, elle a exposé à la galerie Kyle Kauffman (9) à New York en 2007 et a tout dernièrement fait partie de l'exposition Global Africa Project au Museum of Modern Arts and Design de New York (2010-2011). Dans l'ensemble, il semblerait que les artistes qui étaient déjà établis aient été confirmés dans leur position et que ceux qui ne l'étaient pas aient gagné en reconnaissance, sans pour autant faire réellement décoller leur carrière. Si à ce jour Snap Judgments n'a pas eu d'impact retentissant sur la carrière de la plupart de ces artistes - on ne doit pas oublier que les choses fonctionnent lentement, par effet multiplicateur, et que c'est aux artistes de savoir "tirer avantage" du fait d'être exposés sur la scène internationale -, c'est notamment parce que ce n'était pas là la priorité d'Enwezor en tant que commissaire. En effet, il faut s'éloigner d'une vision centrée sur l'artiste pour comprendre les objectifs d'un commissaire, qui seront toujours ambivalents, puisqu'il fonctionne aujourd'hui autant comme un critique d'art que comme celui qui détermine les canons ou agit comme "découvreur" de nouveaux talents. C'est pourquoi un commissaire ne peut pas, et ne doit pas, être trop concerné par la carrière d'un artiste. Ce qu'Enwezor a réussi à faire, c'est de présenter à un public américain des œuvres africaines qui dépassent largement la tradition du portrait - établie dans la perception publique depuis In/Sight, bien qu'il y ait eu une plus grande variété d'œuvres présentées dans cette exposition que l'on ait tendance à se le rappeler - dans le but de donner une visibilité encore plus grande à la photographie africaine aux États-Unis.

En même temps, beaucoup des œuvres présentées dans Snap Judgments puisaient leur inspiration précisément dans le "conceptualisme global" qui n'est ni très populaire, ni très répandu chez la plupart des praticiens en Afrique et qui donne donc plutôt un "instantané" différent de ce qui se fait d'un point de vue plus large en termes de culture visuelle. Le fait est que la "photographie d'art" est un genre relativement nouveau pour la majorité des photographes du continent. Toutefois, même avant qu'elle ne soit accessible et praticable dans beaucoup d'endroits, des artistes comme Samuel Fosso de la Centrafrique ou Youssouf Sogodogo du Mali, entre autres, ont produit des œuvres aux qualités indéniablement artistiques et ce malgré un accès limité à la "culture photographique" pour renforcer leurs inspirations.

À la différence de Snap Judgments, qui avait la tâche plutôt simple de mettre en lumière les derniers développements en matière de photographie sur le continent et dans la diaspora, les enjeux qui sous-tendent les Rencontres de Bamako s'avèrent plus chargés politiquement et socialement, notamment parce que cette biennale a lieu sur le continent. Les Rencontres sont destinées à générer - et jusqu'à un certain point, elles le font - de l'intérêt et des opportunités pour la photographie d'art sur le continent. Initiées par des photographes français et soutenues par le gouvernement français, ce festival a traversé une série de cycles, tout en construisant un vivier de participants - artistes, commissaires, chercheurs. L'édition de 1998 semble avoir été la plus "malienne" : même le titre Ja Taa ! (Prendre l'image) était en bambara, la langue véhiculaire du Mali. Suite à l'arrivée de Simon Njami qui a pris les rênes de la manifestation en tant que commissaire principal de 2001 à 2007, les Rencontres ont concentré tous leurs efforts à éveiller l'intérêt du monde de l'art international. Dans un entretien personnel réalisé en juillet 2010, Simon Njami avouait que s'il était resté commissaire principal pendant quatre éditions, c'était parce qu'il voulait que l'événement reçoive suffisamment de publicité pour devenir une institution viable après son départ. Bien qu'il y ait souvent dans les biennales des tensions entre le national et l'international, le fait que les Français, via l'opérateur culturel CulturesFrance, devenu depuis l'Institut français, continuent à financer les Rencontres et à produire ses catalogues, exacerbe les tensions locales. À un moment où les Maliens font valoir leur désir de contrôler certains aspects de ce festival et d'utiliser cette exposition comme un moteur du changement, l'Institut français semble tourner son intérêt vers la création d'une biennale contemporaine au Bénin (d'après un entretien avec Lucie Touya, chargée de mission en arts visuels à l'Institut français, en juillet 2010). Mais les Rencontres sont en train de gagner davantage de visibilité en tant qu'événement photographique d'envergure et, avec de l'espoir, continueront à être un rassemblement impressionnant dans les décennies à venir.

Ce qui s'est passé sur le plan local à Bamako grâce aux Rencontres est loin d'être insignifiant. Des centres de formation photographiques ont été créés, notamment Promo Femme (10) - Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles - qui a réellement permis à de jeunes maliennes d'avoir accès à une formation de photographe, une profession auparavant entièrement masculine. Lors des entretiens que j'ai menés auprès de photographes au Mali durant l'été 2006, bien que quelques plaintes aient concerné la manière dont CulturesFrance/l'Institut français gérait les Rencontres, personne ne regrettait leur existence, ni ne souhaitait leur disparition. En effet, elles donnent aux photographes maliens, dont le quotidien est davantage tourné vers le portrait commercial et le reportage, l'occasion d'explorer l'expression de soi et la photographie créative, auparavant inaccessibles. Toutefois, le vœu de Njami de trouver pour les Rencontres des commissaires basés sur le continent n'est pas encore exaucé, peut-être que cela viendra. L'exposition A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, qu'il a présentée au BOZAR de Bruxelles, confirmait un certain nombre d'artistes habitués du circuit des expositions de photographie africaine mentionnées ci-dessus, ainsi que quelques nouveaux venus. Avec A Useful Dream, Njami poursuit son projet, celui de rendre visibles les travaux d'artistes africains à un public basé en Europe, tout en nous rappelant qu'un nombre grandissant de photographes attend toujours de montrer leurs visions du continent - passées et présentes - et dont l'avenir sera bientôt consigné et imaginé dans des formes toujours plus variées.

1- J'entends par "conceptualisme global" cette tendance dans les expositions internationales et sur le marché de l'art à privilégier une approche conceptuelle de l'art. Tout nouveau média est considéré d'emblée comme conceptuel et les pratiques artistiques traditionnelles comme la peinture ou la photographie doivent maintenant, elles aussi, suivre cette tendance pour ne pas sembler obsolètes.



2- Lire Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, édité par Heike Behrend et Tobias Wendl, Munich, Prestel, 1998. Voir également Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa", Journal of Religion in Africa, vol. 33, no. 2 (2003), p. 129145 ; "‘Feeling Global'. The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya", African Arts, vol. 33, no. 3 (automne 2001), p. 70-77 et 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers", Visual Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 3 (2001), p. 301-320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography", Paideuma, 44 (1998), p. 139-153. Lire aussi Behrend et Jean-François Werner (éd. invités), "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 3 (2001). Lire Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana", in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, 39 (printemps 2001), p. 78-100. Voir enfin Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & Londres, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson Pub., 2002.



3- Lire Naomi Rosenblum, Une histoire mondiale de la photographie (1992) ; Michel Frizot (dir.), Nouvelle histoire de la photographie (1994) and Mary Warner Marien¸ Photography: A Cultural History (2002). De Geoffrey Batchen, lire entre autres Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002 et Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, Princeton, NJ., Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.



4- Publié en 1965 par les Éditions de Minuit.



5- Lire Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow", in Olu Oguibe et Okwui Enwezor (éd.), Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, Londres, Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, p. 88-113, de même qu'un numéro spécial d'African Arts, vol. 9, no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) consacré à la question de l'authenticité.



6- Une exposition conjointe de ces deux photographes - August Sander and Seydou Keïta: Portraiture and Social Identity - a été récemment inaugurée à New-York au Walther Collection Project Space (23 septembre 2011-10 mars 2012). Dans le mailing de lancement de l'événement, l'on pouvait lire que le travail de ces artistes avait déjà été présenté de façon dialogique lors de l'exposition inaugurale de la Walther Collection à Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, en Allemagne, en 2010 : Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, dont le commissariat était assuré par Okwui Enwezor.



7- À noter que l'ICP a davantage intérêt que le Musée Guggenheim à inclure la photographie africaine dans l'histoire de la photographie mondiale.



8- ll a également été commissaire de la Documenta 11 et des Biennales de Séville, Gwangju et de la seconde Biennale de Johannesburg.



9- Voir [le site de la galerie]

10- Pour une présentation de Promo Femme, lire : [ici]

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African Photography seen from the United States
Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.



A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.


1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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African Photography seen from the United States. Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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African Photography seen from the United States. Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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African Photography seen from the United States. Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

 

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Allison Moore

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La photographie africaine vue des États-Unis

Allison Moore

Quelles photographies africaines circulent aux États-Unis ? Et dans quels cadres ? Comment sont-elles mises en valeur et quels sont les enjeux de cette valorisation, aussi bien dans le milieu scientifique que dans celui de l'art contemporain ? Quels débats agitent les spécialistes aux États-Unis ? L'essai d'Allison Moore vise à éclaircir ces questions.

 

Appréhender la photographie africaine à travers le prisme de la recherche américaine, c'est se demander comment les œuvres de photographes africains circulent, comment elles se font connaître aux États-Unis ; autrement dit, qui soutient cette photographie en l'exposant, en écrivant à son sujet ou en documentant ses histoires, afin de permettre à un public le plus large possible de prendre conscience de ses développements actuels.
D'emblée, il faut se rendre à l'évidence : la photographie produite en Afrique ou dans la diaspora est principalement exposée et étudiée aux États-Unis et en Europe, même si cette évidence frappante est contrebalancée par des événements comme les Rencontres de Bamako au Mali ou le dynamisme de la scène photographique sud-africaine.
Par ailleurs, les expositions artistiques occidentales privilégient davantage la photographie d'art produite par les Africains de la diaspora que celle produite sur le continent, car les artistes de la diaspora ont plus recours à des concepts, des esthétiques ou même des médias (grâce à un accès facilité aux technologies numériques et aux logiciels complexes) qui séduisent un public international fasciné par la mode actuelle du "conceptualisme global" (1).

Aux États-Unis, hormis les expositions personnelles de noms comme Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé et Samuel Fosso, les deux seules expositions majeures entièrement consacrées à la photographie africaine ont été In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) et Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), toutes deux organisées par Okwui Enwezor (In/Sigh avec Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin et Octavio Zaya). Zwelethu Mthethwa et David Goldblatt ont également été célébrés individuellement : Goldblatt au Jewish Museum de New York durant l'été 2010 ; le Museum of Modern Art à New York a acheté des photos de Mthethwa, tandis que Tracy Rose a exposé au Walker Art Center de Minneapolis. Mais les artistes sud-africains occupent une position à part sur le marché de l'art international grâce au réseau de galeries et de musées de leur pays. Aussi, les expositions de photographie sud-africaine et leurs catalogues tels que Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present de Tosha Grantham (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009) pourraient-ils servir de modèles aux futures études sur la photographie entreprises sur le reste du continent, à la fois en limitant la "photographie africaine" à un contenu national et en approfondissant plusieurs aspects de cette photographie par des études critiques sérieuses.

À la différence d'Okwui Enwezor qui semble-t-il favoriserait les artistes africains issus d'une certaine élite intellectuelle, résidant pour certains en dehors de l'Afrique, les chercheurs ont tendance à privilégier la "culture visuelle", c'est-à-dire la photographie locale entendue comme entreprise commerciale et sociale, plutôt que purement artistique. Cela semble être par exemple le cas de la recherche allemande représentée par les travaux de Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl et Christraud Geary (qui vit et travaille aux États-Unis mais est d'origine allemande) (2). Cette approche met moins l'accent sur les individus que sur l'histoire culturelle du support. Le problème pointé par certains critiques est que cela ne différerait pas beaucoup des études anthropologiques qui relèguent l'art à une forme de production culturelle parmi tant d'autres. Bien que l'anthropologie ait réévalué son approche de "l'autre", par le passé, les anthropologues ont bien souvent manqué de discernement et d'autocritique, leur discours ayant entre autres servi de caution à l'oppression coloniale.

Il convient ici de souligner que la distinction faite entre la "photographie d'art" et la "culture visuelle" existe aussi dans les études sur les photographies occidentales et que ce n'est pas seulement vis-à-vis de l'Afrique qu'une approche plus "sociologique" ou "culturelle" est privilégiée. Ainsi, l'approche historique de certains chercheurs comme Geoffrey Batchen, Naomi Rosenblum et Michel Frizot couvre-t-elle l'intégralité de la production photographique, qu'elle soit scientifique, médicale, vernaculaire, journalistique, artistique ou conceptuelle (3).

En revanche, une approche plus classique adoptée par les historiens de l'art se concentrera uniquement sur l'étude des aspects esthétiques de la photographie considérée ici comme un art, allant même jusqu'à réduire l'histoire de la photographie du XIXe siècle à un discours purement esthétique. Il serait donc sans doute utile que les chercheurs et les commissaires de la photographie africaine, souvent en désaccord dans leurs approches méthodologiques respectives, reconnaissent qu'un schisme identique existe aussi au sein de l'histoire de la photographie occidentale et qu'il peut être pertinent d'étudier aussi cette photographie occidentale à travers le filtre de l'anthropologie ou de la sociologie, comme l'a fait Pierre Bourdieu dans Un art moyen. Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (4).

Aux États-Unis, les spécialistes d'art africain dit "traditionnel" se réfèrent également à la "culture visuelle", puisque la définition occidentale de l'art destiné aux musées ne s'applique pas aux objets ou rituels produits dans les sociétés africaines précoloniales. La préférence américaine pour les "traditions" précoloniales et la notion désuète d'"authenticité", construite à l'origine par les chercheurs occidentaux eux-mêmes (5), ont "détourné" pendant de nombreuses décennies la recherche africaniste des mouvements artistiques modernes et contemporains, y compris de la photographie, de la vidéo et du cinéma. En 1991, Susan Vogel organise Africa Explores au Center for African Arts à New York : cette exposition majeure va susciter une importante réaction de la critique, bien qu'il faille également noter le rôle joué par de précédentes expositions qui ont été moins remarquées (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974 ; Contemporary African Art, Howard University, 1977 ; Contemporary African Artists?: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum à Harlem, 1990).

Aborder l'histoire de la photographie en Afrique sous l'angle de la "culture visuelle" rejoint les approches méthodologiques des chercheurs spécialisés dans les arts africains précoloniaux et de certains historiens de la photographie. Mais qu'en est-il de la photographie d'art, celle qui est produite pour les musées occidentaux et qui aborde des questions en relation avec les préoccupations occidentales, internationales de l'art et de l'esthétique ? Bien que cette pratique de la photographie tournée vers l'Occident soit relativement nouvelle dans beaucoup de régions d'Afrique, elle gagne rapidement du terrain, surtout dans les centres urbains où existent des écoles de photographie, des regroupements d'artistes ou des centres d'art. Serait-il possible alors, tant dans le milieu de la recherche que celui de l'art, de combiner les facteurs esthétique et commercial, artistique et social ?

Abolir ces frontières est certainement ce que proposait Enwezor, en désignant Keïta comme un maître moderne, dans la veine du portraitiste allemand August Sander (6). Le fait est que le champ de la photographie est bien plus désordonné que nous suggèrent ces classifications tranchées. Presque tous les photographes dits "artistes" ont fait de la photographie commerciale et beaucoup de photographes commerciaux se considèrent comme des créateurs dans leur domaine. Dans Snap Judgments, Enwezor abordait également la photographie contemporaine comme un mélange de pratiques, comprenant la photographie de mode et le portrait documentaire (mais non commercial) parmi les œuvres à orientation plus artistique. En même temps, cette exposition avait pour objectif de fuir la vision hégémonique de la photographie africaine se résumant au portrait de studio commercial, pour ouvrir le public américain à d'autres genres et pratiques.

À long terme, on peut penser que la majorité des portraitistes du continent seront simplement appréciés pour le rôle qu'ils jouent au sein de leurs communautés, tandis qu'un petit nombre sera considéré pour son talent artistique, tout comme cela se passe dans les pays occidentaux. Par ailleurs, il est souhaitable qu'à l'avenir de nouveaux corpus de photographies soient valorisés, notamment ceux issus des sciences, de la médecine ou de l'anthropologie, ainsi que les fonds d'archives documentaires appartenant aux agences de presse. Le champ doit rester ouvert aux différentes approches méthodologiques et aux nouvelles découvertes, car il faudrait beaucoup plus de recherches pour combler nos connaissances lacunaires sur la photographie en Afrique. Les champs de la culture visuelle et de l'art ne devraient pas rester coupés l'un de l'autre, ni pris dans des désaccords insignifiants qui divisent. Un champ débattu est quelque chose de positif, mais les critiques acerbes ne sont pas nécessaires et ne font que dissuader les chercheurs voulant s'y engager, par crainte d'être attaqués. En ce sens, le travail pionnier d'Enwezor a été absolument essentiel dans le domaine de la photographie africaine et l'on ne peut sous-estimer son influence.

Aux États-Unis, la recherche universitaire sur la photographie africaine s'est surtout développée dans les départements d'anthropologie et d'études africaines, plutôt qu'en histoire de l'art. Ces nouvelles approches de l'histoire de la photographie, qui mettent l'accent sur les études culturelles et qui considèrent toute photographie comme de la "culture visuelle", en contraste avec une minorité de photographies envisagées comme de "l'art", signifient que les historiens de la photographie viennent aux photographies africaines avec une ouverture disciplinaire marquée. D'un autre côté, ils semblent ne pas avoir suffisamment développé de savoirs interdisciplinaires, pour être à même d'analyser toute production culturelle. De plus, à l'instar des spécialistes de l'art africain qui ont tendance à ignorer l'art contemporain, ceux qui travaillent sur la photographie africaine n'ont parfois pas la moindre connaissance des stratégies artistiques contemporaines, ce qui risque d'altérer leur compréhension de la photographie d'art visible sur le marché international, tandis que les commissaires, eux, s'intéressent moins aux productions photographiques qui ne se conforment pas aux normes esthétiques et conceptuelles dictées par le marché de l'art mondial.

À considérer ces différentes approches dans les milieux de la recherche et de l'art aux États-Unis, il devient clair que toutes sont nécessaires et qu'elles peuvent revêtir des fonctions différentes : montrer que la photographie contemporaine est importante afin d'ouvrir un nouveau champ ; que la recherche l'est tout autant afin de documenter l'histoire et d'élaborer des théories plus larges. Mais considérer les approches des chercheurs et celles des commissaires permet aussi de pointer quelques-uns des conflits qui ont eu lieu entre eux - des conflits qui ne devraient pas durcir les positions au point de refuser le débat et de mettre fin au dialogue, mais qui devraient au contraire remettre en cause les définitions et questionner les frontières de manière productive, en ouvrant ainsi d'infinies possibilités pour la recherche à venir.

Pour avoir travaillé sur l'exposition Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (International Center of Photography de New York, 2006) et mené des recherches sur les Rencontres de Bamako, je peux affirmer que ces deux événements avaient des perspectives très différentes. Snap Judgments a en effet été conçue comme la suite, dix ans plus tard, de In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present, présenté au Guggenheim Museum de New York. À la différence de la Biennale de Bamako, qui organise son exposition panafricaine sur appel à candidatures, celle-ci était le choix totalement assumé d'un commissaire, Okwui Enwezor, qui avait réalisé pour ce faire plusieurs courtes missions de prospection en Afrique et en Europe. Si cette exposition présentait peu d'artistes basés aux États-Unis, elle mettait par contre en valeur le travail de photographes basés en Europe et en Afrique, pour certains "nouveaux venus" (comme Mamadou Gomis ou Michael Tsegaye). Montée à New York tout comme In/Sight, même si le lieu d'exposition, ici l'International Center of Photography (ICP), avait changé (7), Snap Judgments était une exposition singulière, destinée à fournir un instantané, si l'on peut dire, de l'activité photographique contemporaine sur le continent et dans la diaspora.

Par la suite, en tant que commissaire adjoint de l'ICP, Enwezor a organisé Archive Fever (2008), prouvant ainsi qu'il était capable de varier les sujets et les supports et refusant d'être catalogué uniquement comme un commissaire pour l'Afrique contemporaine (8). L'impact de Snap Judgments, où les artistes sud-africains étaient fortement représentés, est bien entendu difficile à mesurer, surtout en Afrique, mais l'un de ses principaux effets a été de donner davantage de visibilité internationale et américaine à certains artistes. Ainsi, Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko est probablement l'artiste qui a le plus bénéficié de Snap Judgments : par la suite, elle a exposé à la galerie Kyle Kauffman (9) à New York en 2007 et a tout dernièrement fait partie de l'exposition Global Africa Project au Museum of Modern Arts and Design de New York (2010-2011). Dans l'ensemble, il semblerait que les artistes qui étaient déjà établis aient été confirmés dans leur position et que ceux qui ne l'étaient pas aient gagné en reconnaissance, sans pour autant faire réellement décoller leur carrière. Si à ce jour Snap Judgments n'a pas eu d'impact retentissant sur la carrière de la plupart de ces artistes - on ne doit pas oublier que les choses fonctionnent lentement, par effet multiplicateur, et que c'est aux artistes de savoir "tirer avantage" du fait d'être exposés sur la scène internationale -, c'est notamment parce que ce n'était pas là la priorité d'Enwezor en tant que commissaire. En effet, il faut s'éloigner d'une vision centrée sur l'artiste pour comprendre les objectifs d'un commissaire, qui seront toujours ambivalents, puisqu'il fonctionne aujourd'hui autant comme un critique d'art que comme celui qui détermine les canons ou agit comme "découvreur" de nouveaux talents. C'est pourquoi un commissaire ne peut pas, et ne doit pas, être trop concerné par la carrière d'un artiste. Ce qu'Enwezor a réussi à faire, c'est de présenter à un public américain des œuvres africaines qui dépassent largement la tradition du portrait - établie dans la perception publique depuis In/Sight, bien qu'il y ait eu une plus grande variété d'œuvres présentées dans cette exposition que l'on ait tendance à se le rappeler - dans le but de donner une visibilité encore plus grande à la photographie africaine aux États-Unis.

En même temps, beaucoup des œuvres présentées dans Snap Judgments puisaient leur inspiration précisément dans le "conceptualisme global" qui n'est ni très populaire, ni très répandu chez la plupart des praticiens en Afrique et qui donne donc plutôt un "instantané" différent de ce qui se fait d'un point de vue plus large en termes de culture visuelle. Le fait est que la "photographie d'art" est un genre relativement nouveau pour la majorité des photographes du continent. Toutefois, même avant qu'elle ne soit accessible et praticable dans beaucoup d'endroits, des artistes comme Samuel Fosso de la Centrafrique ou Youssouf Sogodogo du Mali, entre autres, ont produit des œuvres aux qualités indéniablement artistiques et ce malgré un accès limité à la "culture photographique" pour renforcer leurs inspirations.

À la différence de Snap Judgments, qui avait la tâche plutôt simple de mettre en lumière les derniers développements en matière de photographie sur le continent et dans la diaspora, les enjeux qui sous-tendent les Rencontres de Bamako s'avèrent plus chargés politiquement et socialement, notamment parce que cette biennale a lieu sur le continent. Les Rencontres sont destinées à générer - et jusqu'à un certain point, elles le font - de l'intérêt et des opportunités pour la photographie d'art sur le continent. Initiées par des photographes français et soutenues par le gouvernement français, ce festival a traversé une série de cycles, tout en construisant un vivier de participants - artistes, commissaires, chercheurs. L'édition de 1998 semble avoir été la plus "malienne" : même le titre Ja Taa ! (Prendre l'image) était en bambara, la langue véhiculaire du Mali. Suite à l'arrivée de Simon Njami qui a pris les rênes de la manifestation en tant que commissaire principal de 2001 à 2007, les Rencontres ont concentré tous leurs efforts à éveiller l'intérêt du monde de l'art international. Dans un entretien personnel réalisé en juillet 2010, Simon Njami avouait que s'il était resté commissaire principal pendant quatre éditions, c'était parce qu'il voulait que l'événement reçoive suffisamment de publicité pour devenir une institution viable après son départ. Bien qu'il y ait souvent dans les biennales des tensions entre le national et l'international, le fait que les Français, via l'opérateur culturel CulturesFrance, devenu depuis l'Institut français, continuent à financer les Rencontres et à produire ses catalogues, exacerbe les tensions locales. À un moment où les Maliens font valoir leur désir de contrôler certains aspects de ce festival et d'utiliser cette exposition comme un moteur du changement, l'Institut français semble tourner son intérêt vers la création d'une biennale contemporaine au Bénin (d'après un entretien avec Lucie Touya, chargée de mission en arts visuels à l'Institut français, en juillet 2010). Mais les Rencontres sont en train de gagner davantage de visibilité en tant qu'événement photographique d'envergure et, avec de l'espoir, continueront à être un rassemblement impressionnant dans les décennies à venir.

Ce qui s'est passé sur le plan local à Bamako grâce aux Rencontres est loin d'être insignifiant. Des centres de formation photographiques ont été créés, notamment Promo Femme (10) - Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles - qui a réellement permis à de jeunes maliennes d'avoir accès à une formation de photographe, une profession auparavant entièrement masculine. Lors des entretiens que j'ai menés auprès de photographes au Mali durant l'été 2006, bien que quelques plaintes aient concerné la manière dont CulturesFrance/l'Institut français gérait les Rencontres, personne ne regrettait leur existence, ni ne souhaitait leur disparition. En effet, elles donnent aux photographes maliens, dont le quotidien est davantage tourné vers le portrait commercial et le reportage, l'occasion d'explorer l'expression de soi et la photographie créative, auparavant inaccessibles. Toutefois, le vœu de Njami de trouver pour les Rencontres des commissaires basés sur le continent n'est pas encore exaucé, peut-être que cela viendra. L'exposition A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, qu'il a présentée au BOZAR de Bruxelles, confirmait un certain nombre d'artistes habitués du circuit des expositions de photographie africaine mentionnées ci-dessus, ainsi que quelques nouveaux venus. Avec A Useful Dream, Njami poursuit son projet, celui de rendre visibles les travaux d'artistes africains à un public basé en Europe, tout en nous rappelant qu'un nombre grandissant de photographes attend toujours de montrer leurs visions du continent - passées et présentes - et dont l'avenir sera bientôt consigné et imaginé dans des formes toujours plus variées.

1- J'entends par "conceptualisme global" cette tendance dans les expositions internationales et sur le marché de l'art à privilégier une approche conceptuelle de l'art. Tout nouveau média est considéré d'emblée comme conceptuel et les pratiques artistiques traditionnelles comme la peinture ou la photographie doivent maintenant, elles aussi, suivre cette tendance pour ne pas sembler obsolètes.



2- Lire Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, édité par Heike Behrend et Tobias Wendl, Munich, Prestel, 1998. Voir également Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa", Journal of Religion in Africa, vol. 33, no. 2 (2003), p. 129145 ; "‘Feeling Global'. The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya", African Arts, vol. 33, no. 3 (automne 2001), p. 70-77 et 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers", Visual Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 3 (2001), p. 301-320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography", Paideuma, 44 (1998), p. 139-153. Lire aussi Behrend et Jean-François Werner (éd. invités), "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 3 (2001). Lire Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana", in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, 39 (printemps 2001), p. 78-100. Voir enfin Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & Londres, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson Pub., 2002.



3- Lire Naomi Rosenblum, Une histoire mondiale de la photographie (1992) ; Michel Frizot (dir.), Nouvelle histoire de la photographie (1994) and Mary Warner Marien¸ Photography: A Cultural History (2002). De Geoffrey Batchen, lire entre autres Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002 et Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, Princeton, NJ., Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.



4- Publié en 1965 par les Éditions de Minuit.



5- Lire Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow", in Olu Oguibe et Okwui Enwezor (éd.), Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, Londres, Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, p. 88-113, de même qu'un numéro spécial d'African Arts, vol. 9, no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) consacré à la question de l'authenticité.



6- Une exposition conjointe de ces deux photographes - August Sander and Seydou Keïta: Portraiture and Social Identity - a été récemment inaugurée à New-York au Walther Collection Project Space (23 septembre 2011-10 mars 2012). Dans le mailing de lancement de l'événement, l'on pouvait lire que le travail de ces artistes avait déjà été présenté de façon dialogique lors de l'exposition inaugurale de la Walther Collection à Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, en Allemagne, en 2010 : Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, dont le commissariat était assuré par Okwui Enwezor.



7- À noter que l'ICP a davantage intérêt que le Musée Guggenheim à inclure la photographie africaine dans l'histoire de la photographie mondiale.



8- ll a également été commissaire de la Documenta 11 et des Biennales de Séville, Gwangju et de la seconde Biennale de Johannesburg.



9- Voir [le site de la galerie]

10- Pour une présentation de Promo Femme, lire : [ici]

#

African Photography seen from the United States
Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.



A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.


1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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African Photography seen from the United States. Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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African Photography seen from the United States. Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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African Photography seen from the United States. Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

 

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A fotografia africana vista dos Estados Unidos (Fr) // African Photography seen from the United States

Allison Moore

English

Français

La photographie africaine vue des États-Unis

Allison Moore

Quelles photographies africaines circulent aux États-Unis ? Et dans quels cadres ? Comment sont-elles mises en valeur et quels sont les enjeux de cette valorisation, aussi bien dans le milieu scientifique que dans celui de l'art contemporain ? Quels débats agitent les spécialistes aux États-Unis ? L'essai d'Allison Moore vise à éclaircir ces questions.

 

Appréhender la photographie africaine à travers le prisme de la recherche américaine, c'est se demander comment les œuvres de photographes africains circulent, comment elles se font connaître aux États-Unis ; autrement dit, qui soutient cette photographie en l'exposant, en écrivant à son sujet ou en documentant ses histoires, afin de permettre à un public le plus large possible de prendre conscience de ses développements actuels.
D'emblée, il faut se rendre à l'évidence : la photographie produite en Afrique ou dans la diaspora est principalement exposée et étudiée aux États-Unis et en Europe, même si cette évidence frappante est contrebalancée par des événements comme les Rencontres de Bamako au Mali ou le dynamisme de la scène photographique sud-africaine.
Par ailleurs, les expositions artistiques occidentales privilégient davantage la photographie d'art produite par les Africains de la diaspora que celle produite sur le continent, car les artistes de la diaspora ont plus recours à des concepts, des esthétiques ou même des médias (grâce à un accès facilité aux technologies numériques et aux logiciels complexes) qui séduisent un public international fasciné par la mode actuelle du "conceptualisme global" (1).

Aux États-Unis, hormis les expositions personnelles de noms comme Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé et Samuel Fosso, les deux seules expositions majeures entièrement consacrées à la photographie africaine ont été In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) et Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), toutes deux organisées par Okwui Enwezor (In/Sigh avec Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin et Octavio Zaya). Zwelethu Mthethwa et David Goldblatt ont également été célébrés individuellement : Goldblatt au Jewish Museum de New York durant l'été 2010 ; le Museum of Modern Art à New York a acheté des photos de Mthethwa, tandis que Tracy Rose a exposé au Walker Art Center de Minneapolis. Mais les artistes sud-africains occupent une position à part sur le marché de l'art international grâce au réseau de galeries et de musées de leur pays. Aussi, les expositions de photographie sud-africaine et leurs catalogues tels que Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present de Tosha Grantham (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009) pourraient-ils servir de modèles aux futures études sur la photographie entreprises sur le reste du continent, à la fois en limitant la "photographie africaine" à un contenu national et en approfondissant plusieurs aspects de cette photographie par des études critiques sérieuses.

À la différence d'Okwui Enwezor qui semble-t-il favoriserait les artistes africains issus d'une certaine élite intellectuelle, résidant pour certains en dehors de l'Afrique, les chercheurs ont tendance à privilégier la "culture visuelle", c'est-à-dire la photographie locale entendue comme entreprise commerciale et sociale, plutôt que purement artistique. Cela semble être par exemple le cas de la recherche allemande représentée par les travaux de Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl et Christraud Geary (qui vit et travaille aux États-Unis mais est d'origine allemande) (2). Cette approche met moins l'accent sur les individus que sur l'histoire culturelle du support. Le problème pointé par certains critiques est que cela ne différerait pas beaucoup des études anthropologiques qui relèguent l'art à une forme de production culturelle parmi tant d'autres. Bien que l'anthropologie ait réévalué son approche de "l'autre", par le passé, les anthropologues ont bien souvent manqué de discernement et d'autocritique, leur discours ayant entre autres servi de caution à l'oppression coloniale.

Il convient ici de souligner que la distinction faite entre la "photographie d'art" et la "culture visuelle" existe aussi dans les études sur les photographies occidentales et que ce n'est pas seulement vis-à-vis de l'Afrique qu'une approche plus "sociologique" ou "culturelle" est privilégiée. Ainsi, l'approche historique de certains chercheurs comme Geoffrey Batchen, Naomi Rosenblum et Michel Frizot couvre-t-elle l'intégralité de la production photographique, qu'elle soit scientifique, médicale, vernaculaire, journalistique, artistique ou conceptuelle (3).

En revanche, une approche plus classique adoptée par les historiens de l'art se concentrera uniquement sur l'étude des aspects esthétiques de la photographie considérée ici comme un art, allant même jusqu'à réduire l'histoire de la photographie du XIXe siècle à un discours purement esthétique. Il serait donc sans doute utile que les chercheurs et les commissaires de la photographie africaine, souvent en désaccord dans leurs approches méthodologiques respectives, reconnaissent qu'un schisme identique existe aussi au sein de l'histoire de la photographie occidentale et qu'il peut être pertinent d'étudier aussi cette photographie occidentale à travers le filtre de l'anthropologie ou de la sociologie, comme l'a fait Pierre Bourdieu dans Un art moyen. Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (4).

Aux États-Unis, les spécialistes d'art africain dit "traditionnel" se réfèrent également à la "culture visuelle", puisque la définition occidentale de l'art destiné aux musées ne s'applique pas aux objets ou rituels produits dans les sociétés africaines précoloniales. La préférence américaine pour les "traditions" précoloniales et la notion désuète d'"authenticité", construite à l'origine par les chercheurs occidentaux eux-mêmes (5), ont "détourné" pendant de nombreuses décennies la recherche africaniste des mouvements artistiques modernes et contemporains, y compris de la photographie, de la vidéo et du cinéma. En 1991, Susan Vogel organise Africa Explores au Center for African Arts à New York : cette exposition majeure va susciter une importante réaction de la critique, bien qu'il faille également noter le rôle joué par de précédentes expositions qui ont été moins remarquées (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974 ; Contemporary African Art, Howard University, 1977 ; Contemporary African Artists?: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum à Harlem, 1990).

Aborder l'histoire de la photographie en Afrique sous l'angle de la "culture visuelle" rejoint les approches méthodologiques des chercheurs spécialisés dans les arts africains précoloniaux et de certains historiens de la photographie. Mais qu'en est-il de la photographie d'art, celle qui est produite pour les musées occidentaux et qui aborde des questions en relation avec les préoccupations occidentales, internationales de l'art et de l'esthétique ? Bien que cette pratique de la photographie tournée vers l'Occident soit relativement nouvelle dans beaucoup de régions d'Afrique, elle gagne rapidement du terrain, surtout dans les centres urbains où existent des écoles de photographie, des regroupements d'artistes ou des centres d'art. Serait-il possible alors, tant dans le milieu de la recherche que celui de l'art, de combiner les facteurs esthétique et commercial, artistique et social ?

Abolir ces frontières est certainement ce que proposait Enwezor, en désignant Keïta comme un maître moderne, dans la veine du portraitiste allemand August Sander (6). Le fait est que le champ de la photographie est bien plus désordonné que nous suggèrent ces classifications tranchées. Presque tous les photographes dits "artistes" ont fait de la photographie commerciale et beaucoup de photographes commerciaux se considèrent comme des créateurs dans leur domaine. Dans Snap Judgments, Enwezor abordait également la photographie contemporaine comme un mélange de pratiques, comprenant la photographie de mode et le portrait documentaire (mais non commercial) parmi les œuvres à orientation plus artistique. En même temps, cette exposition avait pour objectif de fuir la vision hégémonique de la photographie africaine se résumant au portrait de studio commercial, pour ouvrir le public américain à d'autres genres et pratiques.

À long terme, on peut penser que la majorité des portraitistes du continent seront simplement appréciés pour le rôle qu'ils jouent au sein de leurs communautés, tandis qu'un petit nombre sera considéré pour son talent artistique, tout comme cela se passe dans les pays occidentaux. Par ailleurs, il est souhaitable qu'à l'avenir de nouveaux corpus de photographies soient valorisés, notamment ceux issus des sciences, de la médecine ou de l'anthropologie, ainsi que les fonds d'archives documentaires appartenant aux agences de presse. Le champ doit rester ouvert aux différentes approches méthodologiques et aux nouvelles découvertes, car il faudrait beaucoup plus de recherches pour combler nos connaissances lacunaires sur la photographie en Afrique. Les champs de la culture visuelle et de l'art ne devraient pas rester coupés l'un de l'autre, ni pris dans des désaccords insignifiants qui divisent. Un champ débattu est quelque chose de positif, mais les critiques acerbes ne sont pas nécessaires et ne font que dissuader les chercheurs voulant s'y engager, par crainte d'être attaqués. En ce sens, le travail pionnier d'Enwezor a été absolument essentiel dans le domaine de la photographie africaine et l'on ne peut sous-estimer son influence.

Aux États-Unis, la recherche universitaire sur la photographie africaine s'est surtout développée dans les départements d'anthropologie et d'études africaines, plutôt qu'en histoire de l'art. Ces nouvelles approches de l'histoire de la photographie, qui mettent l'accent sur les études culturelles et qui considèrent toute photographie comme de la "culture visuelle", en contraste avec une minorité de photographies envisagées comme de "l'art", signifient que les historiens de la photographie viennent aux photographies africaines avec une ouverture disciplinaire marquée. D'un autre côté, ils semblent ne pas avoir suffisamment développé de savoirs interdisciplinaires, pour être à même d'analyser toute production culturelle. De plus, à l'instar des spécialistes de l'art africain qui ont tendance à ignorer l'art contemporain, ceux qui travaillent sur la photographie africaine n'ont parfois pas la moindre connaissance des stratégies artistiques contemporaines, ce qui risque d'altérer leur compréhension de la photographie d'art visible sur le marché international, tandis que les commissaires, eux, s'intéressent moins aux productions photographiques qui ne se conforment pas aux normes esthétiques et conceptuelles dictées par le marché de l'art mondial.

À considérer ces différentes approches dans les milieux de la recherche et de l'art aux États-Unis, il devient clair que toutes sont nécessaires et qu'elles peuvent revêtir des fonctions différentes : montrer que la photographie contemporaine est importante afin d'ouvrir un nouveau champ ; que la recherche l'est tout autant afin de documenter l'histoire et d'élaborer des théories plus larges. Mais considérer les approches des chercheurs et celles des commissaires permet aussi de pointer quelques-uns des conflits qui ont eu lieu entre eux - des conflits qui ne devraient pas durcir les positions au point de refuser le débat et de mettre fin au dialogue, mais qui devraient au contraire remettre en cause les définitions et questionner les frontières de manière productive, en ouvrant ainsi d'infinies possibilités pour la recherche à venir.

Pour avoir travaillé sur l'exposition Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (International Center of Photography de New York, 2006) et mené des recherches sur les Rencontres de Bamako, je peux affirmer que ces deux événements avaient des perspectives très différentes. Snap Judgments a en effet été conçue comme la suite, dix ans plus tard, de In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present, présenté au Guggenheim Museum de New York. À la différence de la Biennale de Bamako, qui organise son exposition panafricaine sur appel à candidatures, celle-ci était le choix totalement assumé d'un commissaire, Okwui Enwezor, qui avait réalisé pour ce faire plusieurs courtes missions de prospection en Afrique et en Europe. Si cette exposition présentait peu d'artistes basés aux États-Unis, elle mettait par contre en valeur le travail de photographes basés en Europe et en Afrique, pour certains "nouveaux venus" (comme Mamadou Gomis ou Michael Tsegaye). Montée à New York tout comme In/Sight, même si le lieu d'exposition, ici l'International Center of Photography (ICP), avait changé (7), Snap Judgments était une exposition singulière, destinée à fournir un instantané, si l'on peut dire, de l'activité photographique contemporaine sur le continent et dans la diaspora.

Par la suite, en tant que commissaire adjoint de l'ICP, Enwezor a organisé Archive Fever (2008), prouvant ainsi qu'il était capable de varier les sujets et les supports et refusant d'être catalogué uniquement comme un commissaire pour l'Afrique contemporaine (8). L'impact de Snap Judgments, où les artistes sud-africains étaient fortement représentés, est bien entendu difficile à mesurer, surtout en Afrique, mais l'un de ses principaux effets a été de donner davantage de visibilité internationale et américaine à certains artistes. Ainsi, Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko est probablement l'artiste qui a le plus bénéficié de Snap Judgments : par la suite, elle a exposé à la galerie Kyle Kauffman (9) à New York en 2007 et a tout dernièrement fait partie de l'exposition Global Africa Project au Museum of Modern Arts and Design de New York (2010-2011). Dans l'ensemble, il semblerait que les artistes qui étaient déjà établis aient été confirmés dans leur position et que ceux qui ne l'étaient pas aient gagné en reconnaissance, sans pour autant faire réellement décoller leur carrière. Si à ce jour Snap Judgments n'a pas eu d'impact retentissant sur la carrière de la plupart de ces artistes - on ne doit pas oublier que les choses fonctionnent lentement, par effet multiplicateur, et que c'est aux artistes de savoir "tirer avantage" du fait d'être exposés sur la scène internationale -, c'est notamment parce que ce n'était pas là la priorité d'Enwezor en tant que commissaire. En effet, il faut s'éloigner d'une vision centrée sur l'artiste pour comprendre les objectifs d'un commissaire, qui seront toujours ambivalents, puisqu'il fonctionne aujourd'hui autant comme un critique d'art que comme celui qui détermine les canons ou agit comme "découvreur" de nouveaux talents. C'est pourquoi un commissaire ne peut pas, et ne doit pas, être trop concerné par la carrière d'un artiste. Ce qu'Enwezor a réussi à faire, c'est de présenter à un public américain des œuvres africaines qui dépassent largement la tradition du portrait - établie dans la perception publique depuis In/Sight, bien qu'il y ait eu une plus grande variété d'œuvres présentées dans cette exposition que l'on ait tendance à se le rappeler - dans le but de donner une visibilité encore plus grande à la photographie africaine aux États-Unis.

En même temps, beaucoup des œuvres présentées dans Snap Judgments puisaient leur inspiration précisément dans le "conceptualisme global" qui n'est ni très populaire, ni très répandu chez la plupart des praticiens en Afrique et qui donne donc plutôt un "instantané" différent de ce qui se fait d'un point de vue plus large en termes de culture visuelle. Le fait est que la "photographie d'art" est un genre relativement nouveau pour la majorité des photographes du continent. Toutefois, même avant qu'elle ne soit accessible et praticable dans beaucoup d'endroits, des artistes comme Samuel Fosso de la Centrafrique ou Youssouf Sogodogo du Mali, entre autres, ont produit des œuvres aux qualités indéniablement artistiques et ce malgré un accès limité à la "culture photographique" pour renforcer leurs inspirations.

À la différence de Snap Judgments, qui avait la tâche plutôt simple de mettre en lumière les derniers développements en matière de photographie sur le continent et dans la diaspora, les enjeux qui sous-tendent les Rencontres de Bamako s'avèrent plus chargés politiquement et socialement, notamment parce que cette biennale a lieu sur le continent. Les Rencontres sont destinées à générer - et jusqu'à un certain point, elles le font - de l'intérêt et des opportunités pour la photographie d'art sur le continent. Initiées par des photographes français et soutenues par le gouvernement français, ce festival a traversé une série de cycles, tout en construisant un vivier de participants - artistes, commissaires, chercheurs. L'édition de 1998 semble avoir été la plus "malienne" : même le titre Ja Taa ! (Prendre l'image) était en bambara, la langue véhiculaire du Mali. Suite à l'arrivée de Simon Njami qui a pris les rênes de la manifestation en tant que commissaire principal de 2001 à 2007, les Rencontres ont concentré tous leurs efforts à éveiller l'intérêt du monde de l'art international. Dans un entretien personnel réalisé en juillet 2010, Simon Njami avouait que s'il était resté commissaire principal pendant quatre éditions, c'était parce qu'il voulait que l'événement reçoive suffisamment de publicité pour devenir une institution viable après son départ. Bien qu'il y ait souvent dans les biennales des tensions entre le national et l'international, le fait que les Français, via l'opérateur culturel CulturesFrance, devenu depuis l'Institut français, continuent à financer les Rencontres et à produire ses catalogues, exacerbe les tensions locales. À un moment où les Maliens font valoir leur désir de contrôler certains aspects de ce festival et d'utiliser cette exposition comme un moteur du changement, l'Institut français semble tourner son intérêt vers la création d'une biennale contemporaine au Bénin (d'après un entretien avec Lucie Touya, chargée de mission en arts visuels à l'Institut français, en juillet 2010). Mais les Rencontres sont en train de gagner davantage de visibilité en tant qu'événement photographique d'envergure et, avec de l'espoir, continueront à être un rassemblement impressionnant dans les décennies à venir.

Ce qui s'est passé sur le plan local à Bamako grâce aux Rencontres est loin d'être insignifiant. Des centres de formation photographiques ont été créés, notamment Promo Femme (10) - Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles - qui a réellement permis à de jeunes maliennes d'avoir accès à une formation de photographe, une profession auparavant entièrement masculine. Lors des entretiens que j'ai menés auprès de photographes au Mali durant l'été 2006, bien que quelques plaintes aient concerné la manière dont CulturesFrance/l'Institut français gérait les Rencontres, personne ne regrettait leur existence, ni ne souhaitait leur disparition. En effet, elles donnent aux photographes maliens, dont le quotidien est davantage tourné vers le portrait commercial et le reportage, l'occasion d'explorer l'expression de soi et la photographie créative, auparavant inaccessibles. Toutefois, le vœu de Njami de trouver pour les Rencontres des commissaires basés sur le continent n'est pas encore exaucé, peut-être que cela viendra. L'exposition A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, qu'il a présentée au BOZAR de Bruxelles, confirmait un certain nombre d'artistes habitués du circuit des expositions de photographie africaine mentionnées ci-dessus, ainsi que quelques nouveaux venus. Avec A Useful Dream, Njami poursuit son projet, celui de rendre visibles les travaux d'artistes africains à un public basé en Europe, tout en nous rappelant qu'un nombre grandissant de photographes attend toujours de montrer leurs visions du continent - passées et présentes - et dont l'avenir sera bientôt consigné et imaginé dans des formes toujours plus variées.

1- J'entends par "conceptualisme global" cette tendance dans les expositions internationales et sur le marché de l'art à privilégier une approche conceptuelle de l'art. Tout nouveau média est considéré d'emblée comme conceptuel et les pratiques artistiques traditionnelles comme la peinture ou la photographie doivent maintenant, elles aussi, suivre cette tendance pour ne pas sembler obsolètes.



2- Lire Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, édité par Heike Behrend et Tobias Wendl, Munich, Prestel, 1998. Voir également Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa", Journal of Religion in Africa, vol. 33, no. 2 (2003), p. 129145 ; "‘Feeling Global'. The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya", African Arts, vol. 33, no. 3 (automne 2001), p. 70-77 et 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers", Visual Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 3 (2001), p. 301-320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography", Paideuma, 44 (1998), p. 139-153. Lire aussi Behrend et Jean-François Werner (éd. invités), "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 3 (2001). Lire Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana", in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, 39 (printemps 2001), p. 78-100. Voir enfin Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & Londres, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson Pub., 2002.



3- Lire Naomi Rosenblum, Une histoire mondiale de la photographie (1992) ; Michel Frizot (dir.), Nouvelle histoire de la photographie (1994) and Mary Warner Marien¸ Photography: A Cultural History (2002). De Geoffrey Batchen, lire entre autres Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002 et Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, Princeton, NJ., Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.



4- Publié en 1965 par les Éditions de Minuit.



5- Lire Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow", in Olu Oguibe et Okwui Enwezor (éd.), Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, Londres, Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, p. 88-113, de même qu'un numéro spécial d'African Arts, vol. 9, no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) consacré à la question de l'authenticité.



6- Une exposition conjointe de ces deux photographes - August Sander and Seydou Keïta: Portraiture and Social Identity - a été récemment inaugurée à New-York au Walther Collection Project Space (23 septembre 2011-10 mars 2012). Dans le mailing de lancement de l'événement, l'on pouvait lire que le travail de ces artistes avait déjà été présenté de façon dialogique lors de l'exposition inaugurale de la Walther Collection à Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, en Allemagne, en 2010 : Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, dont le commissariat était assuré par Okwui Enwezor.



7- À noter que l'ICP a davantage intérêt que le Musée Guggenheim à inclure la photographie africaine dans l'histoire de la photographie mondiale.



8- ll a également été commissaire de la Documenta 11 et des Biennales de Séville, Gwangju et de la seconde Biennale de Johannesburg.



9- Voir [le site de la galerie]

10- Pour une présentation de Promo Femme, lire : [ici]

#

African Photography seen from the United States
Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.



A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.


1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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African Photography seen from the United States. Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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African Photography seen from the United States. Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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African Photography seen from the United States. Allison Moore

How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

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How does African photography circulate in the United States? In what institutions is it shown? How does its meaning change according to the context in which it is shown, whether as anthropological documents or as contemporary art? What are the debates about African photography among scholars, curators and critics in the United States? The essay by Allison Moore attempts to answer these questions.

To understand African photography in relation to American scholarship requires that we examine the question of how photographs by Africans are circulated and publicized within the US: i.e. who supports photography by exhibiting it, writing about it, or documenting its histories, thus allowing a wider audience to become aware of current developments.?It is immediately striking and well-known that African photographic production and its resultant scholarship and exhibitions mostly take place in different politico-geographies. By and large, the photography that is produced in Africa and the diaspora is exhibited and written about in the US and Europe, although Mali's Bamako Biennale and the dynamic exhibition scene in South Africa are two important exceptions to this general rule. The art photography produced by Africans in the diaspora tends to be privileged in Western art exhibitions over much photography made on the continent because diasporic artists tend to use concepts, aesthetics, and even media (access to and knowledge of digital technologies and complex software programs) that appeal to an international audience fascinated by the current mode of "global conceptualism." (1)

In the US there have been relatively few exhibitions of African photography, however, to even prove this general point. In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996) and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), both curated by Owkui Enwezor (In/sight with Clare Bell, Olu Oguibe, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya) are the only two major exhibitions in the US that dealt solely with photography from Africa, aside from solo shows on major figures like Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Samuel Fosso. Zwelethu Mthethwa and David Goldblatt have also been celebrated individually (Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York in summer 2010; Mthethwa's work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tracy Rose was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) but South Africa's artists are positioned differently vis à vis the international art world because of the country's structure of gallery and museum networks. Indeed, perhaps exhibitions and accompanying catalogs on South Africa, like Tosha Grantham's Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa, 1950 to the Present (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), can provide a model for future scholarship for photography across the continent, both in terms of limiting'African photography' to national content and in providing a range of genres accompanied by thoughtful and critical scholarship.

In contrast to Enwezor, who has been said to privilege elite-educated artists, some of whom live and work outside of Africa, academic scholars tend to privilege what would be called'visual culture' in the context of art historical discourse; i.e. photography produced as a commercial and social enterprise, rather than as a purely artistic one, by practitioners who live on the African continent. This seems to be true in German scholarship as well, seen in the work of Heike Behrend, Tobias Wendl, and Christraud Geary (who now lives and works in the US, but is of German heritage). (2)

The'visual culture' approach to scholarship tends to focus less on individuals and more on cultural histories of the medium, and the problem that some critics see is that it does not seem to differ significantly from anthropological scholarship, which relegates art to one among many forms of cultural production. Anthropology as a discipline is seen as especially suspect in regard to the study of Africa as historically much anthropology was uncritical of its hegemonic approaches and the oppressive uses to which such scholarship was put.

It is important in this context to recognize that the schism between understanding photography as'fine art' and as'visual culture' exists in Western scholarship on photography as well, and that it is not simply in relation to Africa that a more'sociological' or'cultural' approach should be taken. One approach to the history of photography, pioneered by scholars like Geoffrey Batchen and Elizabeth Edwards, takes all of photographic production within its scope (science, medical, vernacular, photojournalism, art, conceptual). In contrast, a more traditional art historical approach focuses on specifically art-oriented aesthetic developments in the history of photography, and seeks even to reduce photography's 19th century history to a discourse on aesthetic terms. Thus it might be useful for scholars and curators of African photography who disagree over methodological approaches to recognize that a similar schism exists within the history of Western photography, and that to turn an anthropological lens on Western photography is needed as well; one useful example is the sociological study by Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, 1996). (3)

African art scholarship in the US, like scholarship on African photography, also has traditionally dealt with the field of'visual culture', as the Western definition of museum-oriented art did not apply to the objects or rituals produced in African precolonial societies. The American preference for precolonial traditions and antiquated notions of'authenticity,' which were originally constructed by Western scholarship in the first place, held scholars back from investigating modern and contemporary art movements as well as photography, video and film. (4) Susan Vogel's exhibition at the Center for African Arts in New York, Africa Explores:20th Century African Art (1991) was the first major US show to garner a good deal of critical attention, although there had been several earlier precedents (Contemporary African Arts, Field Museum, 1974; Contemporary African Art, Howard University 1977; and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990) that received less attention. Thus a'visual culture' approach to the history of photography in Africa dovetails with the methodological approaches of scholars trained both in precolonial African arts and of some photo historians.

But what of art photography, made for a mostly Western art market, that engages with specific concerns central to Western, international notions of art and aesthetics? While it is a relatively new genre in much of Africa, it is one that is quickly gaining interest, especially in urban areas where an education in photography is available. Is it possible, in scholarship or in exhibitions, to combine the aesthetic with the commercial, the artistic with the social? Eliding these boundaries is certainly what Enwezor suggested by labeling Keïta a modernist master, in the vein of the German portraitist August Sander. The truth is that photography as a field is far messier than such neat divisions would have us believe. Almost all'art' photographers have made commercial work, and many commercial photographers consider themselves skilled and creative in their fields.

Enwezor approached contemporary photography as a mélange of practices in Snap Judgments, including fashion photography and documentary (but not commercial) portraiture among works that were more artistically-oriented. At the same time, that show's mission was specifically to move away from the prevalence of interest in commercial studio portraiture in Africa, thereby exposing American audiences to other forms and genres of work. In the long run, while some portrait photographers on the continent will be recognized as brilliant practitioners, most will be appreciated for their role in their communities' histories, just as most commercial Western portraitists are not considered great artists. Bodies of medical and scientific and anthropological photographs will be discovered, as well as important documentary archives belonging to news agencies. The field must remain open to methodological approaches and to new discoveries, for there is much more scholarship needed, and so many gaps in our knowledge. The fields of visual culture and art should not cut themselves off from each other and become engaged in petty and divisive arguments. A debated field is a good one, but bitter criticisms are unnecessary and serve to scare scholars from engaging in the field for fear of being attacked. Enwezor's pioneering work has been absolutely essential to the field of African photography, and his influence cannot be under-acknowledged.

In the US, the path of academic scholarship on African photography has largely been pursued through African art and anthropology departments, rather than by historians of photography. New approaches to the history of photography, emphasizing cultural studies and viewing the whole of photography as'visual culture,' in contrast to the minority of photographs which are meant to constitute'art,' has meant that scholars in the history of photography come to African photographies with a wide disciplinary scope. African art scholars tend to be less appreciative of contemporary art while curators tend to be less interested in photographic production that does not fall into the aesthetic and conceptual standards dictated by the global art market. On the other hand, photography historians tend to lack the interdisciplinary cultural knowledge of Africa that should inform the analysis of any cultural production from a specific locale. Both African art and photography historians sometimes lack the knowledge of contemporary art strategies that may impede their understanding of art photography shown on the global market.

By mapping out the different positions in scholarship and curatorship in the US, as I have tried to do above, it becomes clear that all approaches are needed, and that they can serve somewhat different functions: to exhibit contemporary photography is important in creating a new field; scholarship is important in documenting histories and generating broader theories. But mapping out scholarly and curatorial positions also outlines some of the conflicts that have occurred among scholars and curators - conflicts that should not force positions to harden into oppositional stances that refuse debate and shut down dialogue, but that can instead revitalize definitions and question boundaries and productively investigate the very nature of the field, thereby opening up unlimited possibilities for future scholarship.

A Comparison of Important and Relevant Exhibitions

As a scholar who worked on Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006) at the International Center of Photography in New York, and who has researched and written on the Bamako Biennale in Mali, I will assert that the two exhibitions held very different outlooks and have had different functions. Snap Judgments was conceived by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a follow-up, decade-later response to In/Sight, African Photographers from 1940s to the Present (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unlike the Biennale, Snap Judgments was not a juried exhibition; it was a handpicked show with decisions on works made solely by Enwezor, on several short trips across Africa and Europe. Few of the artists were based in the US. Some were based in Europe, and some new photographers working on the African continent were exposed to the international market by Snap Judgments. Shown in the same city as In/Sight although at a different venue (it is worth noting that the ICP is making an important step by including African photography within the world history of photography), Snap Judgments was a singular exhibition, meant to provide a snap shot, as it were, of the state of contemporary photographic activity on the continent and in the diaspora.

As ICP's adjunct curator, Enwezor went on to curate Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art two years later, thus showing his versatility in traversing subject matter as well as medium, and refusing to be stereotyped as solely a'contemporary African' curator (he also curated Documenta 11, the Seville Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, as well as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale). The impact of Snap Judgments, in which South African artists constituted a strong presence, is of course difficult to measure, especially in Africa, but one main effect was to give certain artists more international and American exposure. The artist who has benefitted the most from Snap Judgments, it seems, was Nontsikelelo'Lolo' Veleko, who subsequently was shown at Kyle Kauffman Gallery in New York in 2007, and has since been included in New York in Global Africa Project (2010-11) at the Museum of Modern Arts and Design. For the most part, the effect of Snap Judgments seemed to allow those artists who had established careers to become somewhat more established, and those who did not to gain a bit of recognition; but in general the show did not seem to dramatically affect artists' careers.

While Snap Judgments' effect may not have had a strong impact on most artists' careers as of yet (such things take time and it is up to the artist to'take advantage,' as it were, of being shown internationally), it must be stated that furthering artists' careers was not Enwezor's curatorial intent. We must move away from an artist-centric view to understand the goals of a curator, which can be ambivalent toward artists, since curators function today much as art critics did in the past - curators now determine a canon as well as show new work. For that reason, a curator cannot, and should not, be overly concerned with an artist's career. What Enwezor succeeded in doing was exposing a public to work from Africa that went far beyond the portrait tradition - established in the public perception by In/Sight (although there was a wider variety of work in that show than is usually recalled) - and thus creating a vaster exposure to African photography than previously had existed for an American public.

At the same time, many works in Snap Judgments utilized the very style of global conceptualism that is neither popular nor prevalent among most practitioners in Africa, and thus gives a different'snapshot' of the type of work that is being made from a broader, visual culture perspective. The truth is that'art photography' is a relatively new genre for most of the continent, but even before'art photography' was available in many places as a conceptual option, practitioners like Samuel Fosso of Democratic Republic of Congo and Youssouf Sogodogo of Mali, among others, made creative and inarguably artistic photographs on their own, despite lacking a'culture' of art photography to support their inspirations.

In contrast to Snap Judgments, which had the straightforward task of publicizing new developments on the continent and in the diaspora, the underlying mission of the Bamako Encounters or Bamako Biennale has been more politically and socially loaded, as well as more significant to Africa, because it is a biannual exhibition held on the continent. The Biennale was meant to foster, and to some extent has fostered, interest in and opportunity for making art photography across the continent. Founded by French photographers and supported by the French government, the Biennale went through a series of iterations while building a constituency of participants - artists, curators, scholars, gallerists. The 1998 Biennale seems to have had the most Malian agency: even the title, Ja Taa! "Prendre l'image", was in Bamanankan, Mali's lingua franca, as well as in French. After curator Simon Njami assumed stewardship as chief curator from 2001-2007, the Biennale became effective in terms of generating some global artworld interest. Njami has said that he remained chief curator because he wanted the event to gain enough publicity to remain a viable institution after he left. (5) While tensions usually exist in Biennales between the national and the international, obviously the fact that the French continue to fund the Biennale and produce its catalogs means that local tensions are stronger than elsewhere. At the moment when Malians are asserting their desire to have control over aspects of the Biennale, and to use this exhibition as a force for change, CulturesFrance (now l'Institut français) has turned its interest toward founding a contemporary biennale in Benin. The first edition, Regard Bénin, occurred in the summer of 2010. But certainly the Bamako Biennale is gaining more exposure as a significant photography event, and hopefully will continue to be an impressive gathering for decades to come.

Locally, what has happened in Bamako as a result of the Biennale has been spectacular. Photography schools have sprouted, and a special school for women's photography [Promo-femme : Centre de formation en audiovisuel pour les jeunes filles ] now unfortunately closed due to lack of government support, was for the duration of its existence hugely influential in allowing women to enter the field of photography, a formerly all-male profession. When I interviewed photographers in Mali in the summer of 2006, there were a few complaints about how the French handle the Biennale but certainly no one wished that it had not been invented, or thought it should end. It gave Malian photographers who were well-versed in portraiture and reportage the opportunity to explore self-expression and creative photography in ways previously unavailable. While Njami was hopeful that curators for the Biennale could be found from among the ranks of continent-based curators, that has not happened yet.

Njami's own recent effort, A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010, shown in Brussels at BOZAR (2010), displays a number of artists familiar to the circuit of African photography exhibits mentioned above, as well as some photographers new to this lexicon. A Useful Dream continues Njami's project to display work from Africa, enabling a European- based audience to view these works, while reminding us that an inexhaustible number of photographs still wait to show us their visions of the continent's past and present, with its future soon to be duly recorded and imagined in ever more varied forms.

1.  What I mean by "global conceptualism" is how prevalent the inclusion of a conceptual approach to art has become in international art exhibitions and on the global market. All new media are seen as conceptual, and traditional media such as painting or photography must now also have a conceptual aspect or risk seeming redundant.
2.  See Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, edited by Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum and Prestel, 1998). See also Behrend, "Photo Magic: Photographs in Practices of Healing and Harming in East Africa" Journal of Religion in Africa 33 no. 2 (2003): 129-145 ; "‘Feeling Global' The Likoni Ferry Photographers of Mombasa, Kenya" African Arts vol. 33 no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 70-77, 96 ; "Fragmented Visions: Photo Collages by Two Ugandan Photographers" Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001): 301- 320 ; "Love à la Hollywood and Bombay: Kenyan Postcolonial Studio Photography" Paideuma vol. 44 (1998): 139-153. See also Behrend and Jean-François Werner, guest eds. "Photographies and Modernities in Africa", Visual Anthropology vol. 14 no. 3 (2001). See Tobias Wendl, "Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana" in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics vol. 39 (Spring 2001): 78-100. See Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Washington, D.C. & London: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution & Philip Wilson, Publishers, 2002 ; Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 ; "Early Images from Benin at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution." African Arts vol. 30 (Summer 1997): 44-53.
3.  See Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 1984); Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Konemann, 1999) and Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2002). For Batchen, see "Vernacular Photographies" in History of Photography vol. 24 no. 2 (Summer 2000); see also Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Photography Writing History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and also Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara, Suspending Time - life - photography - death (Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka: Izu Photo Museum, 2010).
4.  See Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999): 88-113 and a special issue of African Arts, vol. 9 no. 3 (Los Angeles, 1976) dedicated to the issue of authenticity.
5.  Communicated in a personal interview, July 2010, Paris.

 

- See more at: http://www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=11109#sthash.EtGyzTBG.dpuf

 

L' INSENSÉ Africa, 2014

revistas sobre fotografia africana (3): L' INSENSÉ Africa (nº 12 Octobre 2014, Paris) : reeditado de 11/18/2014 :

 

O mercado da fotografia africana (visto de Paris)

 "O mercado da fotografia africana, sombras e luzes"

tradução (e tradução anotada, a seguir)

a partir de http://www.loeildelaphotographie.com/fr/2014/11/07/.../ l-insense-place-a-l-afrique

de 

"Ombres et Lumières, le marché de la photographie africaine"

texto de Camille Moulonguet, em L' INSENSÉ Africa 

L'Insensé

Depois do Paris Photo ter proposto África como tema privilegiado, em 2011, e de surgir em Londres, em 2013, uma feira internacional integralmente consagrada à criação contemporânea africana, qual é realmente o lugar da fotografia africana no mercado de arte? O estado da questão em 2014 (Nota: o ponto de vista é muito parisiense e muito explicitamente dependente da lógica do mercado de arte - só existe quem está no mercado)

O aparecimento da fotografia em África seguiu de perto a invenção do medium, mas a sua entrada no mercado de arte data somente dos anos 1990. A maneira como «surgiu» Saydou Keïta é emblemática da curta história do mercado da fotografia africana. Estamos em 1991 em Nova Iorque. André Magnin e Jean Pigozzi visitam a exposição «African Explores: 20th Century African Art» organizada por Susan Vogel no New Museum of Contemporary Art. Encontram fotografias a preto e branco, retratos, em cujas legendas se escreve: «Anónimo. Mali». André Magnin parte a seguir para Bamako, com uma pasta de fotocópias. Levam-no a um primeiro fotógrafo que o conduz a outro fotógrafo: o primeiro é Malick Sibidé e o segundo, Seydou Keïta. Foi assim que estes fotógrafos, que trabalhavam até aí como artesãos, com a sua clientela, entraram num outro mercado, o mercado de arte. E durante anos são estes retratistas (Seydou Keïta, Ojeikere) ou fotógrafos documentais (Jean Depara, Malick Sidibé) que monopolizam o mercado. Em números, a coisa traduz-se assim: em 1990, uma foto de Keïta valia o equivalente a 50 cêntimos de euro, em 1992 vale 150 euros e hoje uma prova assinada de Keïta vale entre 5 000 e 15 000 euros.

Nesses anos, os actores deste mercado contam-se pelos dedos de uma mão e os fotógrafos africanos estavam muito dependentes dessas pontes fabulosas cuja omnipotência não é propícia a um mercado aberto. De 1989 a 2009, André Magnin desempenha um papel capital neste minúsculo mercado, já que estava a formar a colecção de Jean Pigozzi, que lhe pedira, depois de ter visto a exposição «Magiciens de Terre» em Beaubourg em 1989: «Faça-me uma colecção única no mundo». Vinte anos mais tarde a colecção Pigozzi conta com mais de 10 000 obras. Paralelamente, a Revue Noire fazia um trabalho magistral de publicação e revelava 3 500 artistas, 600 dos quais fotógrafos, desde o início dos anos 1990.

Dois anos depois da descoberta de Seydou Keïta, o fotógrafo francês Bernard Descamps desembarca no estúdio de Samuel Fosso em Bangui, na República Centroafricana. À época tinha 31 anos e terminava as suas chapas, à tarde, com auto-retratos encenados. Hoje as fotografias de Samuel Fosso integram as colecções da Tate Modern em Londres, do Centro Georges-Pompidou e do Museu do Quai Branly em Paris. A sua série "African Spirits", que presta homenagem às grandes figuras panafricanistas e da luta pelos direitos cívicos nos Estadfos Unidos não se vende por menos de 100 000 euros. O género do retrato marca a fotografia africana e assegura-lhe os seus primeiros grandes sucessos internacionais. São histórias que dizem muito sobre um mercado compartimentado e com mais-valias fabulosas.

A criação da Bienal de Dakar - Dak’Art - em 1989 e, mais tarde, em 1994, a dos Encontros (Rencontres) de Bamako marcam os inícios de um mercado que se caracteriza globalmente por ser uma vasta terra virgem. Estando massivamente à sombra do mercado de arte, a fotografia africana não é representada na sua diversidade. A exposição de 1998 «L’Afrique par elle-même», associada ao seu catálogo «Anthologie de la photographie africaine», montada pela Revue Noire e com um périplo mundial que começou na Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) em Paris acentua o processo de reconhecimento internacional de uma fotografia africana plural (1 - Uma versão adaptada chegou em 2006 ao Porto, Centro Português de Fotografia: ver "Voz própria"). Os anos 2000 são marcados pela ambiciosa e itinerante exposição «Africa Remix» do Centro Pompidou de Paris.

Em 2007, Malick Sibidé recebe um Leão de Ouro na Bienal de Veneza. O mercado da fotografia internacional já passara a contar com a fotografia africana, cujo futuro assenta então na sua abertura e na sua diversificação. O apogeu deste período corresponde já à respectiva ultrapassagem, simbolizada pelo primeiro pavilhão africano na Bienal de Veneza, em 2007, sob a direcção de Simon Njami (2: foi o "CHECK LIST LUANDA POP", pavilhão atribuído por concurso à Fundação Sindika Dokolo e galeria Soso de Luanda). A fotografia africana, que continuava a ser um objecto construído do exterior controlado por galeristas e comissários ocidentais, entra lentamente numa nova fase ao mesmo tempo de abertura e de recuperação pelos Africanos.

Para além dos cinco nomes que giram em círculo na boca dos galeristas e dos coleccionadores, os fotógrafos africanos estão pouco representados no mercado. Por isso chegou o momento de reflectir a fertilidade de um continente, o que a presidente da Fundação Zinsou, do Benim, Marie-Cécile Zinsou, resume perfeitamente em algumas palavras: « Em África, é por toda a parte, todo o tempo» (« En Afrique, c’est partout, tout le temps. »). Novos actores contribuem para abrir este mercado, atribuindo aos fotógrafos africanos um lugar crescente. Para o reconhecimento da criação contemporânea africana em sentido amplo, cabe ao comissário nigeriano Okwui Enwezor um papel importante desde 2002, por ocasião da Documenta 11 de Kassel na Alemanha ou mais recentemente com a Trienal de Arte Contemporânea que teve lugar no Palácio de Tokyo em 2012 e de que assegurou a direcção geral (3. Okwui Enwezor organizara no Museu Guggenheim de Nova Iorque, em 1996, dois anos antes da exp. da Revue Noire, o primeiro grande panorama da fotografia africana: IN/SIGHT AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHERS, 1940 to the Present - aí aparece Ricardo Rangel com a série da Rua Araújo.)

 

1. Sartorial Anarchy #8, 2013, Pigment on satin paper, 122.2x101.9cm, Ed. of 3, 3AP, courtesy Galerie Leila Heller, New-York © Iké Ude / 2. "Ashleigh McLean, Série There’s a Place in Hell for me and my friends", 2011, archival pigment ink on warmtone, courtesy Galerie Stevenson, Le Cap et GalerieYossi Milo, NewYork © Pieter Hugo / 3. 99 Series, Series of seven photographs, 2013, 89x 89cm © Aïda Muluneh / 4. Autoportrait, Série «African Spirits», 2008, courtesy Galerie Jean-Marc Patras, Paris © Samuel Fosso

Os artistas africanos começam a ser reconhecidos como actores de parte inteira da criação contemporânea mundial. Para lá do interesse internacional crescente pela criação contemporeânea africana, a África toma consciência da riqueza da sua criatividade. Emblemático deste deslocamento do mercado é Sindika Dokolo, congolês nascido em 1972, que cria a sua colecção em 2004 (4. Banqueiro casado com Isabel dos Santos, ligado à Trienal de Luanda desde antes de 2006, via Fernando Alvim: ver Trienal). Hoje, ela conta com mais de 500 peças de 140 artistas provenientes de 28 países africanos. Um ano mais tarde, em 2005, a criação da Fundação Zinsou no Benim - ver Zinsou - e a constituição de uma colecção composta por 300 a 400 obras (de que 30 a 40 por cento são fotografias) prolonga essa tendência nascente. Tudo se passa como se o crescimento da cotação dos artistas será tanto mais acelerado quanto a sua aparição é tardia (recente) no mercado, que se caracteriza por uma expansão rápida e curvas excepcionalmente ascendentes.

Neste contexto, os antigos actores continuam presentes mas mudam de estatuto, como André Magnin que de comprador para a colecção Pigozzi passou a galerista em 2009, e também, um ano mais tarde, da editora Revue Noire que se tornou uma galeria sob o nome Maison Revue Noire. Jean Loup Pivin, um dos três fundadores da Revue, explica o seu projecto: «O continente africano não pode resumir-se a menos de dez nomes e duas tendências ‘exóticas’. O nosso trabalho é continuar a promover a diversidade da fotografia africana na sua invenção e também com o nosso fundo constituído por vários milhares de imagens de várias centenas de fotógrafos que representam todo o espectro qualitativo dos fotógrafos africanos, de modo a que um dia lhes seja reservado um lugar maior no mercado.» Se as grandes capitais europeias continuam a ser placas giratórias importantes para esse mercado, já não são lugares de passagem obrigatórios. Os fotógrafos africanos vão directamente a Nova Iorque, Dubai ou Doha.

Desde há dois anos, o mercado da criação contemporânea africana vive um período de efervescência, uma bolha de que a fotografia não está, obviamente, excluída. André Magnin, que encontrámos precisamente no seu regresso de Paris-Photo Los Angeles, está tranquilo; vendeu todas as suas fotografias de Omar Victor Diop, o que não aconteceu à maior parte dos galeristas, para os quais esta feira representa mais despesas que benefícios. « Nestes dois últimos anos tudo vai muito depressa e aparecem excelentes artistas apoiados por galerias muito profissionais» - observa. (5. A galerie Magnin-A tem apresentado Mauro Pinto e Filipe Branquinho.) Os actores deste mercado têm a sensação de assistir a um boom. Imane Farès partilha esse entusiasmo: «Penso que este interesse pela arte africana vai ainda crescer, está em plena expansão.» Sammy Baloji, que ela representa desde o ano passado, faz parte das «success stories» deste mercado. Foi, nomeadamente, um dos finalistas do célebre Prémio Pictet em 2013.

Este dinamismo é confirmado pelo êxito da feira 1:54 (1 continente, 54 países) de Londres. A primeira edição teve lugar em 2013. A galerista da Costa do Marfim Cécile Fakhoury vendeu todo o seu stand. O fotógrafo François-Xavier Gbré, que ela representa, foi comprado pela Tate Modern. Para Paul Hewitt, director estratégico dos novos mercados na Christie’s, «o facto de a 1:54, primeira feira internacional consagrada à arte africana, ter lugar em Londres durante a Frieze envia uma mensagem clara: a arte africana é hoje um mercado de crescimento rápido.»

No entanto, esta tendência só terá continuidade se for sustentada por uma rede de coleccionadores, museus e galeristas africanos. «É um mercado que suscita o interesse dos investidores», sublinha Cécile Fakhoury. Trata-se para ela de desenvolver um mercado interior e criar dinâmicas entre os países. «A maior parte das pessoas a quem vendi obras nunca tinham comprado arte. Andam pelos 30 anos e têm uma curiosidade enorme por este domínio». A bipolaridade francófona e anglófona atenua-se para enriqueccer um tecido de trocas e de interesses comuns.

A África do Sul está à parte, o seu mercado é estruturado e organizado desde há várias décadas com grandes galerias, grandes colecções e grandes museus. De modo geral, o desenvolvimento do mercado da África anglófona é muito similar ao que acabamos de descrever, nomeadamente a Nigéria, que é ao mesmo tempo o país mais povoado de África e a primeira potência económica africana, ultrapassando desde este ano a África do Sul.

É na Nigéria que o Lagos Photo Festival criado em 2010 estabelece condições de trocas sem precedentes entre países africanos à volta dos seus fotógrafos. Está a tornar-se o ponto de encontro incontornável para a fotografia africana. Marie-Cécile Zinsou visita-o todos os anos. «É tudo o que os Rencontres de Bamako não são. É toda a dinâmica do continente na sua relação com o resto do mundo», diz com entusiasmo. O mercado africaniza-se rapidamente e constrói assim as bases de um crescimento estável.

Nesta mesma linha, o empresário marroquino Alami Lazraq está a criar em Marrakexe um museu dedicado à arte contemporânea marroquina e africana com uma superfície de 6 000 m2, cuja inauguração está prevista para 2016. A sua colecção conta já com 500 obras. A este respeito, Touria El Glaoui, directora fundadora do 1:54, o Salão africano de arte contemporânea, afirma: «O facto de um museu inteiramente dedicado à fotografia e às artes visuais surgir em Marrakexe é significativo da evolução do interesse por estas práticas, e parece-me primordial que artistas fotógrafos como Yto Barrada ou Hicham Benohoud, que atingiram uma importante visibilidade à escala internacional, apoiem a sua criação.»

No desenvolvimento deste mercado em África, um dado muito importante tem de ser levado em conta, o da conservação das fotos. O calor e a humidade alteram terrivelmente as provas. Na Fundação Zinsou, os orçamentos de conservação impedem a compra de outras obras fotográficas. «Estamos a interrogar-nos sobre se a colecção não será repatriada para França», explica a sua presidente. Para contornar o problema é preciso ser inventivo e, para a sua última exposição de Malick Sibidé, fez imprimir as fotos a tinta sobre tela. Parece que o efeito é muito interessante para o preto e branco e que a conservação é melhor. A ver a longo termo.

No que é agora um vasto mercado, quais são os fotógrafos mais prometedores? Proponho-vos que os descubram

OS FOTÓGRAFOSS : LEONCE RAPHAEL AGBODJELOU, AKINTUNDE AKINLEYE, LEILA ALAOUI, MALALA ANDRIALAVI- DRAZANA, KADER ATTIA, SAMMY BALOJI, KOTO BOLOFO, NABIL BOUTROS, FILIPE BRANQUINHO (Maputo), MOHAMED CAMARA, SEYDOU CAMARA, KUDZANAI CHIURAI, FATOUMATA DIABATE, OMAR VICTOR DIOP, CALVIN DONDO, LALLA ESSAYDI, HASSAN ET HUSAIN ESSOP, SAMUEL FOSSO, WASSIM GHOSLANI, HASSAN HAJJAJ, NERMINE HAMMAM, PIETER HUGO, EURIDICE KALA, KILUANJI KIA HENDA (Luanda, Lisboa), GERMAIN KIEMTORE, MAMADOU KONATE, T-J LETSA, NAMSA LEUBA, DILLON MARSH, FATIMA MAZMOUZ, FABRICE MONTEIRO, BAUDOUIN MOUANDA, ZWELETHU MTHETHWA, ZANELE MUHOLI, AIDA MULUNEH, YOUSSEF NABIL, DANIEL NAUDE, MATAR NDOUR, MAME-DIARRA NIANG, ABRAHAM OGHOBASE ONORIODE, LAKIN OGUNBANWO, ALAIN POLO, NYANI QUARMYNE, ZINEB SEDIRA, GEORGES SENGA, MARY SIBANDE, MALICK SIDIBE, PAUL SIKA, MIKHAEL SUBOTZKY, GUY TILLIM, IKE UDE, NONTSIKELELO VELEKO, GRAEME WILLIAMS, RALPH ZIMAN.

Os nomes no índice divulgado no site:

• L-R. AGBODJELOU
• Akintunde AKINLEYE
• Leila ALAOUI
• M. ANDRIALAVIDRAZANA
• Kader ATTIA
• Sammy BALOJI
• Koto Bolofo
• Nabil Boutros
• Mohamed Camara
• Seydou Camara
• Kudzanai CHIURAI
• Fatoumata DIABATE
• Omar Victor Diop
• Calvin Dondo
• Lalla ESSAYDI

• Hassan & Husain ESSOP
• Samuel Fosso
• Wassim GHOZLANI
• David Goldblatt
• Hassan Hajjaj
• Nermine Hammam
• Pieter Hugo
• Euridice Kala
• Seydou Keita
• Kiluanji KIA HENDA
• Germain KIEMTORE
• Mamadou Konate
• T-J. LETSA
• Namsa Leuba
• Dillon Marsh

• Fatima Mazmouz
• Nandipha MNTAMBO
• Fabrice Monteiro
• Baudoin Mouanda
• Zwelethu MTHETHWA
• Zanele Muholi
• Aida MULUNEH
• Youssef Nabil
• Daniel Naude
• Matar Ndour
• Mame-Diarra NIANG
• A. OGHOBASE Onoriode
• Lakin OGUNBANWO
• Alain Polo
• Nyani QUARMYNE

• Zineb SEDIRA
• Georges SENGA
• Mary SIBANDE
• Malik SIDIBE
• Paul SIKA
• Youssouf SOGODOGO
• M. & P. SUBOTZKY & WATERHOUSE
• Guy TILLIM
• Siaka Soppo TRAORE
• Ike UDE
• Nontsikelelo VELEKO
• Graeme WILLIAMS
• Ralph ZIMAN

 

 

###

versão anotada (in progress)

O aparecimento da fotografia em África seguiu de perto a invenção do medium, mas a sua entrada no mercado de arte* data já dos anos 1990. A maneira como «surgiu» Saydou Keïta é emblemática da curta história do mercado da fotografia africana. Estamos em 1991 em Nova Iorque. André Magnin e Jean Pigozzi visitam a exposição «African Explores: 20th Century African Art» organizada por Susan Vogel no New Museum of Contemporary Art. Encontram fotografias a preto e branco, retratos, em cujas legendas se lê: «Anónimo. Mali». André Magnin parte logo a seguir para Bamako, com uma pasta de fotocópias. Levam-no a um primeiro fotógrafo que o conduz a outro fotógrafo: o primeiro é Malick Sibidé e o segundo, Seydou Keïta. Foi assim que estes fotógrafos, que trabalhavam até aí como artesãos, com a sua clientela, entraram num outro mercado, o mercado de arte. E durante anos são estes retratistas (Seydou Keïta, Ojeikere) ou fotógrafos documentais (Jean Depara, Malick Sidibé) que vão monopolizar o mercado. Em números, a coisa exprime-se assim: em 1990, uma foto de Keïta valia o equivalente a 50 cêntimos de euro, em 1992 vale 150 euros e hoje uma prova assinada de Keïta vale entre 5 000 e 15 000 euros.

* <Trata-se (outra vez) da "descoberta" da África pelo Ocidente e no Ocidente, segundo as suas regras de interesse e de visibilidade: é uma história dos descobrimentos, não uma história de África. É o conhecimento, a aprovação, a apropriação exterior que constitui o objecto de estudo, no caso a fotografia. O ponto de vista é em absoluto eurocêntrico (e em especial parisiense) e neste caso a fotografia que importa é aquela que entra no mercado ocidental - e este é já o mercado de arte, ou um mercado da fotografia associado ao mercado de arte. (Existem também o mercado fotográfico da fotografia, o pequeno mercado dos coleccionadores de fotografia, e dois mercados institucionais da fotografia, o da divulgação da fotografia e o outro, museológico e empresarial (corporate) mais ou menos identificado com o mercado de arte.) "African Explores" é de 1991, já depois de "Magiciens de la Terre", de 1989, de que se fala adiante, e onde não há ainda fotógrafos africanos. É óbvio que ao longo dos anos 80, e mesmo antes, se produz e expõe fotografia africana, mas ela não constitui um pólo de atenção enquanto fotografia de ambição ou qualidade artística e não tem ainda o seu mercado. (O mercado da fotografia foi surgindo lentamente nos anos 70, a crítica da fotografia nos anos 80.)>

Nesses anos, os actores deste mercado contam-se pelos dedos de uma mão e os fotógrafos africanos estavam muito dependentes dessas pontes fabulosas cuja omnipotência não é propícia a um mercado aberto. De 1989 a 2009, André Magnin desempenha um papel capital neste minúsculo mercado, já que estava a formar a colecção de Jean Pigozzi, que lhe dissera, depois de ter visto a exposição «Magiciens de Terre» em Beaubourg [e La Vilette] em 1989 [dirigida por Jean-Hubert Martin]: «Você vai-me fazer uma colecção única no mundo». (Magiciens de la Terre:  www.centrepompidou.fr ) Vinte anos mais tarde a colecção Pigozzi conta com mais de 10 000 obras. Paralelamente, a Revue Noir fazia um trabalho de publicação magistral e revelava 3 500 artistas, 600 dos quais fotógrafos, desde o início dos anos 1990.

< André Magnin fora comissário adjunto dos "Magiciens"; foi o comissário/director da colecção Pigozzi de 1989 até 2009 e possui desde então a sua galeria, Magnin-A - www.magnin-a.com - que apresenta artistas que vivem e trabalham na "África Negra", e não os das diásporas ocidentais (expõe Mauro Pinto e Filipe Branquinho). Essa opção pelos artistas do interior do continente, muitos deles autodidactas e intérpretes de tradiçõs locais, vernaculares ou ± eruditas, divide a informação e o mercado da arte africana - continua a ser uma marca da colecção Piggozi.

A Revue Noire - www.revuenoire.com - apresenta logo em 1991 (nº 3, Dezembro) um panorama da fotografia africana dividida entre a produção documental e a direcção arte, num número que põe na capa Rotimi Fani-Kayodé (Ife, NIgeria 1955 - London 1989). O nº 15, Dezembro 1994, é dedicado a Moçambique e também aos 1ºs Encontros de Bamako. A revista, luxuosa e de grande formato, muito apoiada pela cooperação francesa, é criada por Jean-Loup Pivin e Pascal Martin Saint Léon, arquitectos que trabalharam de 1979 a 1985 em Bamako, para a concepção e realização do Museu Nacional de Mali e outros projectos. Desenvolvem depois trabalhos para África e fundam a revista, editora e empresa produtora de exposições em 1991 com Simon Njami e Bruno Tilliette. Ver AP: 2008/cronologia.html>

Dois anos depois da descoberta de Seydou Keïta, o fotógrafo francês Bernard Descamps desembarca no estúdio de Samuel Fosso em Bangui, na República Centroafricana. À época tinha 31 anos e terminava as suas películas, à tarde, com auto-retratos encenados. Hoje as fotografias de Samuel Fosso integram as colecções da Tate Modern em Londres, do Centro Georges-Pompidou e do Museu do Quai Branly em Paris. A sua série "African Spirits", que presta homenagem às grandes figuras panafricanistas e da luta pelos direitos cívicos nos Estadfos Unidos não se vende por menos de 100 000 euros. O género do retrato marca a fotografia africana e assegura-lhe os seus primeiros grandes sucessos internacionais. São factos que dizem muito sobre um mercado espartilhado e com mais-valias fabulosas.

A criação da Bienal de Dakar Dak’Art em 1989 e, mais tarde, em 1994, a dos Encontros de Bamako marcam os inícios de um mercado que se caracteriza globalmente por explorar uma vasta terra virgem (une vaste friche). Estando massivamente à sombra do mercado de arte, a fotografia africana não é representada na sua diversidade. A exposição de 1998** «L’Afrique par elle-même» associada ao seu catálogo «Anthologie de la photographie africaine», montada pela Revue Noire e com um périplo que começou na Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) em Paris marca um movimento de reconhecimento internacional de uma fotografia africana plural. Os anos 2000 são marcados pela ambiciosa e itinerante exposição «Africa Remix» do Centro Pompidou de Paris.

** < De facto, a exposição de Orkui Enwezor no Guggenheim de NY - IN/SIGHT AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHERS, 1940 to the Present - é anterior à exp. da Revue Noire - aí aparede Ricardo Rangel com a série da Rua Araújo.>

Em 2007, Malick Sibidé recebe um Leão de Ouro na Bienal de Veneza. O mercado da fotografia internacional já passara a contar com a fotografia africana, cujo futuro assenta então na sua abertura e na sua diversificação. O apogeu deste período corresponde já à respectriva ultrapassagem, simbolizada pelo primeiro pavilhão africano na Bienal de Veneza, em 2007, sob a direcção de Simon Njami. A fotografia africana, que continuava a ser um objecto construído do exterior controlado por galeristas e comissários ocidentais, entra lentamente numa nova fase ao mesmo tempo de abertura e de recuperação pelos Africanos.

<Foi o Padiglione/Pavilhão Africano chamado .  Os artistas expostos foram (a negro os 6 angolanos): Ghada Amer, Oladélé Bamgboyé, Miquel Barcelò, Jean Michel Basquiat, Mario Benjamin, Bili Bidjocka, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Loulou Cherinet, Marlène Dumas, Mounir Fatmi, Kendell Geers, Ihosvanny, Alfredo Jaar, Paulo Kapela, Amal Kenawy, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, Santu Mofokeng, Nástio Mosquito, Ndilo Mutima, Ingrid Mwangi, Chris Ofili, Olu Oguibe, Tracey Rose, Ruth Sacks, Yinka Shonibare, Minette Vari, Viteix, Andy Warhol, Yonamine. Curatori: Fernando Alvim e Simon Njami. ( Check List ) >

Para além dos cinco nomes que giram em círculo na boca dos galeristas e dos coleccionadores, os fotógrafos africanos estão pouco representados no mercado. Por isso chegou o momento de reflectir a fertilidade de um continente, o que a presidente da Fundação Zinsou, do Benim, Marie-Cécile Zinsou, resume perfeitamente em algumas palavras: « Em África, é por toda a parte, todo o tempo» (« En Afrique, c’est partout, tout le temps. »). Novos actores contribuem para abrir este mercado, atribuindo aos fotógrafos africanos um lugar crescente. Para o reconhecimento da criação contemporânea africana em sentido amplo, cabe ao comissário nigeriano Okwui Enwezor um papel importante desde 2002, por ocasião da Documenta 11 de Kassel na Alemanha ou mais recentemente com a Trienal de Arte Contemporânea que teve lugar no Palácio de Tokyo em 2012 e de que assegurou a direcção geral.  ( la triennale, 2012, Palais de Tokyo ,   louvre  )

< A "origem" dos Encontos de Bamako reside no projecto fotográfico de Françoise Huguier de seguir os passos de Michel Leirism publicado em "Sur les traces de l'Afrique fantôme", éditions Maeght 1990 ("De mars 1931 à février 1933, Michel Leiris traverse l’Afrique d’Ouest en Est. Il est secrétaire archiviste d’une mission ethnographique dirigée par Marcel Griaule, et, à ce titre, en tient le journal de bord. Publié pour la première fois chez Gallimard en 1934, son carnet de route est devenu un grand livre, L’Afrique fantôme.) De mai 1988 à janvier 1990, une photographe, Françoise Huguier, et un écrivain reporter, Michel Cressole, ont repris l’itinéraire de la mission Dajar-Djibouti.") A estadia no Mali dá origem a um projecto de trabalho com os fotógrafos locais que é proposto à cooperação francesa.

En 1991, deux photographes, Bernard Descamps et Françoise Huguier se voient regulierement dans leur agence : l’Agence Vu. Lors d’une discussion, ils prennent conscience qu’au cours de leurs voyages en Afrique ils ont rencontré de nombreux photographes africains. Ils décident alors de mettre en œuvre un projet commun en Afrique. En premier lieu, Françoise Huguier et Bernard Descamps lancent leur projet avec des photographes maliens (Alioune Ba et Django Cissé). Chaque français travaille en binome avec un photographe local. Cette aventure n’ayant pas réellement abouti, les deux français prennent l’initiative d’organiser un festival pour faire connaître la photographie africaine. "Les 1ères Rencontres: une initiative française pour promouvoir une photographie méconnue.
Pour trouver des financements, Françoise Huguier prend contact avec Roger Aubry, qui dirige alors l’association «Atout Centre». Ce dernier sollicite l’association «Afrique en Créations» (cette association était née en 1990 avec une mission fondatrice, celle de favoriser la présence de la création africaine contemporaine sur les marchés culturels français et européene), qui promeut la création africaine pour trouver des financements. Afrique en Créations absorbera par la suite l’association de Roger Aubry. - in Jeanne MERCIER Juin 2006 , Les Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, Bamako 2005. Sous la direction d’André Gunthert Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

 "O mercado da fotografia africana, sombras e luzes"

tradução (e tradução anotada, a seguir)

a partir de http://www.loeildelaphotographie.com/fr/2014/11/07/.../ l-insense-place-a-l-afrique

de 

"Ombres et Lumières, le marché de la photographie africaine"

texto de Camille Moulonguet, em L' INSENSÉ Africa 

L'Insensé

Depois do Paris Photo ter proposto África como tema privilegiado, em 2011, e de surgir em Londres, em 2013, uma feira internacional integralmente consagrada à criação contemporânea africana, qual é realmente o lugar da fotografia africana no mercado de arte? O estado da questão em 2014 (Nota: o ponto de vista é muito parisiense e muito explicitamente dependente da lógica do mercado de arte - só existe quem está no mercado)

O aparecimento da fotografia em África seguiu de perto a invenção do medium, mas a sua entrada no mercado de arte data somente dos anos 1990. A maneira como «surgiu» Saydou Keïta é emblemática da curta história do mercado da fotografia africana. Estamos em 1991 em Nova Iorque. André Magnin e Jean Pigozzi visitam a exposição «African Explores: 20th Century African Art» organizada por Susan Vogel no New Museum of Contemporary Art. Encontram fotografias a preto e branco, retratos, em cujas legendas se escreve: «Anónimo. Mali». André Magnin parte a seguir para Bamako, com uma pasta de fotocópias. Levam-no a um primeiro fotógrafo que o conduz a outro fotógrafo: o primeiro é Malick Sibidé e o segundo, Seydou Keïta. Foi assim que estes fotógrafos, que trabalhavam até aí como artesãos, com a sua clientela, entraram num outro mercado, o mercado de arte. E durante anos são estes retratistas (Seydou Keïta, Ojeikere) ou fotógrafos documentais (Jean Depara, Malick Sidibé) que monopolizam o mercado. Em números, a coisa traduz-se assim: em 1990, uma foto de Keïta valia o equivalente a 50 cêntimos de euro, em 1992 vale 150 euros e hoje uma prova assinada de Keïta vale entre 5 000 e 15 000 euros.

Nesses anos, os actores deste mercado contam-se pelos dedos de uma mão e os fotógrafos africanos estavam muito dependentes dessas pontes fabulosas cuja omnipotência não é propícia a um mercado aberto. De 1989 a 2009, André Magnin desempenha um papel capital neste minúsculo mercado, já que estava a formar a colecção de Jean Pigozzi, que lhe pedira, depois de ter visto a exposição «Magiciens de Terre» em Beaubourg em 1989: «Faça-me uma colecção única no mundo». Vinte anos mais tarde a colecção Pigozzi conta com mais de 10 000 obras. Paralelamente, a Revue Noire fazia um trabalho magistral de publicação e revelava 3 500 artistas, 600 dos quais fotógrafos, desde o início dos anos 1990.

Dois anos depois da descoberta de Seydou Keïta, o fotógrafo francês Bernard Descamps desembarca no estúdio de Samuel Fosso em Bangui, na República Centroafricana. À época tinha 31 anos e terminava as suas chapas, à tarde, com auto-retratos encenados. Hoje as fotografias de Samuel Fosso integram as colecções da Tate Modern em Londres, do Centro Georges-Pompidou e do Museu do Quai Branly em Paris. A sua série "African Spirits", que presta homenagem às grandes figuras panafricanistas e da luta pelos direitos cívicos nos Estadfos Unidos não se vende por menos de 100 000 euros. O género do retrato marca a fotografia africana e assegura-lhe os seus primeiros grandes sucessos internacionais. São histórias que dizem muito sobre um mercado compartimentado e com mais-valias fabulosas.

A criação da Bienal de Dakar - Dak’Art - em 1989 e, mais tarde, em 1994, a dos Encontros (Rencontres) de Bamako marcam os inícios de um mercado que se caracteriza globalmente por ser uma vasta terra virgem. Estando massivamente à sombra do mercado de arte, a fotografia africana não é representada na sua diversidade. A exposição de 1998 «L’Afrique par elle-même», associada ao seu catálogo «Anthologie de la photographie africaine», montada pela Revue Noire e com um périplo mundial que começou na Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) em Paris acentua o processo de reconhecimento internacional de uma fotografia africana plural (1 - Uma versão adaptada chegou em 2006 ao Porto, Centro Português de Fotografia: ver "Voz própria"). Os anos 2000 são marcados pela ambiciosa e itinerante exposição «Africa Remix» do Centro Pompidou de Paris.

Em 2007, Malick Sibidé recebe um Leão de Ouro na Bienal de Veneza. O mercado da fotografia internacional já passara a contar com a fotografia africana, cujo futuro assenta então na sua abertura e na sua diversificação. O apogeu deste período corresponde já à respectiva ultrapassagem, simbolizada pelo primeiro pavilhão africano na Bienal de Veneza, em 2007, sob a direcção de Simon Njami (2: foi o "CHECK LIST LUANDA POP", pavilhão atribuído por concurso à Fundação Sindika Dokolo e galeria Soso de Luanda). A fotografia africana, que continuava a ser um objecto construído do exterior controlado por galeristas e comissários ocidentais, entra lentamente numa nova fase ao mesmo tempo de abertura e de recuperação pelos Africanos.

Para além dos cinco nomes que giram em círculo na boca dos galeristas e dos coleccionadores, os fotógrafos africanos estão pouco representados no mercado. Por isso chegou o momento de reflectir a fertilidade de um continente, o que a presidente da Fundação Zinsou, do Benim, Marie-Cécile Zinsou, resume perfeitamente em algumas palavras: « Em África, é por toda a parte, todo o tempo» (« En Afrique, c’est partout, tout le temps. »). Novos actores contribuem para abrir este mercado, atribuindo aos fotógrafos africanos um lugar crescente. Para o reconhecimento da criação contemporânea africana em sentido amplo, cabe ao comissário nigeriano Okwui Enwezor um papel importante desde 2002, por ocasião da Documenta 11 de Kassel na Alemanha ou mais recentemente com a Trienal de Arte Contemporânea que teve lugar no Palácio de Tokyo em 2012 e de que assegurou a direcção geral (3. Okwui Enwezor organizara no Museu Guggenheim de Nova Iorque, em 1996, dois anos antes da exp. da Revue Noire, o primeiro grande panorama da fotografia africana: IN/SIGHT AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHERS, 1940 to the Present - aí aparece Ricardo Rangel com a série da Rua Araújo.)

 

1. Sartorial Anarchy #8, 2013, Pigment on satin paper, 122.2x101.9cm, Ed. of 3, 3AP, courtesy Galerie Leila Heller, New-York © Iké Ude / 2. "Ashleigh McLean, Série There’s a Place in Hell for me and my friends", 2011, archival pigment ink on warmtone, courtesy Galerie Stevenson, Le Cap et GalerieYossi Milo, NewYork © Pieter Hugo / 3. 99 Series, Series of seven photographs, 2013, 89x 89cm © Aïda Muluneh / 4. Autoportrait, Série «African Spirits», 2008, courtesy Galerie Jean-Marc Patras, Paris © Samuel Fosso

Os artistas africanos começam a ser reconhecidos como actores de parte inteira da criação contemporânea mundial. Para lá do interesse internacional crescente pela criação contemporeânea africana, a África toma consciência da riqueza da sua criatividade. Emblemático deste deslocamento do mercado é Sindika Dokolo, congolês nascido em 1972, que cria a sua colecção em 2004 (4. Banqueiro casado com Isabel dos Santos, ligado à Trienal de Luanda desde antes de 2006, via Fernando Alvim: ver Trienal). Hoje, ela conta com mais de 500 peças de 140 artistas provenientes de 28 países africanos. Um ano mais tarde, em 2005, a criação da Fundação Zinsou no Benim - ver Zinsou - e a constituição de uma colecção composta por 300 a 400 obras (de que 30 a 40 por cento são fotografias) prolonga essa tendência nascente. Tudo se passa como se o crescimento da cotação dos artistas será tanto mais acelerado quanto a sua aparição é tardia (recente) no mercado, que se caracteriza por uma expansão rápida e curvas excepcionalmente ascendentes.

Neste contexto, os antigos actores continuam presentes mas mudam de estatuto, como André Magnin que de comprador para a colecção Pigozzi passou a galerista em 2009, e também, um ano mais tarde, da editora Revue Noire que se tornou uma galeria sob o nome Maison Revue Noire. Jean Loup Pivin, um dos três fundadores da Revue, explica o seu projecto: «O continente africano não pode resumir-se a menos de dez nomes e duas tendências ‘exóticas’. O nosso trabalho é continuar a promover a diversidade da fotografia africana na sua invenção e também com o nosso fundo constituído por vários milhares de imagens de várias centenas de fotógrafos que representam todo o espectro qualitativo dos fotógrafos africanos, de modo a que um dia lhes seja reservado um lugar maior no mercado.» Se as grandes capitais europeias continuam a ser placas giratórias importantes para esse mercado, já não são lugares de passagem obrigatórios. Os fotógrafos africanos vão directamente a Nova Iorque, Dubai ou Doha.

Desde há dois anos, o mercado da criação contemporânea africana vive um período de efervescência, uma bolha de que a fotografia não está, obviamente, excluída. André Magnin, que encontrámos precisamente no seu regresso de Paris-Photo Los Angeles, está tranquilo; vendeu todas as suas fotografias de Omar Victor Diop, o que não aconteceu à maior parte dos galeristas, para os quais esta feira representa mais despesas que benefícios. « Nestes dois últimos anos tudo vai muito depressa e aparecem excelentes artistas apoiados por galerias muito profissionais» - observa. (5. A galerie Magnin-A tem apresentado Mauro Pinto e Filipe Branquinho.) Os actores deste mercado têm a sensação de assistir a um boom. Imane Farès partilha esse entusiasmo: «Penso que este interesse pela arte africana vai ainda crescer, está em plena expansão.» Sammy Baloji, que ela representa desde o ano passado, faz parte das «success stories» deste mercado. Foi, nomeadamente, um dos finalistas do célebre Prémio Pictet em 2013.

Este dinamismo é confirmado pelo êxito da feira 1:54 (1 continente, 54 países) de Londres. A primeira edição teve lugar em 2013. A galerista da Costa do Marfim Cécile Fakhoury vendeu todo o seu stand. O fotógrafo François-Xavier Gbré, que ela representa, foi comprado pela Tate Modern. Para Paul Hewitt, director estratégico dos novos mercados na Christie’s, «o facto de a 1:54, primeira feira internacional consagrada à arte africana, ter lugar em Londres durante a Frieze envia uma mensagem clara: a arte africana é hoje um mercado de crescimento rápido.»

No entanto, esta tendência só terá continuidade se for sustentada por uma rede de coleccionadores, museus e galeristas africanos. «É um mercado que suscita o interesse dos investidores», sublinha Cécile Fakhoury. Trata-se para ela de desenvolver um mercado interior e criar dinâmicas entre os países. «A maior parte das pessoas a quem vendi obras nunca tinham comprado arte. Andam pelos 30 anos e têm uma curiosidade enorme por este domínio». A bipolaridade francófona e anglófona atenua-se para enriqueccer um tecido de trocas e de interesses comuns.

A África do Sul está à parte, o seu mercado é estruturado e organizado desde há várias décadas com grandes galerias, grandes colecções e grandes museus. De modo geral, o desenvolvimento do mercado da África anglófona é muito similar ao que acabamos de descrever, nomeadamente a Nigéria, que é ao mesmo tempo o país mais povoado de África e a primeira potência económica africana, ultrapassando desde este ano a África do Sul.

É na Nigéria que o Lagos Photo Festival criado em 2010 estabelece condições de trocas sem precedentes entre países africanos à volta dos seus fotógrafos. Está a tornar-se o ponto de encontro incontornável para a fotografia africana. Marie-Cécile Zinsou visita-o todos os anos. «É tudo o que os Rencontres de Bamako não são. É toda a dinâmica do continente na sua relação com o resto do mundo», diz com entusiasmo. O mercado africaniza-se rapidamente e constrói assim as bases de um crescimento estável.

Nesta mesma linha, o empresário marroquino Alami Lazraq está a criar em Marrakexe um museu dedicado à arte contemporânea marroquina e africana com uma superfície de 6 000 m2, cuja inauguração está prevista para 2016. A sua colecção conta já com 500 obras. A este respeito, Touria El Glaoui, directora fundadora do 1:54, o Salão africano de arte contemporânea, afirma: «O facto de um museu inteiramente dedicado à fotografia e às artes visuais surgir em Marrakexe é significativo da evolução do interesse por estas práticas, e parece-me primordial que artistas fotógrafos como Yto Barrada ou Hicham Benohoud, que atingiram uma importante visibilidade à escala internacional, apoiem a sua criação.»

No desenvolvimento deste mercado em África, um dado muito importante tem de ser levado em conta, o da conservação das fotos. O calor e a humidade alteram terrivelmente as provas. Na Fundação Zinsou, os orçamentos de conservação impedem a compra de outras obras fotográficas. «Estamos a interrogar-nos sobre se a colecção não será repatriada para França», explica a sua presidente. Para contornar o problema é preciso ser inventivo e, para a sua última exposição de Malick Sibidé, fez imprimir as fotos a tinta sobre tela. Parece que o efeito é muito interessante para o preto e branco e que a conservação é melhor. A ver a longo termo.

No que é agora um vasto mercado, quais são os fotógrafos mais prometedores? Proponho-vos que os descubram

OS FOTÓGRAFOSS : LEONCE RAPHAEL AGBODJELOU, AKINTUNDE AKINLEYE, LEILA ALAOUI, MALALA ANDRIALAVI- DRAZANA, KADER ATTIA, SAMMY BALOJI, KOTO BOLOFO, NABIL BOUTROS, FILIPE BRANQUINHO (Maputo), MOHAMED CAMARA, SEYDOU CAMARA, KUDZANAI CHIURAI, FATOUMATA DIABATE, OMAR VICTOR DIOP, CALVIN DONDO, LALLA ESSAYDI, HASSAN ET HUSAIN ESSOP, SAMUEL FOSSO, WASSIM GHOSLANI, HASSAN HAJJAJ, NERMINE HAMMAM, PIETER HUGO, EURIDICE KALA, KILUANJI KIA HENDA (Luanda, Lisboa), GERMAIN KIEMTORE, MAMADOU KONATE, T-J LETSA, NAMSA LEUBA, DILLON MARSH, FATIMA MAZMOUZ, FABRICE MONTEIRO, BAUDOUIN MOUANDA, ZWELETHU MTHETHWA, ZANELE MUHOLI, AIDA MULUNEH, YOUSSEF NABIL, DANIEL NAUDE, MATAR NDOUR, MAME-DIARRA NIANG, ABRAHAM OGHOBASE ONORIODE, LAKIN OGUNBANWO, ALAIN POLO, NYANI QUARMYNE, ZINEB SEDIRA, GEORGES SENGA, MARY SIBANDE, MALICK SIDIBE, PAUL SIKA, MIKHAEL SUBOTZKY, GUY TILLIM, IKE UDE, NONTSIKELELO VELEKO, GRAEME WILLIAMS, RALPH ZIMAN.

Os nomes no índice divulgado no site:

• L-R. AGBODJELOU
• Akintunde AKINLEYE
• Leila ALAOUI
• M. ANDRIALAVIDRAZANA
• Kader ATTIA
• Sammy BALOJI
• Koto Bolofo
• Nabil Boutros
• Mohamed Camara
• Seydou Camara
• Kudzanai CHIURAI
• Fatoumata DIABATE
• Omar Victor Diop
• Calvin Dondo
• Lalla ESSAYDI

• Hassan & Husain ESSOP
• Samuel Fosso
• Wassim GHOZLANI
• David Goldblatt
• Hassan Hajjaj
• Nermine Hammam
• Pieter Hugo
• Euridice Kala
• Seydou Keita
• Kiluanji KIA HENDA
• Germain KIEMTORE
• Mamadou Konate
• T-J. LETSA
• Namsa Leuba
• Dillon Marsh

• Fatima Mazmouz
• Nandipha MNTAMBO
• Fabrice Monteiro
• Baudoin Mouanda
• Zwelethu MTHETHWA
• Zanele Muholi
• Aida MULUNEH
• Youssef Nabil
• Daniel Naude
• Matar Ndour
• Mame-Diarra NIANG
• A. OGHOBASE Onoriode
• Lakin OGUNBANWO
• Alain Polo
• Nyani QUARMYNE

• Zineb SEDIRA
• Georges SENGA
• Mary SIBANDE
• Malik SIDIBE
• Paul SIKA
• Youssouf SOGODOGO
• M. & P. SUBOTZKY & WATERHOUSE
• Guy TILLIM
• Siaka Soppo TRAORE
• Ike UDE
• Nontsikelelo VELEKO
• Graeme WILLIAMS
• Ralph ZIMAN

 

 

###

versão anotada (in progress)

O aparecimento da fotografia em África seguiu de perto a invenção do medium, mas a sua entrada no mercado de arte* data já dos anos 1990. A maneira como «surgiu» Saydou Keïta é emblemática da curta história do mercado da fotografia africana. Estamos em 1991 em Nova Iorque. André Magnin e Jean Pigozzi visitam a exposição «African Explores: 20th Century African Art» organizada por Susan Vogel no New Museum of Contemporary Art. Encontram fotografias a preto e branco, retratos, em cujas legendas se lê: «Anónimo. Mali». André Magnin parte logo a seguir para Bamako, com uma pasta de fotocópias. Levam-no a um primeiro fotógrafo que o conduz a outro fotógrafo: o primeiro é Malick Sibidé e o segundo, Seydou Keïta. Foi assim que estes fotógrafos, que trabalhavam até aí como artesãos, com a sua clientela, entraram num outro mercado, o mercado de arte. E durante anos são estes retratistas (Seydou Keïta, Ojeikere) ou fotógrafos documentais (Jean Depara, Malick Sidibé) que vão monopolizar o mercado. Em números, a coisa exprime-se assim: em 1990, uma foto de Keïta valia o equivalente a 50 cêntimos de euro, em 1992 vale 150 euros e hoje uma prova assinada de Keïta vale entre 5 000 e 15 000 euros.

* <Trata-se (outra vez) da "descoberta" da África pelo Ocidente e no Ocidente, segundo as suas regras de interesse e de visibilidade: é uma história dos descobrimentos, não uma história de África. É o conhecimento, a aprovação, a apropriação exterior que constitui o objecto de estudo, no caso a fotografia. O ponto de vista é em absoluto eurocêntrico (e em especial parisiense) e neste caso a fotografia que importa é aquela que entra no mercado ocidental - e este é já o mercado de arte, ou um mercado da fotografia associado ao mercado de arte. (Existem também o mercado fotográfico da fotografia, o pequeno mercado dos coleccionadores de fotografia, e dois mercados institucionais da fotografia, o da divulgação da fotografia e o outro, museológico e empresarial (corporate) mais ou menos identificado com o mercado de arte.) "African Explores" é de 1991, já depois de "Magiciens de la Terre", de 1989, de que se fala adiante, e onde não há ainda fotógrafos africanos. É óbvio que ao longo dos anos 80, e mesmo antes, se produz e expõe fotografia africana, mas ela não constitui um pólo de atenção enquanto fotografia de ambição ou qualidade artística e não tem ainda o seu mercado. (O mercado da fotografia foi surgindo lentamente nos anos 70, a crítica da fotografia nos anos 80.)>

Nesses anos, os actores deste mercado contam-se pelos dedos de uma mão e os fotógrafos africanos estavam muito dependentes dessas pontes fabulosas cuja omnipotência não é propícia a um mercado aberto. De 1989 a 2009, André Magnin desempenha um papel capital neste minúsculo mercado, já que estava a formar a colecção de Jean Pigozzi, que lhe dissera, depois de ter visto a exposição «Magiciens de Terre» em Beaubourg [e La Vilette] em 1989 [dirigida por Jean-Hubert Martin]: «Você vai-me fazer uma colecção única no mundo». (Magiciens de la Terre:  www.centrepompidou.fr ) Vinte anos mais tarde a colecção Pigozzi conta com mais de 10 000 obras. Paralelamente, a Revue Noir fazia um trabalho de publicação magistral e revelava 3 500 artistas, 600 dos quais fotógrafos, desde o início dos anos 1990.

< André Magnin fora comissário adjunto dos "Magiciens"; foi o comissário/director da colecção Pigozzi de 1989 até 2009 e possui desde então a sua galeria, Magnin-A - www.magnin-a.com - que apresenta artistas que vivem e trabalham na "África Negra", e não os das diásporas ocidentais (expõe Mauro Pinto e Filipe Branquinho). Essa opção pelos artistas do interior do continente, muitos deles autodidactas e intérpretes de tradiçõs locais, vernaculares ou ± eruditas, divide a informação e o mercado da arte africana - continua a ser uma marca da colecção Piggozi.

A Revue Noire - www.revuenoire.com - apresenta logo em 1991 (nº 3, Dezembro) um panorama da fotografia africana dividida entre a produção documental e a direcção arte, num número que põe na capa Rotimi Fani-Kayodé (Ife, NIgeria 1955 - London 1989). O nº 15, Dezembro 1994, é dedicado a Moçambique e também aos 1ºs Encontros de Bamako. A revista, luxuosa e de grande formato, muito apoiada pela cooperação francesa, é criada por Jean-Loup Pivin e Pascal Martin Saint Léon, arquitectos que trabalharam de 1979 a 1985 em Bamako, para a concepção e realização do Museu Nacional de Mali e outros projectos. Desenvolvem depois trabalhos para África e fundam a revista, editora e empresa produtora de exposições em 1991 com Simon Njami e Bruno Tilliette. Ver AP: 2008/cronologia.html>

Dois anos depois da descoberta de Seydou Keïta, o fotógrafo francês Bernard Descamps desembarca no estúdio de Samuel Fosso em Bangui, na República Centroafricana. À época tinha 31 anos e terminava as suas películas, à tarde, com auto-retratos encenados. Hoje as fotografias de Samuel Fosso integram as colecções da Tate Modern em Londres, do Centro Georges-Pompidou e do Museu do Quai Branly em Paris. A sua série "African Spirits", que presta homenagem às grandes figuras panafricanistas e da luta pelos direitos cívicos nos Estadfos Unidos não se vende por menos de 100 000 euros. O género do retrato marca a fotografia africana e assegura-lhe os seus primeiros grandes sucessos internacionais. São factos que dizem muito sobre um mercado espartilhado e com mais-valias fabulosas.

A criação da Bienal de Dakar Dak’Art em 1989 e, mais tarde, em 1994, a dos Encontros de Bamako marcam os inícios de um mercado que se caracteriza globalmente por explorar uma vasta terra virgem (une vaste friche). Estando massivamente à sombra do mercado de arte, a fotografia africana não é representada na sua diversidade. A exposição de 1998** «L’Afrique par elle-même» associada ao seu catálogo «Anthologie de la photographie africaine», montada pela Revue Noire e com um périplo que começou na Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) em Paris marca um movimento de reconhecimento internacional de uma fotografia africana plural. Os anos 2000 são marcados pela ambiciosa e itinerante exposição «Africa Remix» do Centro Pompidou de Paris.

** < De facto, a exposição de Orkui Enwezor no Guggenheim de NY - IN/SIGHT AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHERS, 1940 to the Present - é anterior à exp. da Revue Noire - aí aparede Ricardo Rangel com a série da Rua Araújo.>

Em 2007, Malick Sibidé recebe um Leão de Ouro na Bienal de Veneza. O mercado da fotografia internacional já passara a contar com a fotografia africana, cujo futuro assenta então na sua abertura e na sua diversificação. O apogeu deste período corresponde já à respectriva ultrapassagem, simbolizada pelo primeiro pavilhão africano na Bienal de Veneza, em 2007, sob a direcção de Simon Njami. A fotografia africana, que continuava a ser um objecto construído do exterior controlado por galeristas e comissários ocidentais, entra lentamente numa nova fase ao mesmo tempo de abertura e de recuperação pelos Africanos.

<Foi o Padiglione/Pavilhão Africano chamado .  Os artistas expostos foram (a negro os 6 angolanos): Ghada Amer, Oladélé Bamgboyé, Miquel Barcelò, Jean Michel Basquiat, Mario Benjamin, Bili Bidjocka, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Loulou Cherinet, Marlène Dumas, Mounir Fatmi, Kendell Geers, Ihosvanny, Alfredo Jaar, Paulo Kapela, Amal Kenawy, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, Santu Mofokeng, Nástio Mosquito, Ndilo Mutima, Ingrid Mwangi, Chris Ofili, Olu Oguibe, Tracey Rose, Ruth Sacks, Yinka Shonibare, Minette Vari, Viteix, Andy Warhol, Yonamine. Curatori: Fernando Alvim e Simon Njami. ( Check List ) >

Para além dos cinco nomes que giram em círculo na boca dos galeristas e dos coleccionadores, os fotógrafos africanos estão pouco representados no mercado. Por isso chegou o momento de reflectir a fertilidade de um continente, o que a presidente da Fundação Zinsou, do Benim, Marie-Cécile Zinsou, resume perfeitamente em algumas palavras: « Em África, é por toda a parte, todo o tempo» (« En Afrique, c’est partout, tout le temps. »). Novos actores contribuem para abrir este mercado, atribuindo aos fotógrafos africanos um lugar crescente. Para o reconhecimento da criação contemporânea africana em sentido amplo, cabe ao comissário nigeriano Okwui Enwezor um papel importante desde 2002, por ocasião da Documenta 11 de Kassel na Alemanha ou mais recentemente com a Trienal de Arte Contemporânea que teve lugar no Palácio de Tokyo em 2012 e de que assegurou a direcção geral.  ( la triennale, 2012, Palais de Tokyo ,   louvre  )

< A "origem" dos Encontos de Bamako reside no projecto fotográfico de Françoise Huguier de seguir os passos de Michel Leirism publicado em "Sur les traces de l'Afrique fantôme", éditions Maeght 1990 ("De mars 1931 à février 1933, Michel Leiris traverse l’Afrique d’Ouest en Est. Il est secrétaire archiviste d’une mission ethnographique dirigée par Marcel Griaule, et, à ce titre, en tient le journal de bord. Publié pour la première fois chez Gallimard en 1934, son carnet de route est devenu un grand livre, L’Afrique fantôme.) De mai 1988 à janvier 1990, une photographe, Françoise Huguier, et un écrivain reporter, Michel Cressole, ont repris l’itinéraire de la mission Dajar-Djibouti.") A estadia no Mali dá origem a um projecto de trabalho com os fotógrafos locais que é proposto à cooperação francesa.

En 1991, deux photographes, Bernard Descamps et Françoise Huguier se voient regulierement dans leur agence : l’Agence Vu. Lors d’une discussion, ils prennent conscience qu’au cours de leurs voyages en Afrique ils ont rencontré de nombreux photographes africains. Ils décident alors de mettre en œuvre un projet commun en Afrique. En premier lieu, Françoise Huguier et Bernard Descamps lancent leur projet avec des photographes maliens (Alioune Ba et Django Cissé). Chaque français travaille en binome avec un photographe local. Cette aventure n’ayant pas réellement abouti, les deux français prennent l’initiative d’organiser un festival pour faire connaître la photographie africaine. "Les 1ères Rencontres: une initiative française pour promouvoir une photographie méconnue.
Pour trouver des financements, Françoise Huguier prend contact avec Roger Aubry, qui dirige alors l’association «Atout Centre». Ce dernier sollicite l’association «Afrique en Créations» (cette association était née en 1990 avec une mission fondatrice, celle de favoriser la présence de la création africaine contemporaine sur les marchés culturels français et européene), qui promeut la création africaine pour trouver des financements. Afrique en Créations absorbera par la suite l’association de Roger Aubry. - in Jeanne MERCIER Juin 2006 , Les Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, Bamako 2005. Sous la direction d’André Gunthert Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Uma carta de António Quadros, 1990

(carregar para ampliar)

 

 

Estava completamente esquecida, entre velhas fotografias, e julgo que ficou inédita, desde há 27 anos.

Nem sei se agradeci ao António Quadros, que não conhecia pessoalmente, mas que admirava desde as sessões infantis do Cine-Clube do Porto, numa sala revestida por figuras decortadas.

.

 

Irregularidades na Arco Lisboa

Ainda o ArcoLisboa (em Maio) e as irregularidades da organização IFEMA, que não cumpre o seu próprio regulamento.

Parece haver condições para impugnar judicialmente o processo de selecção-exclusão de galerias portuguesas na próxima feira, observando o Regulamento comunicado aos galeristas e a anunciada criação de uma secção destinada a "novas galerias", intitulada Opening e organizada por convites.

"Como disse < Urroz, director das feiras Arco ao Público> na conferência de imprensa, há novas galerias e novos projectos em Lisboa, como as galerias Madragoa e Pedro Alfacinha, e mais algumas que podem abrir até à Arco Lisboa, em Maio, inclusive galerias estrangeiras. Mas como algumas delas são muito novas e não podem participar no programa geral da Arco Madrid e da Arco Lisboa, arranjámos uma fórmula especial, a secção Opening. Em Lisboa, vai ser uma selecção de galerias novas com curadoria de João Laia; terá um formato especial diferente das outras galerias no espaço principal da Cordoaria. É uma coisa em que estamos a trabalhar e ainda não temos a lista final de galerias. Vamos apresentá-la em Abril."

De facto, quem se candidatou conhecia e aceitou um Regulamento onde se especificavam com rigor as condições de admissão e participação. Está aí estabelecida a possibilidade de a organização (o Comité Organizador) convidar outras galerias, mas só em função do seu "reconhecimento internacional".
Não é manifestamente o caso das galerias já indicadas acima nem das que ainda não abriram, e que, além de entrarem no Arco de modo irregular, também teriam as suas inaugurações fora da feira incluídas na programação e colocadas no centro das atenções dos coleccionadores e visitantes convidados.

Quem foi admitido regularmente na feira é surpreendido com um incumprimento do Regulamento por parte da IFEMA e com uma nova secção "especial", ficando assim sujeito a uma concorrência desleal, que será mais sensível para as galerias que apresentam em especial jovens artistas. É enganado com a aparição de "um formato especial diferente das outras galerias no espaço principal da Cordoaria", e ainda paga a factura.

Entretanto, aguarda-se ainda que os responsáveis políticos e culturais da cidade se pronunciem sobre as exclusões de galerias de 1º plano que violam toda a lógica de um evento comercial realizado com apoio e promoção dos poderes/dinheiros públicos. #casoArcoLisboa2017

 

#

 Entrevista de Carlos Urroz no Público de 22 de Fev.:

" O que pode adiantar sobre a feira em Lisboa? Diz-se que vai ter pela primeira vez uma área dedicada aos projectos especiais com curadoria de João Laia.
Como disse na conferência de imprensa, há novas galerias e novos projectos em Lisboa, como as galerias Madragoa e Pedro Alfacinha, e mais algumas que podem abrir até à Arco Lisboa, em Maio, inclusive galerias estrangeiras. Mas como algumas delas são muito novas e não podem participar no programa geral da Arco Madrid e da Arco Lisboa, arranjámos uma fórmula especial, a secção Opening. Em Lisboa, vai ser uma selecção de galerias novas com curadoria de João Laia; terá um formato especial diferente das outras galerias no espaço principal da Cordoaria. É uma coisa em que estamos a trabalhar e ainda não temos a lista final de galerias. Vamos apresentá-la em Abril.

Quais são as instituições que estão a ajudar mais a instalação da Arco Lisboa na cidade?
Toda a gente. Uma super-ajuda da câmara (EGEAC), Turismo de Portugal, Ministério da Cultura, EDP.

Está tudo a funcionar?
Sim. Isso não quer dizer que nos dêem dinheiro, mas estamos a ter apoio de todas as instituições de que nos aproximamos. Algumas dão o espaço, outras fazem a ligação com a imprensa internacional. Incluindo os museus: Museu do Chiado, Colecção Berardo...

A longo prazo isso vai chegar?
O dinheiro é muito importante. Que as instituições suportem o mercado da arte, que tenham orçamento para comprar na feira. Isso não quer dizer que o dinheiro seja a única forma de ajudar um projecto.

Fazendo a pergunta mais directamente: é suficiente? A Ifema, que organiza a Arco, consegue fazer a feira mais ou menos sozinha em Lisboa?
Até agora. No ano passado, fizemos uma tentativa de a tornar viável. Temos de olhar para os nossos activos, os lucros e as despesas: a feira tem de ser sustentável, de outra maneira não a faremos. Até agora tem cumprido as expectativas da Ifema.

Portanto é sustentável?
Até aqui sim, mas precisa de algum apoio público e das instituições locais, precisa de que os museus locais comprem obras na feira para que as galerias internacionais as vejam. Não é só o dinheiro que nós gerimos, é também que volume de compras há na feira. Para isso, precisamos dos coleccionadores portugueses e dos coleccionadores estrangeiros que trazemos, mas também precisamos das instituições portuguesas. Precisamos de que Serralves, Gulbenkian e Berardo comprem na Arco Lisboa."

"O PÚBLICO viaja a convite do Turismo de Espanha". Mas exagera na subserviência

 

Exclusões na Arco Lisboa de 3 galerias de 1º plano: 111, Barbado e Underdogs

As representações das três grandes galerias afastadas da Arco Lisboa estariam sem margem para dúvidas entre as mais fortes da Feira.

Segundo o regulamento, cada galeria tem de ter um artista em destaque, para além da eventual apresentação colectiva de outros nomes. Ora a Barbado Gallery preparava a apresentação de MARTIN PARR, um dos nomes mais famosos e mediáticos do panorama mundial da fotografia, o qual também ocupa hoje um lugar de grande peso na orientação da Magnum e no universos dos photobooks. Seriam apresentadas fotografias de Espanha e um outro conjunto inédito realizado em Portugal. Foi atribuído ao projecto uma pontuação muito baixa, por razões que não custa entender.

Para João Barbado que cumpriu dois anos de actividade, trata-se de «um rude golpe do ponto de vista comercial» devido à visibilidade da feira, e também em termos de relacionamento internacional. O qual, aliás, não lhe tem faltado, como demonstram os artistas da sua programação: para estar na Arco Lisboa, abdicou da Photo London 2017, onde teria lugar assegurado.

Quanto à 111 teria em destaque no seu stand da Cordoaria PEDRO A.H. PAIXÃO ( Pedro AH Paixao ), um artista exposto na galeria em Setembro de 2015 com grande sucesso da crítica e não só:  http://111.pt/ É  reconhecidamente um artista com uma obra muito original, com que a 111 renovou significativamente a sua actividade. É por ser uma galeria de 1º plano nacional e por apresentar na feira um projecto ganhador que a concorrência (aliás, Cristina Guerra) a excluiu: http://www.pedroahpaixao O afastamento da 111 tem já um historial anterior de hostilizações que deu lugar ao corte de relações pessoais.

Pedro A.H.Paixão

Em terceiro lugar, ou 1º, a ordem é arbitrária, a Underdogs, que é orientada por Alexandre Farto - aka Vhils, e possui dois espaços em Lisboa, concorreu com a apresentação destacada de dois artistas: PEDRO MATOS (Pedro Matos na Underdogs), um artista cujo trabalho se afasta notoriamente dos modelos correntes da arte pública, numa direcção mais reflexiva, com um percurso internacional que tem passado por São Francisco, Londres, Los Angeles ou Milão - http://www.pedromatos.org/  - anterior exp. individual  Less Than Objects na Galeria Presença, Porto, e Underdogs Gallery, Lisboa.

Less Than Objects na Galeria Presença, Porto

E também o alemão CLEMENS BEHR , "a German graphic designer and artist with a background in graffiti, who makes use of inexpensive, discarded materials to create complex, ephemeral architectural structures based on geometric forms that reflect elements from the surrounding environment." - http://www.under-dogs.net/artists/clemens-behr/. O respectivo site permite conhecer uma obra inventiva e de grande impacto : http://www.clemensbehr.com/.

Good news first please", Solo show for the opening of Galerie Nathalie Halgand in Vienna.

A exclusão não foi uma surpresa, porque o mesmo ocorrera em 2016, mas para um dos responsáveis pela galeria-agência é uma decisão que vai ao arrepio de uma anunciada intenção de reunir na feira práticas e artistas inovadores. Note-se que Vhils esteve presente em 2016 na feira Arco de Madrid e na The Armory Show de NY representado pela galeria Vera Cortês. A oposição à chamada «street art», que está na origem da Underdogs, não é a raiz da exclusão.

Fotografia e fotógrafos

"Se são assim tão parte de nós, porque não nos ensinam a consumir imagens, a descodificar os seus contextos de produção, os seus usos, a forma como se transformam e metamorfoseiam?" escreve o Sérgio Gomes, Público, 16 Fev. ( "Aprender a ver imagens")

 

Já não se trata de 'consumir imagens', o que supõe uma distância (uma diferença) entre um público consumidor e as instâncias de produção (profissionais, artistas, órgãos de informação ou comunicação...). Seria ainda, e foi antes, uma diferença essencializada e hierarquizada entre produtores e consumidores de imagens. Precisar-se-ia de uma espécie de Deco para ensinar a consumir e regular a produção.

Mas, no termo de uma evolução que desde sempre democratizou e generalizou a fotografia, sempre mais, todos comunicamos por imagens (comunicar e consumir são coisas diferentes), tal como comunicamos por palavras - palavras ditas e escritas. Um mesmo dispositivo, o telemóvel com câmara, assegura a produção e a comunicação instantânea de palavras (ditas e escritas) e de imagens - é decididamente algo de novo, levando a um extremo a produção digital, que alguns quiseram deixar de considerar fotografia (por ex. André Rouillé)

Dizer e mostrar, ler e ver, chegaram a uma paralela condição de existência, de acesso, de circulação e de uso. Todos comunicamos por palavras e fotografias. É um novo estádio comunicacional.

 Todos fazemos fotografias, todos somos fotógrafos como todos somos falantes e todos escrevemos*. A aprendizagem dos códigos da linguagem - da fala e da escrita - é a alfabetização. Mas a fotografia (e a comunicação visual) é livre de regras e códigos, não se "alfabetiza" nem codifica ou "descodifica", tem outros meios mais informais e mais sensoriais de aprendizagem. A fotografia (tal como a imagem desenhada ou pintada) não é uma linguagem e não se "lê" - nem se consome (como a palavra e a escrita não se consomem): no termo da sua evolução para uma total democratização da fotografia, ela é um equivalente* da linguagem (mas continuamos a dizer por comodidade e falta de termos certos, linguagem da pintura, linguagem da fotografia).
Com ela, imagem fotográfica, se produz e faz circular comunicação. Ela é já comunicação. Comunicamos agora - todos - também por imagens. Se o desenho e a pintura requerem uma habilidade, um talento , uma aprendizagem, para serem eficazes enquanto comunicação e arte, a fotografia requer um dispositivo mecânico.

(Não é o pincel que faz o pintor, nem o "dispositivo" que faz o fotógrafo. - L.P.).

Pode pintar-se com os dedos (sem dispositivo e sem utensílios, sem um suporte definido). Mas nem todos são pintores. No entanto, a pintura é sempre uma arte, mesmo se praticada por crianças, loucos, pintores de domingo, amadores ou académicos. Toda ela remete (ou reinicia) uma prática convencionada como arte, com uma tradição e uma história de géneros e génios. Mesmo que seja "má pintura", ou péssima pintura - e é essencial saber que há péssima arte (a designação de algo como arte não é uma atribuição ou reconhecimento de qualidade).

Faz-se fotografia com um dispositivo (usando uma câmara) que se tornou de tal modo acessível, democratizado e aperfeiçoado (fácil de usar) que todos somos fotógrafos. O que não quer dizer profissionais da fotografia e/ou artistas. É que a fotografia não é uma arte - algumas fotografias são funcionais, utilitárias, vernaculares; algumas fotografias ambicionam ser arte (o inferno está cheio de arte fotográfica - cheio de intenções artísticas de profissionais, amadores e artistas, que são, aliás, categorias imprecisas, formais e flutuantes).  Algumas fotografias são reconhecidas como arte ( mesmos que a tal não se candidatem, de Atget a Vívian Meyer) ou que o recusem ser (como Walker Evans e seguidores). Muitas fotografias incluídas em colecções de museus são anónimas, e as fotografias cientificas ou técnicas podem ser de realização aleatória e maquínica (as de astronomia, por exemplo - e são belíssimas, ou seja, investidas de uma atenção de ordem estética).

Todos somos fotógrafos porque fazemos fotografias mesmo que seja com um bom ou um mau telemóvel, ou com uma câmara sem lente, pinhole.

 

(Não somos todos fotógrafos, não. <...>Fotógrafos são outros, poucos, e não tem nada a ver com "dispositivos": tem a ver com técnica, aprendizagem e, principalmente, com o olhar! - L.P.)

 

...Fui procurando definir os conceitos que ia usando. Pintor é alguém que faz ou tenta fazer arte da pintura. E faz mesmo que seja uma borrada. A palavra arte não qualifica qualidade.

Fotógrafo é alguém que fotografa, ocasionalmente ou não (a pintura exige intenção, a fotografia exige um dispositivo técnico mesmo artesanal (pinhole, o caso Miroslav Tichy), e exige a atenção de um observador (autor e/ou espectador).

Fotógrafos são muitos, é da vocação da fotografia, desde a famosa Kodak, e já antes, tornar-se sempre mais acessível, mais barata, mais fácil. Mas o "povo" continua a acreditar em aristocracias... ainda crê que fotografar é um dom de poucos, como no tempo dos grandes amadores com materiais caríssimos.

 

Uma coisa é fotografar, outra é produzir uma obra fotográfica. A diferença está só aí. Como está, peça a peça, entre uma fotografia apreciada como boa e outra que o não é como boa, passando-se do domínio da opinião para o do juízo argumentado.

Em fotografia o "lá calha", o acaso (cf. o surrealismo), mesmo o acidente, a disponibilidade para o acaso, e também a recusa da "arte" (da artisticidade) podem ser essenciais - podem acontecer boas fotografias: é algo da "espécie" do object trouvé, o encontro imprevisto da street photography. O homem que fazia fotografias de passe ou BI era fotógrafo, o amador salonista é fotógrafo, o turista que viaja com a sua câmara, mesmo descartável, é fotógrafo, o fotojornalista mais boçal e o artista que usa a fotografia (fazendo-a e não só apropriando-se da já feita) são fotógrafos - em fotografia há génios mas não há nobres e plebeus, é uma prática democrática.

 (Na verdade, por detrás desta e de outras incompreensões está essa abissal diferença de conceitos do que é Arte, necessariamente incompatíveis <...> A arte é algo que foge completamente a esses conceitos de mercado, percurso, cotação, escolas, tendências, valor, exposição etc. que norteiam a apreciação de um técnico. <...> - L.P.)

Não distingo em diferentes níveis técnicos (ou especialistas - há por aí cada besta...) e leigos, que têm tantas vezes mais disponibilidade para ver. A arte nunca escapou à igreja, à corte, à academia e à escola, ao Salon, à bienal e à feira, ao autarca ou ministro, ao MERCADO, em suma - cada uma dessas existências em que existe um encomendador ou um cliente corresponde a um (ou a vários) mercados. O mercado dos museus (associado aos grandes coleccionadores e às "galerias líder") é hoje o nível mais elevado da produção, circulação e exibição da arte. Mas não é preciso acompanhar esses meandros para apreciar uma obra.

No ex-CAM. Cronologia

16/01/2017

2. Houve progressos na abordagem da fotografia , mas insuficientes:

1. o álbum Exposição-Feira Angola 1938 passou a ter uma tabela justificativa que lembra o então desenhador e funcionário Vasco Vieira da Costa, depois grande arquitecto moderno de Luanda, além do fotógrafo Firmino Marques da Costa (mas as fotografias são legendadas e a exp. não só "ficou a cargo dos colonos", como foi de sua iniciativa e da autoria exclusiva de técnicos e artistas da colónia, como se explicou numa ambiciosa manifestação de autonomismo crítico...).
2.  O catálogo dos Encontros de Coimbra é já da 10 ed., 1989, é um documento anódino, sem vigor, e é um erro incompreensível dizer que de 1980 a 2000 os Encontros ocuparam o Edifício Chiado, transferindo-se em 2003 para o recém-criado CAV (ocupavam muitos lugares da cidade e em especial o edif, das Caldeiras - se não sabem pq não perguntam...)
3.  Da Ether mostra-se o catálogo "Nível de Olho", também já de 1989, e não um dos seus inventivos desdobráveis-cartaz.
4. FALTA a Europália 1991 e pelo menos um dos catálogos de Jorge Calado (1939-1989, a Colecção Nacional; À Prova de Água, CCB Expo'98; ou Ingenuidades, FG 2007 com 620 p.; ou Au Féminin, exp. na Gulbenkian de Paris). Não se entende, nem com a melhor boa vontade, até pq há por lá tanta ninharia pretensiosa... Os anos do Estado Novo estão muito mais bem tratados.
   

1. Também quanto ao surrealismo - e já agora ao SPN e António Ferro, que não são menos importantes, pelo contrário (para surrealismos é melhor ir aos originais...) - haveria que rever a nota sobre as Exposições de Arte Moderna. É que é nos salões do SPN que se afirma de facto o surrealismo (o 1º surrealismo, e no caso de Dacosta, o melhor surrealismo), com a presença de António Pedro em 1939, 40, 42, 44; de Dacosta em 1941, 42, 44 e 45, etc; idem para Cândido Costa Pinto. Quando se diz que não se enquadrava nos gostos do regime está-se a falsear a coisa; e quanto à abstracção deve dizer-se que quase não havia antes de 1945 (e pouco depois os Fernandos Lanhas e Guedes prepararam a vinda ao SNI de um salão abstraccionista cosmopolita, o das Réalités Nouvelles). Mais: dizer que, "em 1933, o estado Novo criou o SPN para dirigir, centralizar e supervisionar as acções de propaganda do regime" é muito pouco elucidativo. Propaganda e informação à data ainda não eram conceitos distintos, e o organismo criado para e por António Ferro vai muito mais longe, no domínio da acção e dinamização culturais, antecedendo o que serão mais tarde os ministérios da cultura. (E sem o ser foi seguramente o melhor ministro da cultura do séc. XX).

15/Jan. 2017

2. Agora tenho de dizer que melhorou muito. Ainda não há capas da colecção Vampiro (http://listalivroscoleccaovampiro.blogspot.pt/) onde a partir de 1947 o Cândido Costa Pinto democratizou o surrealismo. Mas apareceram outras coisas.

1. Há acidentes felizes, e (assim) a exp. do ex-CAM está agora muito melhor.

Ao centro, a estampa de Beatriz Matias, 1969, fica ali muito bem.

portugal-em-flagrante > F. Gulbenkian

 

2/08/2016

Voltei ao Museu Gulbenkian e fiquei espantado com várias ausências clamorosas na Operação Portugal 1:
a coleção Vampiro com as capas de Cândido Costa Pinto e Lima de Freitas e antes o Gato Preto de Victor Palla;
em geral a não representação do Porto (Portugália, Independentes, Esbap e Magnas, Gal. Álvarez, Divulgação, Árvore, Capital Cultural 2001 - pelo menos; falta de documentos ou ignorância? - já o França não ia ao Porto);
esquecimento (!?) dos Encontros de Coimbra e da Ether e das exposições do Jorge Calado em Lisboa e na Gulbenkian de Paris - que a arbitrariedade dos vários directores (a começar pelo fotógrafo Molder em regime livre de autopromocçao, não deixaram exibir em Lisboa, apesar do enormes investimentos feitos: nunca se fez maior e melhor (uma delas na FG).

Aliás a fotografia é tratada com os pés, depois dos anos 50, ou seja, com ausências e presenças injustificáveis, e aqui, ao contrário da exp da sede, esta mostra deveria entender-se como um guia ou inventário ou levantamento. A seguir justificarei as razões de queixa, com nomes.
E mais, a quase ausência das Áfricas, depois das exp. de 1934 no Porto e 1938 em Luanda, considerando-as lugares de diáspora ou extensões coloniais. A segunda metade da Operação 1 devia ser refeita.

Fátima Mendonça Salão Caravela Gal. 111

 

 

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http://111.pt/exposicoes/caravela-salao/

Caravela – Salão

14 de janeiro – 04 de março 2017

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http://111.pt/exposicoes/a-cura/

A Cura, Operação ao Cérebro

- 15 de Outubro – 31 de Dezembro de 2014

incidentes políticos

Três episódios vividos como jornalista (os dois primeiros quando me ocupava de política nacional no Diário de Notícias, até 1981) marcaram para sempre a minha consideração por Mário Soares. Uma coisa eram as grandes ocasiões políticas em que se participava como espectador empenhado (e em que intervinham também outras figuras destacadas, como Salgado Zenha, Melo Antunes, etc), outra a proximidade profissional nos bastidores.
A mais antiga situação que me chocou vem do seu primeiro período como primeiro-ministro (23 Julho 1976 a 27 Julho 78), por ocasião de uma reunião com Felipe Gonzalez e o PSOE que terá tido lugar durante a campanha eleitoral espanhola de 1977. Não me lembro do lugar onde mas nunca esqueci uma situação que nos envergonhou. A abrir o encontro, Gonzalez apresentou os seus companheiros e indicou os pelouros que deveriam representar na sessão aberta à imprensa. Soares despachou a agenda em três tempos, dizendo preferir a informalidade sem temas de trabalho nem porta-vozes sectoriais. Percebeu-se o desconforto da sala: era uma cimeira ibérica, mesmo que em campanha eleitoral. A diferença de atitudes era abismal, e não deve ter sido motivada por MS ser então governante e FG candidato (derrotado em 1977 e de novo em 1979, antes de iniciar as suas maiorias consecutivas). Dossiers não era com ele, e, por consequência, também não com os que o rodeavam. Mas a jornada de corridas pelas estradas foi empolgante, com várias paragens para comícios (julgo que também em Portugal) e uma grande sessão final conjunta, orquestrada pela eficientíssima máquina partidária espanhola (andaluza). Não me lembro de como descalcei o episódio no DN, onde não éramos reverentes.

A segunda cena decorre em 1980, talvez no início, quando M.S. ainda ambicionava contrariar a segunda candidatura de Ramalho Eanes. A certa altura, não recordo quando, o gabinete ou a entourage do secretário-geral organizou um almoço (pelo menos um almoço) com jornalistas políticos tidos por influentes, de vários jornais, para tentar remediar o mau contacto de Soares com a imprensa, ou de alguma imprensa com Soares. Também não sei se me convidaram directamente ou se foi o Mário Mesquita que me indicou - desde que entrara no DN 1976 mantínhamos uma relação de cumplicidade política, numa redacção ainda em grande parte hostil, cumplicidade que me levara por exemplo, tempos antes, a acompanhar a primeira incursão, quase clandestina, de António Barreto no Alentejo da Reforma Agrária.
Pela minha parte, e portanto pela parte do DN, o almoço correu mal. Dizia-se que M.S. pretendia dialogar, ouvir opiniões, debater o contexto político com os jornalistas. Não foi isso que testemunhei no restaurante da antiga FIL; pelo contrário, vi-o incapaz de ouvir. A certa altura, M.S, já sem ocultar o propósito de impedir o apoio do PS a Ramalho Eanes, afirmava que qualquer nome que o PS indicasse tinha a vitória assegurada. No quadro da primeira presidência de Eanes era uma tese inverosímil. Disse-lhe que só o seu próprio nome poderia complicar ou impedir a vitória de Eanes; ou avançava Soares ou não haveria alternativa. Não gostou, irritou-se. O fim do almoço correu mal, mas são pormenores escusados. Chegou-me como experiência; não tinha estômago para integrar a corte de devotos que via à distância.
O facto de eu manter ainda uma relação estreita de colaboração confidencial (clandestina?) com consultores do conselho da Revolução e do Palácio de Belém não interferia na minha análise. Não penso que o tivessem informado. Pouco depois a proposta de Mário Mesquita para que eu passasse a sub-chefe da política não foi aceite pelo chefe da redacção Fernando Pires, mas também nunca suspeitei que houvesse interferência partidária (seria só animosidade pessoal por parte de um jornalista à antiga, dito da tarimba). Logo a seguir recusei acompanhar o Cavaco na viagem de uma semana pelos países árabes, que considerei uma inaceitável proposta de compensação (os colegas gabavam os relógios de ouro oferecidos em cada escala), e fui então de castigo para a Informação Geral (uma experiência inesquecível…) até passar para a Cultura, sem que tivesse interesse por esse destino.

FALTA A 3ª NOTA

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Anexo sobre um episódio facebookeano:

Eis a mulher que trocou a moral por um mural. Irene Pimentel, historiadora. Censurou-me um comentário, que eu, à cautela, tinha copiado: "É um texto brilhante, corajoso, atento e lúcido, o do J.M.T., mesmo que não comungue de todo o juízo político que expressa. (E reconheço-o sabendo dos laços entre famílias e de alguma cumplicidade com o João - calhou ver que fez um bom discurso, acrescento agora). É hoje um dos melhores colunistas. Lamento a incapacidade de ler, de estudar, de entender que alguma auto-intitulada esquerda mantém como defesa para os seus privilégios sociais. A intervenção política de Mário Soares nas ultimas duas décadas degradou a nossa capacidade de análise e de intervenção política a um ponto que estaremos ainda incapazes de adivinhar. Fica dito antes de tentar explicar as razões de uma oposição pessoal e profissional, enquanto jornalista, que vem dos 1ºs anos da democracia."

Refiria-me à Irene Pimental, que enquanto historiadora devia estar atenta a depoimentos de diferentes orientações, e que no caso do Mário Soares deveria tentar entender como se pode ser ao mesmo tempo um democrata e um autocrata. Primeiro apagou o meu comentário declarando-se proprietária do espaço e intolerante com a divergência. Deixei nessa inicial declaração de censura a pergunta se o recado era mim (não tinha tempo para o confirmar), e a seguir vi que me apagou dos "amigos", numa escalada de má educação e autismo partidário - agora próprio desse partido que M.S. fez (com outros, em boas companhias) e que depois desfez, em más companhias recentes. Já por via dos blogues e do FB, desde os maus tempos da "guarda cultural do Sócrates" (a que chamo o "galambismo", apesar de outros respeitáveis Galambas), tinha pensado que a senhora trocara a história pela propaganda. Agora prova que no seu mural desfez-se também da moral.

O João Miguel Tavares lê-se no Público (https://www.publico.pt/…/o-meu-soares-nao-foi-o-melhor-soar…) e aí presta, do seu ponto de vista geracional que tanto perturba o derrotismo saudosista de certa esquerda, uma grande homenagem ao M.S. que convém lembrar: "Quando comecei a ouvir fado e a gostar de fado, no final dos anos 80, Amália Rodrigues era já uma sombra da extraordinária artista que revolucionara a canção de Lisboa nas décadas de 50 e 60. Os seus espectáculos ao vivo eram penosos e o que a minha geração conhecia dela eram as paródias nos programas do Herman – cabeleira postiça, braços abertos, queixo levantado, “palminhas, palminhas”. A grande Amália, a maior artista portuguesa do século XX, tinha de ser procurada nos discos antigos.

Quando comecei a escrever artigos de opinião, em 2003, Mário Soares era já uma sombra do extraordinário político que esteve na primeira linha da luta pela democracia e pela liberdade nos anos quentes da revolução, e que nunca abdicou de sonhar com um Portugal europeísta. A guinada à esquerda da década final da sua vida é tão penosa quanto os últimos espectáculos de Amália, e tenho muita pena que tudo o que eu próprio escrevi sobre Soares tenham sido textos ácidos e críticas virulentas. Ele incomodava-me tanto mais quanto o seu presente me parecia em total contradição com o seu passado. O grande Soares, o maior político da democracia portuguesa, pertence a uma História à qual já pouco assisti – mas é lá que ele tem de ser procurado. (...)" Não sei se foi o maior política, mas foi o mais histriónico e o mais feliz, o de maior longevidade.
Faz-me falta a direita inteligente e ágil do João Miguel Tavares; a "amizade" da Irene estava a mais, pelos vistos.

sumario: anos 40, neo-realismos

Artigos recolhidos em Academia.edu

(1)
HISTÓRIAS PORTUGUESAS (anos 40… anos 2000)
https://www.academia.edu/748287/Hist%C3%B3rias_portuguesas_anos_40..._

1942, No atelier da Rua das Flores (2002, 60 anos depois)

Geração de 45 (2005)

Júlio Pomar, Pintura (Saltimbancos), 1942, reproduzido de “Panorama, Revista Portuguesa de Arte e Turismo”, nº 13, Fevereiro 1943. Assinado Júlio

(A obra foi exposta no atelier da Rua das Flores em 1942 e daí levada por Almada Negreiros (vendida, como se tem escrito, ou, talvez melhor, cedida, porque é natural que não a tenha chegado a pagar), o qual por sua vez a apresentou ao júri da 7ª Exposição de Arte Moderna do Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional, inaugurada em Dezembro desse ano (foi o nº19 do catálogo, Pintura, mas o autor designa-a como Saltimbancos). O crítico da Seara Nova, Adriano de Gusmão, escreveu que a obrinha «fez sensação neste salão», onde as presenças surrealistas de António Pedro e Dacosta enfrentavam os gostos mais conservadores, entre os modernos apadrinhados por António Ferro. Depois, a tal Pintura cedida pelo Almada, e certamente nunca reclamada, perder-se-ia nos depósitos do futuro SNI, com uma assinatura (Júlio) que deixou de ser identificada ou se prestava a confusões.
Que uma exposição de estudantes tivesse sido visitada pelos artistas e especialistas da época, que um ensaio de pintura de um jovem desconhecido de 16 anos acabado de entrar na Escola de Belas Artes fosse acolhido no Salão do SPN de António Ferro, e comentada na imprensa, e que fosse a seguir reproduzida no «Panorama» entre outros destaques dessa 7ª Exposição de Arte Moderna do Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional é todo um documentário sobre um tempo distante, desconhecido e contraditório…)

As Exposições Gerais de Artes Plásticas, 1946 - 1956: «Um grande comício sem palavras» (2005, Vila Franca de Xira)

Surrealismos de 1934 a 52: «Antes e depois de 1947» (2001, Museu do Chiado)

Júlio Resende    (2001,  Matosinhos)
Fernando Lanhas, «Sonhei que sabia tudo» (2001, Museu de Serralves)
Nadir Afonso, "Razão e excesso» (2001, Cascais)
António Dacosta (1988, CAM, Fundação Gulbenkian)

(2) DE 1982
ANOS QUARENTA
https://www.academia.edu/748287/Hist%C3%B3rias_portuguesas_anos_40..._
in Diário de Notícias, 8, 9, 16 e 16 Abril 82
sobre OS ANOS 40 NA ARTE PORTUGUESA, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
I «A vanguarda de António Ferro»
II «A geração da ruptura»
III «Os sentidos de uma década»
IV «Duas ou três lacunas»

(3) NO CATALOGO RAISONNÉ, 2004
Júlio Pomar. O neo-realismo, e depois (1942-1968)
https://www.academia.edu/741356/Julio_Pomar._O_neo-realismo_e_depois._1942-1968
in Júlio Pomar, Catálogo “Raisonné” I. Pinturas, Ferros e Assemblages 1942-1968 /Catalogue Raisonné I, Peintures, Fers et Assemblages 1942-1968; textos/textes de Alexandre Pomar, Marcelin Pleynet. Éditions de la Différence, Paris / Ed.Artemágica, Lisboa, 2004. (Version française disponible)

(4) ANEXO
O neo-realismo na fotografia portuguesa,1945 – 1963

https://www.academia.edu/525938/O_neo-realismo_na_fotografia_portuguesa_1945_1963
in INDUSTRIALIZAÇÃO EM PORTUGAL NO SÉCULO XX. O CASO DO BARREIRO, Actas do Colóquio Internacional Centenário da CUF do Barreiro,1908-2008, Universidade Autrónoma de Lisboa, 2010 (Auditório Municipal Augusto Cabrita, Barreiro, 8-10 de Outubro de 2008)

Um Ferro curto, à Nery

O António Ferro do Rui Vieira Nery nunca escreveu"A Idade do Jazz-Band", 1923, o "Novo Mundo, Mundo Novo" de 1930, ou "Dez Anos de Política do Espírito 1933 1943". Nunca promoveu os Salões de Arte Moderna, onde expuseram e se consagraram modernistas, surrealistas e outros (em confrontação com os "bota de elástico" da SNBA); nunca publicou a revista Panorama, nunca lançou a Campanha do Bom Gosto, etc. Não sei se é cegueira partidária, se ignorância da história, mas é grave que apareça isto no prefácio de uma edição do Público (Luiz Moita, O Fado canção de vencidos" 2016 - 1936, fac-simile).

 

Na pág 2 do seu prefácio refere-se à Emissora Nacional. Do 1º presidente, António Joyce, diz ser muito próximo de Ferro. Acrescenta que logo em 1935 (1º ano de emissão regular) foi subsituído por Henrique Galvão, "também ele então ainda um apoiante convicto de Salazar", mas omite que se tratava já de um opositor a Ferro, o que lhe permitiria ilustrar o modo habilíssimo de Salazar ser salazarista, com uma "genial" perfídia, maquivelismo ou arte de gerir as contradições ideológicas e em geral a diversidade de posições da direita da época.

 

Na pág 2 do seu prefácio refere-se à Emissora Nacional. Do 1º presidente, António Joyce, diz ser muito próximo de Ferro. Acrescenta que logo em 1935 (1º ano de emissão regular) foi subsituído por Henrique Galvão, "também ele então ainda um apoiante convicto de Salazar", mas omite que se tratava já de um opositor a Ferro, o que lhe permitiria ilustrar o modo habilíssimo de Salazar ser salazarista, com uma "genial" perfídia, maquivelismo ou arte de gerir as contradições ideológicas e em geral a diversidade de posições da direita da época.

 

 

ilustraçoes apontamentos

Algumas capas:

1946 sem indicação de autor, 1946, 1949 (1ª e 2ª ed.), 1950.

Afonso Ribeiro (Maria I - Escada de Serviço, 1946; Povo, 1947),
Papiniano Carlos (Estrada Nova, 1946; Terra com sede, 1946),
Sidónio Muralha (Beco e Passagem de Nivel, 1949; Bichos, Bichinhos e Bicharocos, 1949; Companheira dos Homens, 1950),
Alves Redol
mais João Gaspar Simões, José Cardoso Pires, Raul de Carvalho, são os escritores com capas na 1ª década, anos 40.
Uma ilustração pode ser a simples reprodução de uma obra (de arte), desenho, pintura, colagem, etc, que interrompe a sequência do texto. Uma capa levanta outras exigências (título, nome do autor e editor) e dificuldades - torna-se uma produção especializada; raramente os pintores são bons capistas.

Uma outra associação ao meio literário surge, à data do primeiro neo-realismo, através dos retratos dos autores incluídos nos respectivos livros: nem todos estão identificados, mas conhecem-se Mário Dionísio (1950), José Fernandes Fafe (1951), Eugénio de Andrade (1951), Ilse Losa (1951), Orlando da Costa (1953). Retratos incluídos nas tiragens especiais de 40 exemplares da colecção Cancioneiro Geral, Centro Bibliográfico. Normalmente não existem nas bibliotecas públicas e tornam-se difíceis de localizar. Fernando Lanhas é também retratado numa edição Cadernos das Nove Musas, Portucale, em 1948.

 Distingo então 3 capítulos:

os livros ilustrados (de que há diversas variantes),

as capas (separando os casos em que uma ilustração é trazida por um editor ou designer gráfico para essa capa),

e os retratos dos autores incluídos nos volumes.

 

Em muitos casos as fichas bibliográficas ignoram ou desprezam essas informações, e não encontro nenhum estudo geral que aborde os anos 1945 em diante. A história da edição tem entres motivos de interesse, por exemplo, a identificação dos editores e directores editoriais, revelando como os escritores estiveram implicados em iniciativas editoriais (este foi tb o nome de uma editora, Iniciativas Editoriais). Foi o caso de Urbano Tavares Rodrigues na Minotauro, de Cardoso Pires na Fólio, de Rogério de Freitas e Leão Penedo na Artis. Os escritores de esquerda circulavam entre os jornais, as editoras e a publicidade. Existe bibliografia sobre o tema, Francisco Belard e ou Mário Moura. O memorialista J A França escreveu sobre isso?

 

 

 

 

 

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A ilustração, como a decoração, é parte integrante e significativa da obra de JP, para além da condição alimentar que têm em geral esses trabalhos aplicados, paralelos à obra de pintura, que considerava principal.
Uma escolha alargada dos melhores livros ilustrados (para além do 1º e do último referidos em nota anterior, de 1949 e 2016) deve incluir
"O Romance de Camilo" de Aquilino Ribeiro, com desenhos no texto e 3 litografias (ed. Folio / Gleba), 1957;
"Guerra e Paz" de Tolstoi, desenhos, ed. Sul, 1956-58:
"O Barão" de Branquinho da Fonseca, Portugália, 1959, têmperas sobre cartão;
"D. Quixote de la Mancha", versão de Aquilino Ribeiro, Bertrand, 1960, têmperas sobre cartão;
"Histórias da Terra Negra", de Castro Soromenho, com Alice Jorge, desenhos, Gleba, 1960;
"O Cristo Cigano" de Sophia de Mello Breyner, desenhos, Minotauro, 1961;
"O Purgatório" de Dante, desenhos e xilogravuras na ed. especial, Minotauro, 1961-63;
"Emigrantes", Ferreira e Castro, óleos sobre tela, Portugália, 1966;
"Pantagruel" de Rabelais, desenhos, Prelo, trad. Jorge Reis, design gráfico de Alice Jorge, 1968 - é o único caso em que o ilustrador propôs a edição;
"A Selva", Ferreira de Castro, ENP, 1974; pintura acrílica sobre papel, CR II, nº 72);
"A Abelha na Chuva", de Carlos de Oliveira, Inova, 1976, pintura acrílica sobre papel - CR II, nº 112;
"Pour l'amour de mourrir", Malcolm Lowry, La Différence, 1976, guaches recortados - CR II, nº 132 ;
"Kadama Vivila", Gilbert Lely, La Différence, 1977, desenhos;
"Rose et Bleu", Jorge Luis Borges, La Différence, 1976, guaches recortados - CR II, nº 204;
"Corpo verde", Maria Velho da Costa, Contexto, 1979, desenhos;
"O Burro-em-pé", Cardoso Pires, Morais, 1980, colagem e pintura acrílica sobre tela livre (CR II, 276);
"Les Cheveux du réel", Gonzague Raynaud, La Différence, 1982, desenhos;
"Mensagem - 7 Histórias Portuguesas", Fernando Pessoa, Clássica Ed, 1985 - o livro reproduz uma série de pinturas;
"Le livre des quatre corbeaux", com Claude-Michel Cluny, La Différence / Gal. 111, 1985 - o livro reproduz uma extensa série de pinturas;
"La chasse au snark", Lewis Carroll, La Différence, 1999 - o livro reproduz uma extensa série de pinturas sobre tela e pastéis.

São publicações de diferente natureza: edições de obras em fascículos, que são muito comuns até meados de 970, como O Romance de Camilo, Guerra e Paz, D. Quixote, a Comédia Humana, As Mil e Uma Noites, o Grande Fabulário; edições comemorativas, como A Selva e os Emigrantes; edições de pequena tiragem, como O Cristo Cigano e o Barão.

Destacam-se desta lista as edições de Joaquim Vital em Paris, Editions de la Difference, "Pour l'amour de mourrir", "Kadama Vivila", "Rose et Bleu", "Les Cheveux du réel" - pequenos volumes acompanhados por 'éditions de tête" e múltiplos de arte. E a seguir projectos editoriais que se associam à realização de séries de pinturas e à produção de séries de serigrafias ou litografias, como "Le livre des quatre corbeaux" e "La chasse au snark", ou "Le sel de la mémoire"

#

 Algumas páginas interiores de "Bichos, Bichinhos e Bicharocos" (páginas desenhadas reproduzidas de http://www.slideshare.net/…/conto-sidonio-muralhabichosb…/17

O mais antigo e o mais recente livros ilustrados de Júlio Pomar são duas edições para crianças, e também as únicas que realizou:
1. "Bichos, Bichinhos e Bicharocos", de Sidónio Muralha (poesias), Francine Benoit (músicas) e Júlio Pomar, de 1949. Sem identificação do designer gráfico nem do editor (os autores). É tamb´ém o início do bestiário editado do artista.
2. "O Cão que Comia a Chuva, de Richard Zimler e Júlio Pomar (imagens), com design gráfico de Henrique Cayatte e fotografias de António Pedro Ferreira (por lapso não mencionado), Porto Editora, 2016.

"Bichos, Bichinhos e Bicharocos" foi reeditado, num fac-simili da ed de 1949, por Althum em 2010, em co-edição com Centauro e em parceria com o Museu do Neo-Realismo, de Vila Franca de Xira, com prefácio de João Lobo Antunes. A 2ª e 3ª edição incluem um CD.

A relação com a literatura foi-se tornando mais poderosa na obra tardia de JP:

Bocage, Camões, Almada e Pessoa, desenhos para azulejos do Metro de Lisboa, CAM 1984; Mensagem e 7 histórias portuguesas, 1985, Galeria 111 / Clássica Ed.;

"Les Mots de la Peinture", Charleroi, Bélgica / La Différence, Paris 1991;

"O Paraíso e outras histórias", Culturgest 1994;

"Alguns livros & outras edições (1955-2005)", desdobrável, Centro Cultural Emmerico Nunes, Sines, 2006 (1ª apresentação das ilustrações para Dom Quixote de 2005);

"Retratos e Ficções", Palácio da Galeria, Tavira, 2006. Uma outra linha de trabalho tem a ver com o que poderia designar-se como o espectáculo do real: os corpos, as cenas de trabalho, tauromaquias e corridas de cavalos, até às séries brasilerias de Pirenópolis e do Xingú. Outra ainda, a relação com as obras do passado e a história da arte (Goya, Uccello, Ingres, Chardin, etc).

 

2-A mais recente exposição Dom Quixote está no Instituto Cervantes de Lisboa, até 31 de Janeiro, a concluir as celebrações do 4º centenário da morte do escritor. Inclui 40 desenhos de 2005; 3 gravuras de 1959-60 e uma serigrafia de 1989.

É a versão alargada de uma mostra que por iniciativa do festival literário Folio se apresentou este ano no Museu Municipal de Óbidos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3-Catálogo da 1ª exp. de galeria dos "Desenhos para Dom Quixote de la Mancha". Gal. João Esteves de Oliveira, 2008 

3-A 2ª exp. monográfica dedicada a Dom Quixote ocorreu em Junho de 1997, no Centro Cultural da Gandarinha, em Cascais. Foi comissário Rui Mário Gonçalves, que escreveu o prefácio do catálogo. (Colaborador: Alexandre Pomar)

Com 17 ilustrações de 1958-59, para Novelas Exemplares e para D. Quixote, confundidas; 6 gravuras de 1959-61; 5 esculturas em ferro soldado, 1960-61; 1 assemblage de 1977; 6 quadros de 1960-63 e outro de 1997

 

2-A 1ª exposição D. Quixote realizou-se na Cooperativa Gravura em 1960:

5 têmperas sobre cartão de uma série de 30, da ed. Bertrand; 1 óleo sobre tela (D.Quixote, 1960, col. Yvan Bramão de Azevedo - CR vol I nº 172); 2 + 2 gravuras (2 ed. Gravura e 2 ed. do autor); 2 desenhos.

Esses desenhos mais antigos são desconhecidos. Por onde andarão? Procuram-se para um 2º volume

 

1960, "Pequena exposição D. Quixote", Galeria da Coop. Gravura.

1963, "Ilustrações para as obras completas de Aquilino Ribeiro", Galeria Diário de Notícias (cat. nº 17: "D. Quixote de la Mancha")

 

1-versão de Aquilino Ribeiro, 1960, Liv. Bertand. Três volumes ilustrados com 30 têmperas sobre cartão, preto e branco, 20x15cm (as dimensões do volume). Ver Catálogo Raisonné vol. I, nº 162, pp. 124-127.

 

a história inovadora

Transcrevo do Facebook (de 10 de Dez.) para não perder mais tempo. Com um ou outro acrescento pontual.

1- Já leram a promoção que um conhecido semanário (o Expresso) faz hoje de um desconhecido historiador de arte (o Bernardo Pinto de Almeida, catedrático)? É informação? É crítica? É recado? É bairrismo? É publicidade? É uma vergonha. Rais partam o semanário que desce, desce, desce... Fiquei espantado qd vi a revista de um amigo. Como não acreditei, vim a casa digitalizar para guardar as provas do delito (do Valdemar Cruz, um topa a tudo sem competência para se ocupar do tema, mesmo como jornalista generalista).

2- Devo dizer que comecei a ficar incomodado qd recebi um mail assim: "Conversa Pública e Lançamento do Livro
Com <...o autor> (Professor Catedrático na Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto) e João Ribas (Diretor Adjunto do Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves)

Com esta obra luxuosa, repleta de belíssimas imagens (mais de 500), <o autor> apresenta-nos uma visão profundamente original e inovadora da História da Arte portuguesa no último século.
Rompendo com muitas das ideias cristalizadas no tempo sobre artistas inigualáveis como Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, e revelando a genialidade de nomes quase esquecidos, o mais importante crítico de arte da atualidade oferece-nos uma panorâmica, excecionalmente rica e solidamente fundamentada, da receção nacional aos movimentos artísticos do século XX e dos seus protagonistas.
Esta será, daqui em diante, ‘a’ História da Arte portuguesa contemporânea, referência incontornável para artistas, colecionadores, estudantes e amantes de arte.

" 'É com este alfobre de ideias, de conhecimentos enciclopédicos, de finura de observação, de alta cultura não só artística como também filosófica e literária, através de uma escrita sempre elaborada e original, rica de semelhanças e diferenças, que o leitor fica – com as imagens ao lado – habilitado a escolher de entre o ‘museu imaginário’ concebido <pelo autor> as obras que mais gostaria de levar para casa a fim de as colocar no pequeno museu da sua imaginação.' - do prefácio de Manuel Villaverde. " [Mas foi mesmo o MVC que escreveu esta prosa digna de um qq serôdio académico? Não é o Manel que eu conheci.]

Enviado pelo autor do livro, este escrito promocional está também e ainda na Agenda de Serralves: http://www.serralves.pt/pt/actividades/historia-portuguesa-do-sec-xx-uma-historia-critica/ Já tinha esquecido a coisa qd sábado deparei com a Revista do Expresso. Anote-se para a História que alinham nas sessões, no Porto, o João Ribas, o António Guerreiro e o Manuel Villaverde Cabral, e em Lisboa Margarida Acciaiuoli, o mesmo Manel e o José Bragança de Miranda, numa "conversa aberta" moderada por Margarida Brito Alves e Filomena Serra.

3- Pergunta o escriba (V.C.) para entrar na matéria: "Pode um artista integrado na lógica fascista ser em simultâneo um modernista?" (e se dissermos que a "lógica fascista" é em si mesmo modernista? - o perguntador perderá o pé?)

"Há um modernismo fora de Lisboa, porque o regime proibia as manifestações modernistas. Sobretudo a partir de 1931, procura arregimentar os artistas." Vem entre aspas, deve ser do catedrático.
'O regime' já proibia antes de 1931? Já procurava arregimentar os artistas? Mas 'o regime' existia antes de 1931? Ferro antes de Ferro?

'O regime' fazia as suas Exposições de Arte Moderna, no SPN/SNI, por onde passavam os modernos / 'modernistas' existentes, contemporâneos mais ou menos coevos das modernidades moderadas dos anos 30 com curso dominante em todo o mundo, nessa década de reafirmações realistas em diferentes formações nacionais (ver "Années 30 en Europe - Le Temps Menaçant", MAM Ville de Paris 1997) e incluindo surrealistas como Pedro, Dacosta e Cândido (eram do "contramovimento" segundo MVCabral), e até futuros neo-realistas, mas diz-se que "proibia as manifestações modernistas" (as exposições, entenda-se).

"Não se pode dizer que aquele grupo dos neomodernistas lisboetas são pintores modernistas, porque vendiam todos para o regime". Temos aqui um 'must' entre as muitas pérolas. Eram modernos porque expunham no Salão de Arte Moderna e porque se contrapunham aos "botas de elástico" da SNBA (a Sociedade à antiga), como se devia saber, e também eram 'neomodernistas' mas não, nunca modernistas. Vá-se lá entender o que por aí se escreve, inovando, polemicando, contextualizando, e com muitas ilustrações para fazer um coffee table book a dar-se ares de hiustória crítica.
Estranho era o Botas ('o regime') ter comprado a todos - ele saberia? Assinava os cheques sem ver? O Ferro enganava-o? Temos por aí uma nova pista para abordar o fascismo nacional.

Os artistas que trabalharam para António Ferro "não são modernistas, e esta é a primeira grande dissensão relativamente ao critério de França". Etc, por aí fora, sem se perceber se o jornalista percebe o que escreve e o que cita.

Modernismo é uma palavra de uso difícil e variado, que quer dizer coisas diversas, episodicamente, em países e tempos diferentes. Modernista, em princípio, era alguém ou algum movimento que se reclamava como moderno, como do seu tempo, portanto inovador, em geral definindo-se numa "vanguarda", numa corrente, tendência ou estilo que se opunha a outros, anteriores ou diversos. Hoje já não há modernistas, o que torna mais complexo um uso útil do termo: ou é uma categoria precisa na história ou é uma sucessão ± vaga de movimentos e/ou vanguardas que têm só em comum o facto de se substituíram e/ou sobreporem desde meados do séc. XIX aos academismos e salonismos (aos gostos dos Salons) dominantes. Para muitos ficou entendido como modernismo a sua versão tardia e última, formalista à Greenberg. Mas modernismo pode ser também um não-conceito vazio, um saco de gatos, uma rasteira aos incautos, um factor de intermináveis confusões.

ADENDA

Recordo que, entre outros quiproquos, no Expresso e fora, escrevi em 1994 uma crítica sobre a 1ª versão desta mesma história nacional: EXPRESSO Actual, 12 Fevereiro, pp. 15 e 16, sob o delicado título "Borrar a pintura". O sr respondeu na edição de dia 26 (texto não transcrito no local abaixo referido) e eu respondi-lhe na mesma data ("Ponto final"): os interessados podem ler em http://alexandrepomar.typepad.com/alexandre_pomar/2010/01/pol%C3%A9mica-em-1994.html

 

Um activista africano

A mais interessante síntese biográfica sobre o Ulli Beier - a que leva mais longe a notícia da sua imersão na filosofia-religião Yoruba - é a que encontrei no The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, de F. Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo (editors), de 2010.

A revista "Black Orpheus" não é referida, nem o facto de em 1960 ter organizado a exposição de arte que assinalou a independência da Nigeria.

 

VER:

1955 - Odu: A Journal of Yoruba and Related Studies is founded at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, by Saburi Biobaku and UlIi Beier

1957 - Black Orpheus, a journal for African arts and literature, is founded by UIIi Beier in Ibadan, Nigeria

1960 - Ulli Beier organizes the independence exhibition in Lagos, where the works of key members of the Zaria Society are shown

1961 - July, Mbari Club is founded in Ibadan by a group of young writers and artists, including WoIe Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, Christopher Okigbo, Demas Nwoko, Uche Okeke, and Ulli Beier. Ezekiel Mphahlele, a South African, is its first president.

1962 - Mbari Mbayo Club in Oshogbo, Nigeria, is opened with a performance of dramatist Duro Ladipo's first play, Oba Moro. Many artists, including American painter Jacob Lawrence, Georgina Beier, Dennis Williams, conduct workshops there.

1962 - First International Congress of African Culture, organized by Frank McEwen, is held in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). It seeks to address the contemporary aesthetics of African art and music. Among the participating artists are Vincent Kofi, Ben Enwonwu, and Malangatana Ngwenya <não esteve presente, mas obras suas e de outros moçambicanos foram incluidas por Pancho Guedes numa grande exposição internacional>. Alfred Barr, William Fass, SO. Biobaku, Roland Penrose, and Tristan Tzara attend. <É Tzara que apresenta a intervenção de Pancho Guedes, e depois de terminado o Congresso viaja até L.M. para conhecer a obra de P.G.; morre no ano seguinte> <U.B. não participa no Congresso - terá participado na Conferência referida abaixo?>.

1962 . Historic and controversial Conference of African Literature in English language is held at Makerere University, Kampala, to debate the state of post-colonial African literature. Those who attend include Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ezekiel Mphalele, Lewis Nkosi, James Ngugi, Rajat Neogy. Several nationalist writers fail to acknowledge any literature written in non-African languages as being African.

in "Africa: Colonialism, Arts, Protest & Independence" (timeline)

http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/africa-colonialism-arts-protest-independence

 

Em 1961 Ulli Beier visita Lourenço Marques / Moçambique e a África do Sul. Em Setembro o Mbari Clube apresenta uma exposição fotográfica dedicada a Malangatana, Pancho Guedes, as casas Ndebele e a West Native Township - dois temas de investigação de Pancho Guedes.

"Seen in South Africa" é uma das primeiras exposições do Mbari Club.

Pancho visita Ulli Beier na Nigéria e o 1º workshop é dirigido por Julian Beinart.

CML/EGEAC: galerias a mais, "mediações" a mais, arte contemporânea a mais

E se tentássemos perceber (ou discutir primeiro) para que servem tantas galerias municipais, que constituem uma originalidade portuguesa e lisboeta?
As galerias municipais servem para concorrer com as galerias privadas e associativas; favorecem umas delas expondo os seus artistas e ignoram outras, têm sido uma extensão de galerias privilegiadas; viciam o pobre sistema da arte que temos.
A gestão tendenciosa e promíscua que o João Mourão levou a cabo (dirigindo ele a sua própria galeria Kunsthalle Lissabon e comissariando exposições em espaços privados) não exigiria uma reflexão sobre um passado recente vulnerável aos jogos de grupo e à corrupção, e sobre qual o futuro que importa construir?
E se a CML (EGEAC?) prestasse apoio às estruturas existentes (do Museu Vieira da Silva à Carpe Diem e outras estruturas associativas, passando pelo Arquivo Fotográfico e demais museus e estruturas camarárias débeis, em vez de se dedicar à gestão da arte numa escala provinciana e comunitarista?
Fazer sair o João Mourão, que se expôs despudoradamente e que me fartei de atacar, é só um 1º passo.
(Para a Sara A. Matos, que polidamente devo felicitar pela ascensão na burocracia camarária, pode ser uma problemática acumulação de responsabilidades e trabalhos.  Esta é uma opinião pessoal, claro)

Há tempos tinha interrompido o curso de uma sessão pública para ler parcialmente e entregar ao Presidente da CML e à Vereadora da Cultura um documento crítico em que o "caso Galerias do João Mourão" era o 1º ponto. (LINK a colocar)

26/10/2016

 

2

 Voltando ao tema das Galerias CML/EGEAC, agora ainda mais actual, temos aqui uma actualizada e insólita lista (não digam listagem, por favor) de "espaços", que vale a pena pôr à discussão

PONTO 1. Cito: "em Novembro de 2002, a Câmara Municipal de Lisboa criou a entidade plural das 'Galerias Municipais' com a missão de gerir os espaços expositivos da CML providenciando a mediação da arte contemporânea para diversos públicos." Já havia galerias, como a do Pal. Galveias, agora bem atribuída à Biblioteca central, mas juntaram-se numa mesma direcção.
"... providenciando a mediação da arte contemporânea para diversos públicos": por que raio a providência mediadora se dirige SÓ à arte contemporânea? Os "diversos públicos" (são extratos diferentes para receberem a mediação da arte contemporânea segundo os diferentes níveis do "meio da arte"?) não precisam de mediações dedicadas à arte antiga, moderna e popular, entre outras, as aplicadas, as amadoras, as tecnológicas, o design e a arquitectura, a BD e a novela gráfica (a Bedeteca já teve actividade...), etc? Contando que expor fotografia cabe ao Arquivo Municipal (foi um recuo institucional grave, como foi a destituição da Hemeroteca, que não era vistosa para festivais e turistas, e vendera a casa ao Lopes da Misericórdia). HÁ POR AÍ UMA BARRIGADA DE ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA que nada justifica: é, de facto, aquela que tem uma retaguarda de iniciativa empresarial e associativa mais forte. Mas pior que a barrigada é a BRIGADA DA ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA que se tem servido das "mediações".

PONTO 2. O que é o Africa.Cont, incluído entre as Galerias Municipais, não sendo uma galeria? Nos últimos anos era só uma sinecura do prof. José António Fernandes Dias, depois de ter sido um delírio caro da dupla Sócrates-Costa. As Tercenas do Marquês ficaram na mesma, e ainda bem: eram impróprias para lá meter uma programação "terceiro-mundista" em estilo pós-colonial chique.

PONTO 3. O que justificou a invasão do Palácio Pombal pelo galerista João Mourão, se aí estava sediado o Carpe Diem, com um protocolo em vigor? Não bastavam tantos outros espaços já disponíveis e em geral sub-utilizados?

PONTO 4. Se o Pavilhão Preto foi entregue ao Museu da Cidade, que tem outras galerias e núcleos dispersos pela cidade, por ex. um Torreão da Pr. do Comércio, não deve o Pavilhão Branco ser-lhe tb confiado? O investimento no Museu da Cidade, com os seus vários focos e edifícios, não seria a prioridade mais justa?

PONTO 5. O apoio directo e indirecto à rede de galerias comerciais e às associações, em especial as que ocupam espaços camarários e às que actuam para outros públicos, jovens e interculturais, não deve ser uma prioridade da CML/EGEAC em vez de lhes fazer guerra e concorrência - favorecendo umas galerias e ignorando ou prejudicando outras? Prioritário seria, aliás, o apoio e a colaboração com as entidades associativas e interculturais em vez de se lhes substituir (LEM e Casa do Mundo...), e em vez de substituir as linhas de actividade continuada pelas dinâmicas festivaleiras que tudo absorvem e uniformizam. Essas galerias comerciais, que têm a sua associação corporativa, não discutem estes temas? Não falam? Só estendem a mão?

PONTO 6. Em vez de se dispersar por galerias próprias, a CML/EGEAC não deveria fazer aquisições de obras de arte, alargando o seu museu ou museus - comprando para formar colecções e não para "ajudar"? Sei que comprou na última feira, mas terá sido para a apoiar?

PONTO 7. Existindo um departamento Galerias Municipais na Empresa Pública EGEAC não será preciso distinguir bem o que é uma direcção de serviço do que é um programador, o qual, aliás, em geral se perfila como um comissário, programando a seu gosto, no quadro de uma carreira de galerista-e/ou-comissário-e/ou-crítico-ou-e/artista, com as suas cumplicidades geracionais, estéticas e galerísticas próprias e o seu distanciamento do que deve ser serviço público (estou a pensar num Calhau, num David Santos, num Wandschneider, etc)? E separando também o que é programar do que é comissariar. Em princípio um director de departamento não programa, dirige, e um programador não comissaria. O João Mourão tinha chegado à desvergonha total de ainda dirigir a sua própria galeria (galeria mesmo, mesmo que não vendesse às claras).

PONTO 8. E mais galerias e exposições existem pela cidade na Casa da América Latina e na UCCLA (agora com uma grande sede comum), nos Paços do Concelho, em Bibliotecas e também em espaços de freguesias. É muito? Não, é pouco, porque é tudo rasteiro. Não vemos por cá o que vemos nos programas de outras capitais. #cmlcultural

http://www.egeac.pt/equipamento/galerias-municipais/

EGEAC:

À semelhança do que acontece noutras cidades, em Novembro de 2002, a Câmara Municipal de Lisboa criou a entidade plural das “Galerias Municipais” com a missão de gerir os espaços expositivos da CML providenciando a mediação da arte contemporânea para diversos públicos. Em Janeiro de 2015 estes espaços expositivos transitaram para a gestão da EGEAC, permitindo uma maior agilidade de programação e dinamização de modelos de gestão, financiamento e relacionamento com o público.

As Galerias Municipais pretendem ser locais que respondem com flexibilidade à mudança social e política, perseguindo uma programação participada, com uma base discursiva inerente e com abertura ao meio (local, nacional e internacional). Pretende-se criar espaços activos: parte centro comunitário, parte laboratório e parte academia, enquanto organização progressiva e de crítica, acessível.
As galerias consistem nos seguintes espaços: Pavilhão Branco, Torreão Nascente da Cordoaria Nacional, Galeria da Boavista, Galeria Quadrum, Galeria da Avenida da Índia e Palácio Pombal. (...)

Pavilhão Branco

Situado no Campo Grande, o Pavilhão Branco tem vindo a desempenhar um papel central na estratégia municipal de arte contemporânea, representando uma mais-valia na diversificação da sua oferta. As caraterísticas arquitetónicas do espaço convidam à realização de exposições com cariz “site-specific”: acolhendo habitualmente quatro mostras por ano, proporciona tempos de montagem e de exposição mais longos, de forma a que alguns dos projetos mais emblemáticos sejam definidos em função  – e façam sentido sobretudo – neste pavilhão. A sua linha programática tem apostado consistentemente na presença de artistas em “meio de carreira”, isto é, com um percurso já assinalável, que encontram aqui um local de dimensão que lhes permite apresentar um novo projeto com assinalável alcance. 

Galeria Quadrum

Laboratório da arte experimental portuguesa nas décadas de 1970 e 1980, a Galeria Quadrum nasceu de um sonho da artista e colecionadora Dulce D’Agro. Projetada pelo arquiteto Fernando Peres e instalada no palácio dos Coruchéus, teve um caráter pioneiro, revelando nomes fundamentais da arte portuguesa, e depressa revelou uma vocação de polo cultural da cidade. Mantendo viva esta tradição da sua génese, quer continuar a ser um espaço de apresentação de jovens artistas, onde se construam projetos continuados de serviço educativo envolvendo a comunidade local. (...)

Galeria Boavista

Aberta em 2009, a Galeria da Rua da Boavista revelou desde a primeira hora uma vocação abrangente e multifacetada nos seus vários andares: a programação tem vindo a ser partilhada com agentes culturais vários – de associações a festivais, que aqui desenvolvem exposições, performances, concertos ou outras atividades. Assim sendo, vai afirmando a sua marca na cidade enquanto espaço de discussão, apresentação de disciplinas distintas e de informalidade vincada. Estão previstas obras no espaço, após as quais se deverão apresentar aqui os resultados de um “open call” para jovens curadores, a quem serão dadas oportunidades de trabalhar num contexto institucional.

Galeria do Torreão Nascente da Cordoaria Nacional

Esta galeria tem a particularidade de se situar numa parte do complexo da Cordoaria Nacional, monumento nacional de 1779, com uma extensão de quase 400 metros que permitia acolher a extensão das cordas produzidas para barcos. O edifício continua sob gestão da Marinha Portuguesa, com quem a CML assinou um acordo para utilização do Torreão Nascente, com fim à realização de exposições. Sendo um espaço monumental, organizam-se aqui retrospetivas de artistas portugueses como foi o caso de José Pedro Croft, mas há também lugar para parcerias internacionais e nacionais com exposições de grande público, como por exemplo a Genésis de Sebastião Salgado (na imagem). No intervalo entre estes dois modelos são organizadas exposições coletivas, de coleções ou de propostas curatoriais ou artísticas, de grande envergadura.

Galeria Avenida da Índia

O antigo atelier do escultor Lagoa Henriques foi recuperado pela EGEAC em 2015 com a finalidade de se tornar num novo espaço expositivo da cidade: a Galeria Avenida da Índia. Foi inaugurada em Outubro de 2015 com a iniciativa “Retornar” (na foto), que assinalou os 40 anos da ponte-aérea de 1975. Com ela, iniciou-se também o papel de diálogo e questionamento da herança e memória colonial que se pretende desenvolver na linha programática deste local. A sua programação pretende cruzar artistas de várias geografias com trabalho nesta temática, recorrendo a abordagens diversas e disciplinas como a antropologia ou a história .

Palácio Pombal

Situado na rua de O Século, com cerca de 1560m2 e 1000m2 de jardim, o Palácio Pombal é um edifício seiscentista mandado construir por Sebastião de Carvalho e Melo, avô de Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, futuro Marquês de Pombal. O edifício atual é propriedade municipal desde 1968 e é gerido pela EGEAC desde 1997. Em 2009 foi realizada uma parceria com a associação cultural Carpe Diem, que tinha então à frente o curador Paulo Reis, para a dinamização do espaço. Para reforçar a actividade e garantir uma maior utilização do Palácio com vista à sua manutenção, em Janeiro de 2016 uma parte do Palácio voltou a ter programação da EGEAC ao serviço de iniciativas e parcerias desenvolvidas pelas Galerias Municipais e o Teatro Municipal Maria Matos e outros agentes culturais. Cruzando artes visuais e performativas, pretende-se desenvolver um programa formativo transversal potenciando assim o papel do Palácio na cidade.

Africa.cont

A partir de 1 de Julho de 2016, o Africa.Cont integra a linha programática autónoma das Galerias Municipais, visando a sua interligação com os equipamentos das Galerias Municipais e a partir destas fazer os cruzamentos necessários com os restantes equipamentos EGEAC, numa tentativa de afirmação e desenvolvimento dos objectivos de missão deste projeto: pôr o foco em exposições, conferências, ciclos de cinema, livros e música do continente e das diásporas africanas; a abreviatura “cont” aplica-se não só ao continente que inspirou o projeto mas também ao “contemporâneo” enquanto tempo de produção artística.

 

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Post war 1 - depois da bomba

1 Hanna Arendt, "Zur Person" Full Interview. In German with English subtitles.

https://youtu.be/dsoImQfVsO4

À entrada da exposição, com o som a ocupar a 1ª sala

2 Em frente a... 

Wostell, Appel, Louis, Stella e Beuys

Joseph Beuys, Monuments to the Stag (?), 1958/82

ou

Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch (Lightning with stag in its glare), 1958-1985. Installation, 39 Elemente: Bronze.

Obra em 4 exemplares, aqui atribuída à Gal. Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris - Salzburg, aparentemente incompleta

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3 Francis Bacon (Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950) & Andrzej Wróblewski (1927-1957, Lituânia-Polónia)

 4  Andrzej Wróblewski

1949 Liquidation of the Ghetto / Blue Chauffeur (frente e verso)

1949, Executed Man, Execution with a Gestapo Man.

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5 Wolf Wostell, 1958-59  &  Karel Appel, 1951 (Exodus nº1)

6 Wostell, Appel, Louis, Stella, Beuys

Morris Louis, 1951 (Untitled (Jewis Star) e Charred Jornal, Firewritten II)

& Frank Stella, 1958 (Arbeit Macht Frei, from the "Black Paintings": um título evocativo, "O trabalho liberta", frase exposta em campos de concentração, para uma pintura minimal.)

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7  Appel, Louis, Stella

8 Gerhard Richter, ...

SECÇÃO 1

Secção 1 / 2

 

Isamu Noguchi 1946, Richter 1963 (Bombers), Baj, Movimento Arte Nucleare 1951, David Smith 1949 / Joan Mitchell 1961 (Coll. Berardo)

Secção 1 sala 2

Henri Moore 1964-65, Jess 1962, Paolozzi 1956, Appel

 

 Tenho sérias dúvidas sobre a colocação da bomba atómica como tema e imagem iniciais da exposição Postwar. Eficaz em termos retóricos, mas talvez seja mais uma perspectiva anacrónica, uma leitura posterior aos factos. A memória directa da guerra, das destruições, bombardeamentos e campos, das mortes e das lutas de resistência parece-me dominar a criação artística internacional nos anos imediatos a 1945, em direcções opostas de dissolução da forma, destruição da figura, ou de construção figurativa, narrativa, utópica. Será no contexto da Guerra Fria que o perigo nuclear ganha consistência, como iminência de um novo conflito bélico e como referência mais assustadora.

Se o cogumelo de Henry Mooore é já de 1964-65, as obras vindas dos anos 40 respondem aos anos da guerra em geral, ou em contextos geográficos precisos, e não à "hora zero e a era atómica". O modo como a arte informal e o expressionismo abstracto mais as geometrias e concretismos se afirmam nos anos 40/50, podem corresponder a uma reconstrução de vanguardas divergentes que vai retomar dinâmicas muito anteriores à guerra e aos anos 3o de ameaças fascistas, ao mesmo tempo que reage a uma dinâmica do pós-guerra que a exposição não ilustra: a redescoberta e exaltação dos mestres modernos, após as condenações e ocultações nazis.

Os grandes mestres ocupam o espaço público e as posições críticas radicais e vanguardistas são minoritárias e marginais.

Os anos a partir de 47 são já da guerra fria, que impõe a sua lógica ao confronto entre figuração realista (associada ao nazismo e ao estalinismo, e aos movimentos antifascistas dos anos 30/40) e abstraccionismo, ao qual se associa a expressão da recusa dos totalitarismos e um entendimento finalista da arte moderna - o fim da figura e da narração-ilustração.

Embora a exp. tenha construído com a "Hora Zero" um início atraente e inovador, a realidade parece ser outra.

 

anedotario mironeano

M de Miró? Aqueles não, credo. (Pedras Rubras, 14h30, 3/10/2016)

Se Miró fotografasse teria enquadrado só a palmeira?

O crop do José Barrias.

(....A fotografia começa por ser uma questão de acaso. Essa é uma ou a maior das suas qualidades. Mesmo o lugar que me deram foi por acaso...)

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1 (Foto Luis Castro Mendes, Facebook)

Um ministro poeta da grande tradição homérica*.

É a este quadro que se refere o comissário especialista em Mirós na peça do El País? Tem o título "Cabeça de homem"?

Diz ele (citação): "Es feo, muy feo, diría que deliberadamente feo. El cuadro más feo de Miró”. Robert Lubar contempla Cabeza de hombre." Se não é, este também é "muy feo". http://cultura.elpais.com/.../2016/09/30 "Miró ya tiene casa en Oporto"

*eu referi Homero, não Castilho.

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2 (Foto Luis Castro Mendes, Facebook)

Um secreto adversário do "polo de atractividade".

O pato (ou frango) esbodegou-se. É um "pollo de atractividade" dirá o António Costa

 

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(Foto João Soares no Facebook: "Excelentes os ovos das galinhas do meu amigo Tomás")

João Soares extasiado com o Miró que lhe foi aparecendo no prato, vindo da criação do fiel Vasques, que me chamou Taliban

É a obra do acaso orientado pelo inconsciente profundo, o regresso às raízes surrealistas da lição mironeana. Olhemos criticamente:

Temos o sol em cima, esplendoroso e perfeito, puro círculo que regurgita de futuro e de matéria (bio) e já não só de pigmento amarelo, contendo a vida e a luz, ideal e terreno; o corpo feminino metaforizado pelo fiambre róseo, aberto e oferecido numa notória sugestão clitoridiana; o eflúvio orgiástico ocupando o centro da composição, incontido, informe, fundindo a presença feminina e masculina num levíssimo magma invasor; o azul do céu e do mar à volta, oferecendo a praia branca central e circular, sugestão da ilha (Maiorca?), como promessa do paraíso na terra. Que mais pedir a um Miró de série, múltiplo mas sempre original? A editar em serigrafia a favor do futuro talvez prometido museu, com marca Miró gravada e assinatura João, recordando em texto anexo a proposta da exposição em Serralves e o descuidado vocábulo, que aqui servirá de título: "Permanência".

O crítico de arte Fernando Guedes

Editor, poeta, amigo e cúmplice de Fernando Lanhas desde os anos 40, Fernando Guedes (n. Porto, 1929 - 2016) foi também crítico de arte, e nesse papel assumiu uma importância que tem sido pouco reconhecida por razões ideológicas e em especial pelo inquistamento de posições dominantes neste meio.

Entre outras publicações, F.G. reuniu colaborações dispersas em "Pintura, Pintores, etc", ed. Panorama - SNI, 1952 (actividade e livro que mereceu menos do que uma menção de J. A. França na sua história do séc. XX - a oposição entre os dois permite situar uma linha de omissões e incorrecções da historiografia portuguesa). Depois, "Estudos sobre Artes Plásticas - Os anos 40 em Portugal e outros estudos", INCM, 1985, é uma justa resposta à exposição sobre os Anos 40 organizada sob a tutela do mesmo J.A.França na Fund. Gulbenkian. Em especial, o seu testemunho analítico é essencial para acompanhar a intervenção do grupo dos Independentes do Porto, activos de 1943 a 1950, e onde se integram os inícios das carreiras de Júlio Resende, Fernando Lanhas (o principal animador), Nadir Afonso, Júlio Pomar, Arlindo Rocha, Victor Palla e outros. E também, por consequência, os inícios da abstracção no Porto, atrasada para 1952, em Lisboa, entre outros efeitos.

Escreveu textos de crítica e divulgação nas revistas Graal, Tempo Presente, Rumo e Panorama, e nos jornais Diário Ilustrado (nº 1 em 1956, vespertino de qualidade impresso na gráfica do Diário da Manhã, orgão oficial), Diário de Notícias e Diário da Manhã, o que o situa desde logo como um autor da direita ideológica, mas que no seu caso não diminui a qualidade da observação crítica. Foi um crítico atento e isento, particularmente interessado no abstraccionismo (ver a "Tábua cronológica da pintura abstracta em Portugal", de 1952), escreveu também alguma coisa sobre arte infantil e apresentou no pós-guerra artistas ingleses como Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, Henry Moore e Sutherland

 Tive há tempos a indicação de que Fernando Guedes organizou (ou foi só um dos participantes?) uma intervenção provocadora que ocorreu em 1960 contra a estreia no Teatro Capitólio, em Lisboa, da peça "A Alma Boa de Setsuan", de Bertold Brecht, apresentada pela Companhia de Maria della Costa, visando a sua interdição. O episódio motivaria algumas rupturas pessoais definitivas no meio ligado às artes. (Se não corresponde à realidade, desminta-se agora.) <Jorge Silva Melo já veio dizer que sempre ouviu "falar de Manuel Múrias como o organizador dos "eventos" anti-brecht-della costa; mas também de Goulart Nogueira">

Em termos pessoais, cabe referir a gentileza de me ter enviado, nos anos 90, fotocópias de todos os catálogos dos Independentes e alguns outros da época, num gesto raro de colaboração e reconhecimento mútuo. (capas da ed. cartonada e corrente)

 

Políticas e gestão da cultura

A.P.R. comenta no imediato as políticas da CML a partir de dentro e também do MC/SEC. Num texto de intervenção, hoje, e de sintética reflexão programática. Mas a sua ideia de política cultural ainda sobrevive à mudança do mundo? Versão revista no blog. (O artigo do APR de domingo no Público tem a esta hora, 10h15, 977 recomendações e 934 partilhas; mas nenhum comentário. Além de ser um autor popular, parece existir alguma preocupação com o silêncio dos titulares dos cargos, na CML, na EGEAC, no MC e na SEC...)

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Parece que António Pinto Ribeiro aponta à gestão e à política (culturais) da capital, e a partir de dentro da sua orgânica (a programação da Capital Ibérico-Americana da Cultura, 2017). O alvo será a Empresa de Gestão de Equipamentos e Animação Cultural de Lisboa (EGEAC), cuja orientação se sobrepõe à Câmara e se estendeu ao Ministério, via SEC, por ausência de meios financeiros e de discurso. Visa-se a prioridade dada ao entretenimento e aos festivais dirigidos em especial para turistas (estrangeiros e locais, equiparando os consumos). Entretanto, há uma particular conceptualização, uma prosa "difícil", a interrogar, por onde transpira dirigismo e conservadorismo.#politicasculturais

"O problema acontece quando por falta de política cultural a gestão acaba por vampirizar esse lugar que é o único que dá sentido à imanência do cultural e à gestão e que é a política. E fá-lo invertendo todos os termos da política cultural, colocando a gestão ao serviço do populismo, como por exemplo transformando toda a actividade cultural em entretenimento ou implementando a gratuitidade nos espectáculos em vez de uma política social de preços e portanto banalizando a relação com a criação artística que exige estudo, hábitos culturais, suspensão do conhecimento e da fruição quotidiana."

Público,  28 Agosto 2016: O que resta das políticas culturais

"A gestão cultural não tem mal algum e deve ser equacionada. O problema está quando por falta de política cultural a gestão acaba por vampirizar esse lugar que é o único que dá sentido à imanência do cultural."

 

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 Comentários soltos a acompanhar a leitura:

 

1. "esse lugar que é o único que dá sentido à imanência do cultural e à gestão e que é a política" - a política dá sentido à "imanência do cultural"? Dar-lhe-á transcendência? Instrumentaliza-a? (o que é a imanência do cultural? - será a contiguidade da cultura consigo mesma? A circularidade? A autosuficência? - "Imanência é um conceito filosófico e metafísico que designa o caráter daquilo que tem em si o próprio princípio e fim." Wikipedia)

 

 2."a criação artística que exige estudo, hábitos culturais, suspensão do conhecimento e da fruição quotidiana" - a criação exige a suspensão do conhecimento e da fruição quotidiana? A criação, a arte, não é (também) conhecimento e fruição?

 3. "o lugar do que era a política cultural" não era um lugar cativo. Esse lugar da política cultural era o do poder político, e felizmente o lugar diluiu-se. Existem lugares plurais, descentralizados, fragmentados, concorrenciais e contestados. Nenhum centralismo é aceitável, nenhum dirigismo é mais tolerável. O que era a política cultural (foi a defesa da democratização da cultura, que falhou nos seus critérios, mas as obras-primas da humanidade estão hoje universalmente acessíveis para uma "selfie", e foi depois o desenvolvimento cultural, fazendo da cultura um sector económico como os outros, um mercado empregador e áreas de novos consumos) concretizou-se à revelia dos seus mentores messiânicos: a cultura de massas (popular, das massas) impôs-se - foi-se impondo, desde o jazz, a música popular, o hip-hop, o rap, etc; do folhetim, da bd, da novela gráfica, do graffiti; do cinema de Hollywood e da televisão (novelas e séries são novos modelos narrativos); do ecrã que concorre e ultrapassa a página impressa; da fotografia digital equiparando-se à palavra no uso do mesmo aparelho, o telemóvel - mudança radical na relação voz e imagem, agora gémeas. Sempre contra a incompreensão de novas formas, de novas tecnologias, de diferentes usos. A democratização da cultura e o desenvolvimento cultural não chegaram com colecções de clássicos, mas com novos meios e novos públicos.

4. "a política cultural como serviço público" resulta de um voluntarismo dirigista que fez (mal) o seu tempo, tentando pensar e estabelecer como política (vontade, programa, intenção políticos) o que é do domínio da gestão, a muito diversos níveis de intervenção - associativa, cooperativa, empresarial, fundacional, local, regional e também governamental. E que é também do domínio da expressão individual, do gosto, da criação livre. É na governamentalização que se pensa ao falar de política cultural no singular e chamando-lhe "serviço público" (não sendo este um monopólio dos poderes públicos) - sucessivos deslizes semânticos não escondem a postura messiânica e conservadora.

5. "culturalização do mundo (tudo passou a ser cultura fossem os cânones literários, fossem as receitas gourmet)". E quem delimita o que está dentro e fora da cultura e da arte, como se ao longo dos tempos as fronteiras não mudassem e as cortes, as corporações, as academias, as escolas, os cânones, as certezas, não fossem sujeitos a sobressaltos e falências? Há um mal escondido discurso imobilista que é o do passado e da autoridade. Conservador, sempre. (Os jardins são cultura, o ritual do chá também...)

6. "exigiu-se à arte que fosse comunicante". Sim, foi recuando, desvanecendo-se, sujeito a crítica teórica e às lições da prática social, o discurso da vanguarda distanciada das massas, da elite com acesso privilegiado ao saber, da autonomia da arte e dos artistas, sem função na sociedade, sem público, sem utilidade e comunicabilidade, livre de critérios de apreciação dotados de racionalidade argumentada, separado da vida e da arte da viver.

7. "É assim que fenómenos que julgávamos em decrescimento (...) regressam em força e agora acompanhados de formas perversas de um multiculturalismo light, de um assistencialismo social e de um entretenimento de fusão. Não que a cultura pudesse salvar o mundo, mas a ausência de sentido para a política, onde se inclui um sentido ou sentidos para a política cultural, criou um vazio que todas as expressões do recalque combinadas com o medo vieram ocupar." Aqui, o argumento das "formas perversas de um multiculturalismo light, de um assistencialismo social e de um entretenimento de fusão", é a crítica directa às tutelas do Governo e das grandes câmaras de Lisboa e Porto, com as suas empresas públicas de gestão. Abra-se então o debate que tem sido escamoteado. Mas o "vazio" alegado é o da grande divisão entre cultura popular e erudita (a "cultura operária" que procurava mudar o homem desapareceu com o fim das teorias que iriam mudar o mundo), a divisão entre instrução e cultura, entre cultura de massas e de elites aristocráticas, sustentadas por uma diferenciação social de "famílias" que sempre se prolonga; esse suposto "vazio" é o resultado da falência das políticas culturais seguidas e não da sua falta.

8. Trata-se de querer persistir nas receitas que só podiam falhar ou de repensar um presente em mudança?

Ferreira pesquisa as utopias descolonizadoras

"Ferreira examina o papel da cultura..." A pesquisa extensa, ou reflexão, assim se diz, de Ângela Ferreira, não produz conhecimentos, ela materializa-se em objectos (afirmados como artísticos - no limite podem ser cópias de documentos). Trata-se sempre de referir (citar ou transcrever) objectos ou obras ou documentação prévios (texto ou imagem), que são apropriados e remontados, ou re-apresentados, no caso do cinema apropriado, em construções arquitectónicas (maquetes) ± toscas e precárias - sem qualidades enquanto projecto de arquitectura ou enquanto escultura. As construções podem também citar monumentos ou projectos de arquitectura datados, referidos a um qualquer contexto tido por revolucionário.

É uma impressão de parasitismo que acompanha a visão desses novos (?) objectos ditos artísticos (construções, desenhos de projectos, textos), que nada acrescentam aos objectos históricos citados e apropriados. Os "estudos" desenhados ou pirogravados em contraplacado (e nestes assim se sublinha a artisticidade "material") , bem como as maquetes tridimensionais, não se reconhecem como elementos ou passos de uma pesquisa efectiva, seja ela reflexiva ou experimental, enquanto modelos ou protótipos, mas como uma produção de transcrições decorativas de cada uma das obras (ou pesquisas). Tal como a sua escolha de motivos ou temas de uma qualquer revolução ou utopia nada actualiza quanto ao destino inicial dos objectos apropriados, não lhe devolvendo qualquer operacionalidade ou eficácia, também a identificação das referências citadas e eventualmente a sua breve contextualização é forçosamente deixada exterior à obra, como elucidação proposta num texto anexo da autoria do/a comissário/a, tipo press-release. O que poderia/deveria ser matéria de possível ensaio (escrito) "materializa-se em objectos" destituídos de toda a racionalidade.

Neste caso a artista parasita obras anteriores, alheias, e transforma a sua respectiva ambição política de origem num exercício formalista, vazio de sentido para além da condição (atribuída) de ser um objecto artístico proposto a um mercado de arte, não a um terreno de acção política, apesar da ganga verbal esquerdista com que se apresenta. É a estetização de referências de esquerda ou revolucionárias destituídas da sua eventual funcionalidade prática.
Esse mercado é o mercado arte e também um mercado ideológico, no qual se ilustram estratégias de produção artística e teorias de interpretação. Dai que ao exercício da parasitagem se some a suspeita ou certeza do oportunismo, numa situação em que a África está na moda e que a chamada teoria pós-colonial substitui à investigação histórica séria um formulário esquemático e maniqueísta, que é também uma moda universitária nascida e exercida como poder a partir das antigas metrópoles.

Quando a comissária em exercício escreve que "A.F. (Moçambique, 1958) tem investigado, celebrado e problematicizado (por problematizado?) as utopias descolonizadoras e revolucionárias do período eufórico da construção nacional em Moçambique, entre a independência em 1975 e o início da guerra civil em 1977", isto significa que se apropria do lugar de nascimento (estudou na África do Sul e transferiu-se para Lx) para explorar a ficção de que é uma artista africana, moçambicana, e que igualmente se apropria de uma temática revolucionária para a ilustrar e apresentar-se como intérprete das tais utopias referidas, que não são desconstruídas (sujeitas a análise) mas superficialmente reconstruídas (reeditadas acriticamente).
Na sua biografia escreve-se (a própria ou a comissária escreveram): "O trabalho de A.F. desenvolve-se em torno do impacto do colonialismo e pós-colonialismo na sociedade contemporânea, estas investigações são guiadas por uma pesquisa profunda e pelo filtrar de ideias que conduzem a formas concisas, depuradas e evocativas." Encontramos aqui o enunciado do destino formalista (posminimalista?) das peças e uma circularidade vazia de conteúdo: a investigação é guiada por uma pesquisa (ou será o contrário?, a pesquisa a guiar a investigação) e por um "filtrar de ideias" que sublinha a incapacidade de produzir ideias (e formas) próprias - as formas serão "concisas, depuradas e evocativas".

A atitude parasita da prática artística e o oportunismo político parece-me que são as marcas dominantes. Nos casos do trabalho de 2015 referido às investigações antropológicas de Jorge e Margot Dias e ao Museu Nacional de Etnologia (Prémio Novo Banco) e na referência à Maison Tropicale de Jean Prouvé (levada à Bienal de Veneza em 2007 - como foi possível?) passou-se da irrelevância para a agressão interpretativa e o erro grave da contextualização anacronista.

Bibliografia: (A) 1. "ponto culminante de uma pesquisa extensa, com semelhanças importantes com as suas congéneres académicas, sobre os vestígios materiais das utopias políticas em Moçambique no período entre 1975 e 1977." 2. "a materialização dessa reflexão em objectos artísticos que se apropriam de diferentes disciplinas – escultura, fotografia, filme, desenho, xilogravura a laser, etc. – para concretizar uma síntese pessoalíssima de cada questão abordada." 3. "pontes conceptuais entre os vestígios iconográficos da história moçambicana e momentos chave da arte modernista até à transição para a contemporaneidade." 4. "uma história feita de redes, de cruzamentos onde Ângela Ferreira está permanentemente a marcar o seu lugar de artista plástica." 5. "navegamos entre as imagens do cinema documental, antropológico e ficcional, sem que nunca Ferreira tome posição sobre a interpretação que devemos fazer de cada peça apresentada." 6. "...exemplificam essa indeterminação interpretativa que se afasta definitivamente da tese académica – e por isso as críticas feitas por Pais de Brito ao trabalho de Ângela Ferreira, referidas em artigo sobre a reedição dos filmes de Margot Dias na edição de 5 de Agosto do Ípsilon, não só não fazem sentido como revelam com clareza a possibilidade de suscitar emoções que os temas abordados por Ferreira continuam a possuir. É que o olhar da artista nunca é frio, distante. É sempre um olhar sobre a história própria, dela e dos que a precederam, mas lavado, limpo, de uma lucidez sem véus." (L.S.O. Público, Ipsilon 26 Agosto)

 

 

B. Folha de sala (A.B.F.) "Na linha do pensamento de Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral e Samora Machel, Ferreira examina o papel da cultura, nomeadamente do cinema e da rádio, na construção da nação e nas dinâmicas de colaboração internacionalista, em contexto de Guerra Fria e de luta anti-apartheid na África de Sul."

 

#

Ver

Bienal de Veneza 2007. Jean Prouvé maltratado

 

Prouvé et les Maisons Tropicales

 

Uso indevido de Jorge e Margot Dias

Os Mirós do PS/BPN, actualidades (outras tarefas a cumprir com prioridade)

1. Volto a falar dos Mirós, depois de mais uma declaração confusa do ministro da cultura. Pergunta o jornalista de serviço às Festas da Srª da Agonia (Viana) se está decidido o destino dos Mirós "que o Estado herdou". O ministro, que é culto e informado, além de poeta, não corrigiu a ignorância ou rasteira do jornalista, e respondeu que prosseguem as conversações com o presidente da Câmara do Porto, bem encaminhadas.
Ora o Estado não herdou, e ministro Luis Castro Mendes não corrigiu, deixando correr uma ilusão ou mentira. Foi a CGD (tão falada ultimamente por más razões) que deitou mão às pinturas quando o BPN foi nacionalizado e integrado no banco público. Passaram uma noite a levar os Mirós para os cofres da CGD e, depois de apreciados por entendidos e avaliados por profissionais, deveriam servir para amortizar dívidas: eram activos de um banco falido. Sabe-se que a administração do BPN após nacionalização levou a cabo uma muito cuidada operação com vista ao leilão da Christie's (que ofereceu mais que a Sotheby's). Depois a Parvalorem deixou atrasar a saída das obras e acabou por infringir disposições legais condicionadas pelos prazos de permanência de obras em Portugal. O leilão foi adiado e a Parvalorem multada pelas infracções que cometeu.
O que é a Parvalorem? "A PARVALOREM, S.A. tem por objetivo gerir, criteriosamente e com o sentido bem presente do “Interesse Público”, a carteira de créditos adquiridos no âmbito do processo de reprivatização do BPN por forma a contribuir para a minimização do esforço financeiro do Estado associado a esta operação."
Informava a Parvalorem em Fev de 2014: "O leilão internacional para as obras do pintor Joan Miró agendado para fevereiro de 2014 não se realizou, por contingências externas conhecidas, estando prevista, no entanto, a sua realização no decorrer ainda do ano de 2014."
Recentemente o responsável pela empresa explicou que as obras se mantinham sob a sua tutela e que nada se alterara quanto ao seu destino.

2. Ora o presidente da Câmara do Porto, que é um autarca respeitado, mesmo em Lisboa, ainda não disse que está disposto a pagar os 35 milhões, pelo menos, que constam da avaliação da Christie's. Está à espera que o Ministro da Cultura Luis Castro Mendes pague os 35 milhões à Parvalorem e ofereça o acervo ao Porto? Acredita que o Estado "herdou" os Mirós e se esqueceu que a Parvalorem adquiriu a carteire de créditos... para a minimização do esforço financeiro..."?
Espera mobilizar os tripeitos para comprarem os Mirós? Convém que se explique para pôr cobro a ilusões e disparates, ou que ponha a debate as razões desta ideia de ter um museu Miró no Porto (o pior dos Museus Miró, como escreveu o professor Jorge Calado).

Então poderemos lembrar ao presidente Rui Moreira que pode optar por algumas escolhas melhores. Certamente conhece a Colecção (João) Allen, comprada em 1850 pela Câmara do Porto e mais tarde integrada no Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis, o qual viria a dispensar as peças mais antigas quando da controversa intervenção do arq. Fernando Távora.
O falecido vereador Paulo Cunha e Silva conhecia a importância deste acervo: já não se trata de fracos Mirós, mas de coisas sérias como os retratos do Renascimento francês de François Clouet - um deles o retrato da noiva prometida a D. Sebastião, a depois desaustinada Margarida de Valois (seria agora um must, e foram obras de referência para os pintores do Porto) -, as pinturas de Frei Carlos e Gaspar Vaz, de Domingos Vieira e Vieira Portuense, e mesmo Domingos Sequeira, o mesmo cujo peditório trouxe justamente o Museu de Arte Antiga às bocas de mundo - tudo isto por absurdos critérios museológicos tolerados ao arq. Távara ao tempo de Simoneta Luz Afonso, era directora uma Mónica Baldaia que se distingiu por ser filha da Agustina e - mais tarde - por se ter substituído judicialmente a uma promissora nova directora, a Lúcia Almeida Matos; a seguir, recebeu uma choruda maquia e foi-se embora.... Tudo se completaria com outras obras dispersas e agora não expostas, como o importante quadro de Zuloaga (Ignacio Zuloaga, um grande pintor do século XX espanhol) que se via na Biblioteca Pública do Porto. (Retrato de quem? de um intelectual espanhol de renome, mas qual? Quando voltei à procura já não estava no seu antigo posto.

Um dos retratos do Renascimento francês de François Clouet da Colecção Allen, "antigamente" expostos no Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis (antes da Troika Távora, Simoneta, Mónica) -  o retrato da noiva prometida a D. Sebastião, a depois desaustinada Margarida de Valois (seria agora um must, e foram obras de referência para os pintores do Porto). Avisam-me que os quadros regressaram ao Museu e subiram ao 1º andar - VER COMENTÁRIO

Certamente Rui Moreira pode também preferir aos Mirós de 2ª a ideia de restabelecer o Museu de Etnologia do Porto que funcionou no Palácio de S. João Novo entre 1945 e 1992: fechou há 24 anos, por degradação do edifício mas com promessa de reabertura. (Lia-se no Público em 19 Jan de 2007, em notícia de Abel Coentrão: "Fechado desde 1992, e com as colecções dispersas por outros equipamentos culturais, o Museu de Etnologia do Porto vai mesmo voltar a abrir. O Instituto Português de Museus (IPM) viu aprovada pelo Conselho de Ministros a proposta de aquisição do Palácio de São João Novo, no centro histórico da cidade, e, segundo o seu director, Manuel Oleiro, consumada a compra, por quase 1,46 milhões de euros, vai dedicar o ano de 2007 à elaboração de um programa museológico que ditará o âmbito das obras que serão posteriormente realizadas naquele edifício oitocentista...")
Fernando Lanhas foi o seu último director, numa linhagem de notáveis folcloristas e etnógrafos do norte.
Que o caso Miró seja o mais falado tema relativo às políticas de cultura em Portugal, quer dizer muita coisa sobre o país e sobre o Ministério.

Nota: Não é o destino Porto que está em causa. Não se trata de uma colecção mas de um acervo (colecção é outra coisa). Não se trata de "uma colecção agora pública" mas de um acervo arrolado por um banco credor, a CGD (o banco é que é de capitais públicos, embora forçado a cumprir a mesma racionalidade que a banca privada). O acervo não será "oferecido": alguém o terá de pagar à CGD, à Parvalorem, ao Min. das Finanças, a todos nós; ao passar a bola ao Porto, a ideia é que seja o Porto a pagar, em dinheiro, em favores políticos, por troca, etc. O Rui Pereira está a jogar com um próximo capital de queixa contra o centralismo.

 

3. Transcrevo da coluna de Jorge Calado no Expresso Revista de 20 de agosto, que encontrei há pouco no Bar Irreal:

"(...)Parece que os 85 Mirós vão ficar por cá. Nenhum deles é obra-prima. (A colecção está avaliada em 50 milhões de dólares, e em 2012 um único Miró foi vendido por 37 milhões.) Em vez de ficar com dois ou três razoáveis e vender o resto para comprar obras para as colecções existentes, vai-se criar o pior museu Miró do mundo para mostrar o rebotalho de uns restos de colecção. Como dizia um velho professor meu, os portugueses gostam de rapar o fundo aos tachos e de fumar as beatas que apanham do chão.(...)"

O ministro da cultura Luis Castro Mendes, o poeta Luis Filipe Castro Mendes, o ex-embaixador na Unesco, o meu antigo amigo da Grãfina (anos 70) responde ao professor Jorge Calado?

 

4. O ministro Luís Castro Mendes respondeu pouco depois na sua página do Facabook, apagando dela as minhas notas anteriores (o que compreendo bem, por terem entrado cordial e "abusivamente").:

"Estando já a coleção Miró na esfera patrimonial do Estado, a decisão sobre o seu futuro é uma decisão política do Governo, como a Parvalorem aliás declarou recentemente."

É uma prudente resposta. A 'esfera patrimonial' resulta da nacionalização do BPN, como os restantes activos que se destinam a amortizar as dívidas, e como os passivos que andamos a pagar (não é "o Estado" que paga").
A decisão do Governo será 'política', não cultural, porque não se reconhecem ou sustentam os méritos culturais de uma decisão de compra, ao contrário do que sucedeu com o Sequeira (SÓ 600 mil €) e sucederá, espera-se, com as Vieiras do Jorge de Brito (SÓ 6 milhões €, a trocar por terrenos - e atenção, o acordo cessou em 2015, não dá para empurrar mais com a barriga).
A decisão seria também de ordem financeira, o que o ministro omite, porque haveria valores (quantias: 35 milhões €, pelo menos) que teriam de passar de um orçamento para outro.
A Parvalorem esclareceu recentemente que os tais Mirós lhe continuam entregues e que o Governo não lhe comunicou qualquer alteração das orientações antes seguidas.

Obrigado, caro LuÍs Filipe por esta oportunidade de esclarecimento. Mas o pior museu Miró do mundo, na feliz fórmula de Jorge Calado, é a tua questão mais importante? #mirosdobpn

5. Quando tiver tempo irei recordar cronologias: a nacionalização do BPN ocorre no governo Sócrates, 2008. A decis\ao de pôr o acervo em leilão é tomada pouco depois pela administração do BPN nacionalizado e integrado na CGD que fora nomeada pelo min. das Finanças Teixeira dos Santos. Esta administração construiu um processo de venda (leilão) com uma grande mestria. A Parvalorem conduziu mal o processo de saída das obras, que de início não necessitavam de autorização de saída. O SEC Jorge Barreto Xavier, através da DGPC, teve de intervir sobre esse processo de saída, pelo qual a Parvalorem foi condenada a uma multa. Não foi a decisão de vender que esteve em causa. Depois intervêm as deputadas culturais do PS; depois o João Soares escorrega e fala em instalação definitiva, em permanência no país, em vez de falar só em mostrar o acervo, satisfazendo a curiosidade mórbida de uma dúzia de voyeurs e meia dúzia de personagens artísticos que encontraram um aocasião fácil para se porem em bicos dos pés. E assim vamos. Mas o governo ou o ministro cairão antes que se pratique o dislate do pior museu Miró do mundo, antes que se cometa mais um crime.

Entretanto, o que têm feito? Não reabriram o Museu de Arte Popular, associando-o à redinamização do Museu de Etnologia; não recuperam e exploraram o antigo Jardim do Ultramar (entregue à Universidade para despachar); não projectaram o IICT - Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical ao seu devido lugar no mundo; não fizeram reabrir ao público as Gares Marítimas com os murais do Almada não articularam os equipamentos culturais e científicos da zona de Belém; não acabaram e resolveram o novo museu dos coches, naquele mamarracho Pritzker; não avançaram com o possível projecto de aproveitamento do edifício do Convento de São Francisco (Museu do Chiado, Fac. e Academia de Belas Artes); não encontraram destino para o Pavilhão de Portugal, se tal for possível (Portugal tem destino?) - também o despacharam para uma Universidade de Lisboa bulímica e sem dinheiro para vícios; e por aí fora.

Não há obra (empurram com a barriga), e felizmente que não tem havido muita garganta.

A arte no Pós-guerra, Munique, Haus der Kunst, 14 Outubro

Será uma das mais importantes exposições internacionais do ano: a mais ambiciosa revisão revisão alguma vez realizada das duas décadas que se seguem ao fim da 2ª Guerra.

Por razões várias, porque 1945-1965 é o meu tempo, por razões de ordem pessoal (familiares), por tratar questões que me tenho investigado e divulgado (os inícios da arte moderna africana, e em Moçambique em particular; a rede informal formada nos finais da década de 1950 / inícios de 1960' por Ulli Beier na Nigéria, Pancho Guedes em Moçambique, Frank McEwen na Rodésia do Sul e Julian Beinart da África do Sul; o 1º Congresso Internacional da Cultura Africana, ICAC, em 1962, Salisbury), interessa-me muito esta exposição que inaugura a 14 de Outubro em Munique, na Haus der Kunst: ver hausderkunst....postwar-art

O facto de ter colaborado na recolha de documentação sobre o neo-realismo português (também com apoio do Museu de Vila Franca de Xira) e sobre alguma África ignorada dos anos 50/60, justifica ainda uma maior curiosidade.

Fica adiante um dos textos que o museu de Munique produziu para divulgação:

Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965

Curated by Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes

Narrative

Background

The terms “postwar,” “post-colonialism,” and “post-communism” describe the cultural, political, and historical conditions under which the world has developed since 1945. As individual subjects of artistic inquiry and cultural analysis, these concepts represent the three-part, long-term research and exhibition project developed by Haus der Kunst and its international institutional partners during the past eight years. The purpose of this project is to bring together leading and emerging scholars, historians, artists, curators, theorists, and students to examine the artistic forces and cultural legacies that have shaped the production of art across the world since 1945. The first part of the project concentrates on art of the postwar era in the two decades between 1945 and 1965.

“Postwar” describes the historical period following the end of World War II in 1945. These years delineate the decisive defeat of Germany in Europe and of Japan in Asia, marking a turning point in global history. The catastrophe and disarray brought about by the war — with whole cities and countries destroyed, tens of millions of people slaughtered, and a massive refugee crisis that impacted millions of stateless people — were cast against the backdrop of the first use of the atomic bomb and a confrontation with the full horror of the concentration camps. The moral and technological legacies of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Auschwitz came to represent the crisis of humanism.

In the field of art, the postwar period marks a particular historical and cultural turning point, for it brought about the waning dominance of Western European art capitals and the rise of the international presence and hegemony of contemporary American art, popular culture, and mass media. This cultural shift, in fact, mirrored the shift in geopolitical power in which defeated Europe acquired and acquiesced to new patrons and protectors. In Europe, as the Cold War divided the continent into two separate spheres of influence — the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern and Central Europe allied with the Soviet Union, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries of Western Europe allied with the United States — the state of the arts also revealed a distinct ideological fault line: between communism and capitalist democracy, socialism and liberal democracy.

Informing this simplifying binary, which obscured more complex motivations for artistic production, were the ideological and artistic rationale behind the terms “abstraction” and “socialist realism.” These terms became moral equivalents in the contest for a renewed vision of art after the war.

The same spheres of influence also divided two indomitable competitors in the Pacific: the United States and the Soviet Union. On a global scale, however, several factors complicated this binary — decolonization struggles, independence movements, and anti-colonial resistance in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East — even as the Cold War powers courted and sought control of the new nations. These increasingly independent actors suggested quite different orientations and alliances — including pan-Africanism and the Non-Aligned Movement — in the wake of imperialism and the end of the war. The question was asked everywhere: what would global modernity look like?

Taking these factors as starting points for a major art-historical inquiry, Haus der Kunst has conceived Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 as an in-depth, global study of the postwar period across the practices of painting, sculpture, installation, performance, cinema, and music. The exhibition will open at Haus der Kunst on October 14, 2016, and will subsequently travel.

With its global perspective, the exhibition shifts the focus away from the Western vantage point and redirects attention to the polyphonic and multifocal examination of art since 1945. Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 therefore seeks to understand the complex legacies of artistic practice and art-historical discourses that emerged globally from the devastation wrought by World War II. Through the vital relationship between art works and artists, produced and understood from the perspectives of international, regional, and local contexts, the exhibition traces artistic developments during the first two decades after the war by following the sweeping lines of the two oceans across Europe, Asia, the Pacific Rim, Africa, the Mediterranean, North America, and South America. Probing differing concepts of artistic modernity — such as abstraction, realism, figuration, and representation — the exhibition explores how individual receptions and formulations of modernism informed the variant manifestations of modern art. By following these divergent and convergent vectors of influence, the exhibition invites reflection on the development of art that straddles continents, political structures, economic patterns, and institutional frameworks.

If we are to refigure the cartographies of postwar modernism, what sort of methodologies might we deploy? To what extent did the political exert pressure on the aesthetic, or the cultural on the artistic? In turn, how did artists, critics, and intellectuals negotiate, resist, or even subvert political ideologies? How did artists reapply their practices and aesthetics in diverse political and cultural contexts, especially in response to hegemonic paradigms? Conversely, how did artistic and intellectual movements from the former colonial peripheries impact the terrains of modernism? How, then, did the circulation of art, objects, discourses, and ideas shape the global contours of postwar modernism? What, if any, were the connections between form and content in the postwar world?

The Exhibition

Postwar sits squarely in the tradition of such large, synthetic historical exhibitions as Westkunst that have looked at the social history of art across several geographic regions under the conditions engendered by World War II. Yet in another sense, the present exhibition is entirely unprecedented, in that it examines art of the postwar era from multiple perspectives — East and West, North and South, colonizer and colonized, Pacific and Atlantic — placing regional, national, transnational, and other interests and affinities in dynamic relation to each other. This critical overview also includes relations of conflict — as in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union — and various liberation struggles, from Algeria anti-nuclear campaign to the civil includes relations of connection — by the “between” of the exhibition moving across national boundaries.

Finally, for the first time in the Postwar describes a truly global condition: the increasingly interlocked and interdependent nature of the world today as a single entity, as prompted by new political and technological realities. Organized in eight thematic sections, Postwar illuminates these epochal social, material, and epistemological shifts in their full scale and scope through major art works, ephemera, and documentation.

Sections
1. Aftermath: Zero Hour and the Atomic Era

The postwar era is introduced by the apocalyptic image of the atomic bomb — a new technology that ushered in an era of intertwined beginnings and endings, promise and betrayal. As contemporaneous images of the concentration camps put an end to European aspirations to moral universalism, the bomb and the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the end of Europe’s political power in the world and the opening of an era of American military dominance. This, in turn, prompted a new kind of war: the Cold War and the arms race. While announcing a period of occupation in Japan, the end of World War II also ushered in an era of struggles for liberation and independence in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Ubiquitous both as an image of itself and in the threat it posed to the entire world, the iconography of the mushroom cloud helped to create a new consciousness of the globe as a single, interconnected entity, a new sense of scale emphasized by the space exploration program that would emerge from military technology, affording views of the Earth that reinforced this sense of global integrity and interconnection.

The American use of the bomb represented and enacted American military and economic dominance. American artists such as Norman Lewis, in Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration (1951), were excited by the wondrous natural revelations and awed by the biblical scale of the bomb’s power, even as they were skeptical of the U.S. government’s apologetics for its use. The bomb was also, obviously, a Japanese story, told through photography (much of it suppressed, only to be released later) and by such artists as Iri and Toshi Maruki, who returned to Hiroshima just three days after the bombing and decided to begin an ambitious cycle of paintings — The Hiroshima Panels (1950-82) — that would describe the suffering they saw there. In the wake of futurism’s worship of technology, Italian artists were also keenly focused on the bomb. In 1952, Enrico Baj painted the Boom Manifesto, featuring a black mushroom-cloud-shaped head against an acid yellow background overlaid with anti-nuclear slogans and formulas: “The heads of men are charged with explosives/every atom is exploding.”

Photographs and films of ruined cities and of concentration camp survivors were released in the immediate postwar period. The shock of these images, and the full realization of the scale and depth of the horror of the camps, sparked many works, among them Joseph Beuys’s Monuments to the Stag (1949-58), Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1962-present), and Wolf Vostell’s German View from the Black Room Cycle (1958-63).

2. Form Matters

Materialist abstraction is also accounted for in the exhibition, with work that was grouped under such labels as “art informel,” “abstract expressionism,” and “Gutai,” as well as work by artists who responded to the look of this work but found different and local meanings in the material and how they handled it. Critics at the time emphasized stylistic competition that has often devolved into national competition in historical accounts, pitting, for example, the French artist Nicolas de Stael against the American Franz Kline as a symptom of the official promotion of American values — individual freedom and democracy — as embodied in abstract painting.

Today it is easier to see the transnational character of many of these artistic strategies, and Postwar emphasizes the affinity of ideas and materials among artists who emigrated to the U.S. from Europe. It also documents the encounters of artists from around the world who gathered in such metropolitan centers as Paris, London, and Mexico City; and reviews the proximity and circulation of art works in international exhibitions and small press publications. Yoshihiro Jiro in Japan, Jean Dubuffet in France, and Avinash Chandra in India, for example, shared a belief in art that is organic, materialist, and vitalist. Others sought to push gestural painting into full-body, performative experiments, including Carolee Schneemann, Hermann Nitsch, Niki de Saint Phalle, Tetsumi Kudo, and Kazuo Shiraga.

This materialist art is typical of the postwar period in its difference from earlier European iterations of modernism, often rejecting geometry in a critique of rationality and science, which were seen as dead-ending in the war and the bomb. Instead, artists favored gesture, raw materials, chance, and physical laws; surfaces are tactile, rough, and uneven. Many artists, including Alberto Burri, Jiří Kolář, Antoni Tàpies, Mohan Samant, John Latham, and Ivo Gattin went further still, to invoke the entropy of matter and, more specifically, the outright destruction related to the traumatic events and lingering ruins of the postwar landscape.

3. New Images of Man

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Auschwitz laid bare the failures of Western civilization. In the wake of these shocks came ambivalent political attempts to establish geopolitical systems that would be more just, through such new legal forms as the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — putatively global but in fact dominated by Western authority — and the struggles for full citizenship and autonomy of people in former European colonies. Philosophers and artists sought to inquire more deeply into human nature itself, in debates that included the discourses of négritude and existentialism, and the rights of individuals and groups within larger (often oppressive) social and political entities. “New Images” features pictorial versions of such inquiries, in which humans often appear battered, deformed by the horror of modern life, rent by the question of their own value.

These artists often deliberately combined figuration and materialist facture, refusing the choice between abstraction and representation — or between physical and social life, seeing the binary as not only ideologically false but also deeply destructive. In 1950, at a postwar art conference in Darmstadt, Germany, political opposites Hans Sedlmayr and Theodor Adorno found surprising common ground in bemoaning the missing center of contemporary culture: contemporary art seemed unable to appeal to fundamental human concerns, including emotion and everyday life. This concern was echoed by such East German migrants as Georg Baselitz, who eschewed the politically charged choice between abstraction and socialist realism to render individual figures that were severely deformed but vigorously alive. MoMA’s New Images of Man exhibition (1959) gathered examples of contemporary art from twenty-three American and European artists, including Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Albert Giacometti, and Jackson Pollock. In his introduction to the catalogue, theologian Paul Tillich warned of “the danger in which modern man lives: the danger of losing his humanity,” a danger located both in totalitarianism and in technologically-oriented mass society.

The most significant counterforce to universalist Western humanism came, in different veins, from former European colonies. Leopold Senghor wrote in 1961 of the need to particularize and locate the human being, in contrast not only to modernist (Western) universalism but also to Marxist universalism: “Man is not without a homeland. He is not a man without color or history or country or civilization. He is West African man, our neighbor, precisely determined by his time and his place ... a man humiliated for centuries less perhaps in his hunger and his nakedness than in his color and civilization, in his dignity as an incarnate man.” The laborers painted by Inji Efflatoun, for example, express this specific dignity.

Sometimes, as with Franz Fanon's “new man,” the formerly colonized claimed a moral right to define humanism broadly and universally, a right abrogated by the West with its inhuman behavior in war and colonization. We see this new humanism in the thinkers depicted by Indian artist Francis Newton Souza — colored bodies appropriating the traditional intellectual and ethical prerogative of Western man. South African artist Ernest Mancoba offered yet another restatement of universalist humanism. For him, differences in identity categories belonged to colonialism and underlie the fracturing of art: “In no domain more than in the arts has this systematic dichotomy caused such destruction of the very foundation to the human identity, as both belonging to nature and sharing in the essence of an ideal being.”

4. Realisms

The other half of the Cold War binary is, of course, the socialist realism of Soviet, Chinese, and Eastern and Central Europe. Here, to a greater extent, institutional appropriation came before, not after, artistic production. Nevertheless, accounts of this category, too, can be overly fixed. Even in the heyday of its enforcement, socialist realism was not a single style. Under Mao Zedong, Chinese artists produced large official portraits of the Chairman (Jia Youfu, Marching Across the Snow-covered Mount Minshan, 1965) and scenes depicting model workers, but there was also tolerance of traditional ink painting, with the addition of appropriate symbols of the new order, such as the red flag. In the Soviet Union, art from the 1940s to Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 is primarily characterized by affirmative images of work, especially by heroic images of party leaders (Wassilij Jakowlew, Portrait of Georgii Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, 1946). During the post-Stalinist thaw, genre painting influenced by the nineteenth-century Russian Wanderers became more prominent, as well as the “severe style,” influenced by Soviet art of the 1920s and early 1930s. Outside of the Soviet Union, because there was considerably more latitude for artists working with official socialist representation, such painters as the Czechoslovakian- born Willi Sitte made works that, while depicting officially sanctioned subjects, introduced personal drawing styles. Along with some works of moderate size intended for museums, this section emphasizes enormous public works, popular prints, and documentation.

“Realisms” also includes the influential Mexican muralist painter David Siquieros; ideologically programmatic art by such U.S. artists as Norman Rockwell, who was associated with realist rendering and popular audiences; and Communist Party artists working outside Communist-run countries, including Renato Guttuso and Boris Taslitzky.

5. Concrete Visions

While the international abstract style that dominated the postwar world was primarily materialist and gestural, prewar geometric abstraction did persist, albeit with an impetus quite distinct from that of European prewar artists. Concrete art in South America united the vitalism of Joaquín Torres García with European modernism and became an entirely independent phenomenon. Modernist forms were adopted early on in parallel to a nationalist developmentalism that did not simply stand against Western capitalism but figured in competition with it. “Concrete” art in Latin America — by the Madí group, for example, and such artists as Waldemar Cordeiro — was followed quickly by apparently very similar forms made by such neo-concrete artists as Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, which nonetheless were quite different in spirit. As Clark said, “We use the term "neo-concrete" to differentiate ourselves from those committed to non-figurative "geometric" art and particularly the kind of concrete art that is influenced by a dangerously acute rationalism ... none of which offers a rationale for the expressive potential we feel art contains.” Instead, neo- concrete art was imbued with an antirational vitalism, made socially specific, physically participatory, and psychologically liberating. In this sense, neo-concrete art rhymes with the non- programmatic, everyday formalism of an artist like Ellsworth Kelly,whose “geometric” art eschewed the rationalism — and still more broadly — the authority and dogmatism of earlier avant-garde movements.

6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms

Part of the alluring romance of modern culture has been the extent to which concepts of cosmopolitanism are often seen from a more elevated realm, as the condition, par excellence, of sophistication, worldliness, openness, and the comingling of cultures, ideas, and populations. But the loss of place for artists who migrate from one culture or national frontier to another casts a deep shadow on the romantic idealism of such worldliness.

Following the massive upheavals resulting from World War II, the terms of cosmopolitanism shifted radically. People were on the move. Massive populations — efugees, stateless people, and diasporas — were moving between continents, countries, and cities, forming dispersed lines of displacement, migration, exile, affinities, and settlements. In his essay “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said touches on the dilemma of the exile, observing that “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.” This is a valuable insight into how we might explore not only ideas of cosmopolitanism but also other conditions of being out of place.

For example, the hostile politics and constrained opportunities at home had pushed African American writers and artists like James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney to emigrate to Paris as a place of cosmopolitan refuge. So when we think of cosmopolitanism we should also imagine it within processes of change, upheaval, opportunity, fantasy, and as a form of cross-cultural and transnational artistic self-fashioning.

“New hybridities,” as scholars put it, have emerged in modernism and contemporary art when citizens of colonies and former colonies studied formally and informally in the West, or when refugees fleeing oppression and racism left their homelands to find safe places elsewhere. World War II was perhaps responsible for one of the largest and most extensive cultural and artistic migrations. The same is true of empire, with its discourse of la mission civilisatrice. Thus we can think of postwar art in recombinant terms, as a process of both acculturation and deculturation, whereby artists who combined international-style abstraction with indigenous, traditional, or local imagery fused new aesthetic logics and formal concepts. Particularly widespread was a kind of gestural mark-making (“calligraphic abstraction,” in Iftikhar Dadi’s term) that was as much iconic as it was indexical. That mark-making invoked identity and levels of meaning through allusion to language and legibility, challenging the universality of the modern. The Arabic calligraphic line was central to such artists as Sadequain and Anwar Shemza, who set the sinuous line of Arabic script in explicit relation to the geometry of the Roman alphabet. Categories including the local, tradition, nationality, autonomy, and universal conflict and combine to make new meanings.

Related situations of diaspora and the various colonial legacies, as well as Cold War funding for exchange, sent artists all over the world to study and participate in centers for the production and marketing of modern art.

Furthermore, magazines provided artists with an important source of virtual travel and intersection. As a result of exposure to publications such as Black Orpheus and Middle Eastern art, the work of Ibrahim El-Salahi and others reflects a pronounced set of pan-African and pan-Arabic references (African sculpture, Arabic calligraphy) informed by Western modernism. El-Salahi’s cosmopolitanism evidences time spent in London, but also reflects his relations with African American artists and musicians, travel to Mexico and China, and exhibitions in Nigeria and Senegal. His is a cosmopolitanism not primarily oriented towards the West.

When we consider cosmopolitan modernism, we should think not only of diasporas and exile but also of deliberately chosen affinities. How might our picture of cosmopolitanism change when oriented not toward the lingering end of colonial relations but in dialectical relation to nationalism? A reversal of this dialectic might be seen in extended visits by Jacob Lawrence to Nigeria, under the auspices of the Harmon Foundation. Or in Mark Tobey’s travel to Japan, which inspired him to create calligraphic marks with no semantic meaning, but as a connotative reference to “other” languages and lives.

7. Nations Seeking Form

“Nationalism” is a word that has been in constant motion during the postwar period. In this sense the concept of nation, like nationalism, has generated considerable reflection through which to understand particular formations of cultural and social identity and the political communities in which they are founded. Benedict Anderson has used the notion of “imagined communities” to describe the shifting currents of ideas of the nation and nationalism. In his groundbreaking study on these two concepts, he offers a crucial insight when he asks us to consider “the political power of nationalisms versus their philosophical poverty and even incoherence.” Given the unhealthy history of nationalism in the twentieth century — especially its misuse and abuse in places like Germany and Japan during World War II — it is all the more necessary to carefully consider the figure of the nation in the context of this exhibition section, “Nations Seeking Form.”

Artists in the U.S. and Europe often declined to align themselves with their national governments, which had proven corrupt and militaristic. Nationalism had a different valence for artists in countries that had newly struggled for and won independence, such as Iraq, Cuba, China, India and Pakistan, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa. For this reason, those artists sought cultural forms to articulate and represent new national identities.

Nigerian artists, for example, played institutional and governmental roles, through personal commitment to national independence and the role of culture in establishing identity. Ben Enwonwu and Uzo Egonu represented African masks and instruments in what appears to be a critique of the European appropriation of such imagery. In Egypt, Gazbia Sirry depicted the martyrdom of Egyptians at the hands of the British occupiers, thereby also linking the Egyptian condition to the oppression of African Americans (whose movement for civil rights, informing the work of Jack Whitten and others, could take on a nationalist coloration).

The struggle to define what was truly national in identity, for example, in the debate between those who advocated discarding cultural tradition in the effort to become both independent and modern, and those who saw indigenous identity as central to their new national identity. In Southeast Asia, the choice would be described as one of East versus West, with “the West” representing Europe, the future, education, and technological progress; and “the East” representing indigenous knowledge, non-Western identity, the past, and tradition. While India’s nationalist movement fought against Western colonialism, many Indians saw the same West as the future. How, then, to support locally distinctive cultural self-confidence? Artists in the Progressives group that flourished in the years after Indian independence in 1947 found different solutions: Francis Souza, who depicted the biblical figures in his works as dark-skinned, even entirely black, achieved success among British critics, who compared his work to that of Francis Bacon. Maqbool Fidal Husain, in contrast, stayed in India as his peers left: “They said you can’t grow as an artist in India, and that I should join them, but luckily I was married, so I think for that reason I couldn’t go! My main concern was Indian culture, so I took that route.” Husain’s work celebrated Hindu deities, albeit in their visual rather than religious aspects.

8. Networks, Media & Communication

At its conclusion, Postwar shifts the understanding of art engaged with mass culture away from the usual focus on consumer goods and the signs, symbols, and logos that advertised them, and instead toward the circulation, distribution, and communication of those signs via technology and broadcast networks. Certainly some artists focused on the power of representation. By means of narrative figuration, artist Hervé Telemaque’s My Darling Clementine (1963) scrutinizes widespread racial stereotypes. Politically oriented critiques more often emphasized a newer capitalism, the cocacolonization that was now not only American- dominated but blatantly global in extent, as in Jirō Takamatsu’s Strings in Bottles (1963) and León Ferrari’s The Western-Christian Civilization (1965). Underlying this extension was the global distribution and circulation of information, invoked in the work of Derek Boshier, Thadeusz Kantor, and Gerhard Rühm that took the airmail letter as its subject.

Communication also underlay the systems theories of cybernetics that appealed to an international array of artists rooted in a variety of aesthetic and political orientations. It had particular appeal for artists seeking affinities across national boundaries: the New Tendencies exhibition featured works by twenty-nine artists from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia. This new optical and kinetic art, like that of Mohammed Melehi, sought to transmit information on a fundamental, physiological wavelength transcending the cultural specifics of language. Similarly, communication drew artists to new technologies. The British artists in the Independent Group, particularly John McHale, were oriented toward popular culture’s technological, even futuristic aspects, from transistors to robots. Fluxus and other artists — including Lucio Fontana, Otto Götz, and Nam June Paik — experimented with the new medium of broadcast television, aspiring to make art that not only took part in the latest electronic technologies, but could also communicate to an audience beyond the art galleries themselves. All these artists sought an art adequate to a world conceived as a single integrated system or organism: in this way, the paradigm that dawned in the present exhibition’s introduction becomes conscious and fully developed in its conclusion.

There is today a clear connection between the systems theories of such figures as György Kepes, Norbert Weiner, and Marshall McLuhan, and the vision of an interconnected world, one in which relations of information and capital supersede national identities. The concluding section of Postwar, with its focus on communication and circulation, conflict and control, serves as a bookend to the show’s beginning with the technical invention, epistemological shift, and political reordering emblematized by the atomic bomb. Theories of feedback and communication that emerged from the science of the atomic bomb drove the restructuring of cities around the world, as did the wars in Indochina. And so the end of Postwar looks both backward and forward, to the next episode in this ambitious cycle of exhibitions: Post-colonialism.

 

A Arte Periférica venceu o António Lamas

A guerra que o Presidente António Lamas moveu contra a Arte Periférica (loja e galeria no CCB) não foi ganha pelo agressor.

A Anabela Antunes e o Pedro Reigadas, que conheço desde os Cómicos e acompanhei em Massamá e depois em Belém) tiveram a ousadia de resistir à rescisão do contrato arbitrariamente ditada pelo poderoso professor Lamas - quem seria o feliz contemplado com os espaços?, numa estranha série de arbitrários afastamentos e perseguições em boa hora interrompida pelo João Soares, com todas as razões e mais essa.
Apesar dos custos que teve a longa batalha jurídica, administrativa e de influências que os dois conduziram discretamente, por hábil opção própria, mas com muita coragem, eles lá estão, e o apreciado engenheiro Lamas foi entretanto apeado.

Nunca percebi a campanha de defesa do Presidente professor engenheiro doutor em que se envolveram, entre outros, a Teresa Gouveia e a Raquel Henriques da Silva, com espaços de opinião no Público. Nunca percebi por que razão o Expresso foi ouvir o Lamas, que não tinha mais nada para dizer, e não publicou os testemunhos que a Alexandra Carita recolheu junto dos dois galeristas e de técnicos e empresas absurdamente "dispensados" (transmi-lhe contactos, por uma última vez, mas nada..). O Público e o Expresso não cumpriram o seu papel também neste caso (de que o ataque à Arte Periférica era só um sintoma) - e foi preciso o Ministro João Soares trazer o episódio Lamas à praça pública, com a veemência justificada, para que o homem saísse. Famílias? Clientelas? Lobbies?

Inaugurou hoje, 24, o novo espaço da galeria, que não tem menos parede útil e conta com um espaço reservado junto às reservas. Abriu com a 1ª mostra individual de uma jovem artista estremenha, Ângela Sánchez (Badajoz, 1974), na sequência de uma persistente linha de revelação de jovens artistas, que nunca excluiu a programação de qualificados professores. De Badajoz veio, entre outros, o António Franco Domínguez, director do MEIAC, que não via há anos... Desde há 20 anos que ele associa o seu museu Ibero-Americano à arte portuguesa, sem que se movam as contrapartidas convenientes. Só há fronteira do lado de cá, por mesquinhez "curatorial".

A Arte Periférica voltou ao espaço inicial que ocupou no CCB (são dos mais antigos inquilinos e continuam jovens), juntando a papelaria e a galeria. Mas a mudança irá permitir agora crescer num outro espaço próximo onde tiveram até agora armazém e oficina de molduras. O Presidente Lamas, com toda a sua arrogância e prepotência, perdeu a guerra: fui tentando ajudar à sua derrota. Parabéns Anabela e Pedro!

Na foto, uma exp. de Nuno Viegas em Nov. de 2008, que eu na altura referia na legenda como o melhor programa então em curso no CCB.

LIVROS 1: Visione Colore, 1963

Livros singulares 1 :

"Visione Colore", 1963, Palazzo Grassi, Venezia.

Com uma página do suplemento de traduções:" Epos in cammino" de Paolo Maritoni. O segundo prefácio é de Christian Dotremont, "Ailes et sabots"

Baj, Fischer, Jorn, Lucebert e Alechinsky, Antes, Appel, Corneille, Alan Davie, Dubuffet, San Francis, Jacobsen, Pedersen e outros. Os Cobra e vários outros. Primitivos, espontâneos, populares à margem da pop. A cor bruta num início dos anos 60. Mais pluralista do que depois se diz.

 

 

Enrico Baj (Milano), Visaje, 1963 (tb há colagens com Lego); apresentado por Raymond Queneau.

 

Lothar Fischer, Reiterschiff, 1963 (Gruppe Spur, Munique 1957)

Asger Jorn, sem título, 1960.

Lucebert, Drinking Kobold, 1962

 

Isabel Sabino no Museu Militar: "A menina (não) fica em casa"

Também fui hoje, com gosto, ver a exp.-instalação Isabel Sabino no Museu Militar - sem tempo (o trânsito, o trânsito...) para dar a volta a esse museu precioso e muito pouco conhecido.
Enfrentou a grande Pintura de História (aqui pintura histórica) de Adriano Sousa Lopes e outros numa escala compatível com o espaço disponível (duas vitrinas de pequenas pinturas instaladas e uma construção-instalação no centro de uma outra sala, barreira ou trincheira de pano sobre terra) e em especial com a condição memorialista das imagens fotográficas apropriadas pela pintura (pela pintora), numa escala que é feminina pelo intimismo e também pela cor vermelha de sangue que tudo recobre, por vezes coagulado em pastas.
Em "Mulheres de Armas" colecciona retratos de mulheres que foram em geral feministas, Maria Lamas, Angelina Vidal, Carolina Michaelis, entre as mais conhecidas, identificadas por medalhas de chumbo (?). Noutra vitrina, o título geral "A menina (não) fica em casa" declina-se em imagens fotográficas de cenas colectivas, cenas de trabalho feminino que a ausência dos homens na guerra autorizou e/ou exigiu. Passa-se da representação-nomeação de figuras prestigiadas, honorífica, à atenção às mulheres anónimas. O trabalho, fora do espaço doméstico, era ao mesmo tempo emancipação (relativa) e opressão/exploração, e aí se encontra exposto também enquanto imagens de guerra, como o outro lado menos lembrado da guerra. Na trincheira encenada, adiante, encontram-se retratos também femininos de guerras actuais.

É eficaz a intervenção, ligando a evocação histórica dos murais envolventes e as armas expostas à criação contemporânea, actualizando intenções, procedimentos e representações. Décadas de interditos (a figura, a ilustração, a pintura) limitaram a troco de uma demasiado incerta e inútil "autonomia" a capacidade de referir acontecimentos e situações, a possibilidade de intervir no campo das práticas sociais. I.S. intervém, actualiza imagens, produz um discurso visual veemente sobre o lado oculto (menos heróico) da guerra, sobre as lutas e o trabalho discreto das mulheres. O impacto visual, a visualidade dos objectos, que vemos instalados, aglomerados, ultrapassar aqui as condições de eficácia da sua apresentação; são imagens sobre tela, marcadas pela acção da pintura, activas, gritantes - nada a ver com a facilidade de muitas apropriações preguiçosas de fotografias e objectos. Até 29 de Setembro, uma louvável abertura do museu à arte contemporânea.

A nova directora dos Museus Gulbenkian, a campanha contra

Uma crítica negativa é muitas vezes mais mobilizadora do que muitas estrelas.

Lá voltei hoje à Gulbenkian para tentar perceber por que se encarniçam contra a exposição comemorativa e estreia da nova directora ("Linhas do Tempo") alguns personagens da cidade com banca na CS, por sinal, noto, personagens vinculados a instituições de ensino. Foi o Nuno Crespo, ligado ao Instituto de História da Arte da FCSH da UN (e mais não digo), e há dias o Carlos Vidal agora Tenes da FBAUL. Pelo menos. Eu tinha apreciado a exp., a ruptura e a sua orientação (embora com dúvidas qt à subordinação dos 2 museus a um mesmo nome e bilhete, de 5 para 10€, obrigando os visitantes a pagar entrada num lugar que não lhes interessa). E continuo sem perceber o incómodo, para lá das razões previsíveis: uma directora vinda de fora, alheia às seitas e livre de compromissos.

Voltei à FG e continuo sem perceber a raiva. Bola preta e título "Caos", o que acho que deveria ser um elogio na boca de um esquerdista encartado, mesmo académico e estalinista: não será positiva a caótica decomposição da cultura burguesa? O que é, no grande salão agora aberto e transparente, a conjunção ordenada das peças numa cronologia dupla, com alguns poucos exercícios associativos eficazes, de obras de diferentes disciplinas, é dita ser "uma feira sem nexo de obras-primas da Fundação» - mas, se não entende o nexo tão bem visível como se pode ser professor e ensaísta (mais dado ao exercício livresco especulativo-rebarbativo do que à observação, é verdade)? O que é a junção física de dois sentidos cronológicos e de duas colecções (em espelho e com uma linha média que é óbvia e é objecto de muita informação) classifica-se assim: "nenhuma relação entre os dois museus, nenhuma relação entre as peças desta exposição." É cego, ou faz-se? E voltou a impor-se uma hierarquização de disciplinas a começar na Pintura de História e a acabar nas Artes Decorativas? Não é o contrário que se ensina, questionando fronteiras? Pura má vontade. Má língua. Intriga. E, confesso, desconheço quais as razões. Talvez se explique se eu o provocar... Mas nunca gostei de polémicas.

Para picar o professor doutor pintor ensaísta agora Tenes (com exp. no Montijo, ao fim de anos de abstinência, mas são obras de juventude - se alguma vez a teve) direi que na 1ª parte da nota publicada na Sábado, supl. GPS, pág. 42, faz uma pungente prova de ignorância - terá sido pressa, o ímpeto do ataque, talvez, mas não poder ser assim. Diz ele que em 1957 a Gulbenkian «realiza a sua 1ª Exposição Geral, oásis no estado Novo». Vários erros de palmatória: nunca se chamou nem poderia chamar Exp. Geral, foi só Exp de Arte Plásticas: Geral (Gerais...) eram as 10 exp. que a oposição democrática ia fazendo anualmente na SNBA, até 1956 (a 10ª Geral). E acontece que essa 1ª Exp. FG (a 2ª foi só em 1961, com mais abertura) foi marcada qt ao júri, à selecção e à premiação por uma pesada prudência face às correntes estéticas e aos confrontos Situação-Oposição. Nunca foi vista como um «óasis no Estado Novo», porque o panorama artístico não era monocórdico ou arregimentado ou desértico: esquecendo as Gerais, de que não se lembrou e faziam oposição directa ao SNI, tínhamos como "oásis" a Galeria Pórtico, e o Movimento de Renovação da Arte Religiosa, a Galeria Alvarez que expôs Amadeo em 1956, ano tb da criação da Gravura, bem como da exp. Artistas de Hoje na SNBA. Etc. Qual, quando, como «oásis no Estado Novo» a FG de 1957?

A seguir: "antes da criação do Centro de Arte Moderna, em 1983, a Fundação tem uma clara posição sobre a arte do seu tempo, com o Acarte,…». Aqui a ignorância que se soma à má fé é gritante. Não, antes de 1983, a FG não tem uma posição clara, e depois também não, apesar de ter conseguido comprar para a abertura do CAM centenas de obras ao Jorge Brito para ocupar as paredes que teria vazias ou envergonhadas. E para isso o Azeredo serviu-se da posição que tinha no Banco de Portugal para obrigar o grande coleccionador a vender - para a pequena história conto que o Brito exigiu ser pago em notas e saiu da FG com os sacos. Antes de 1983 a FG fez compras incertas, irregulares, ocasionais e ao sabor de mundanidades e decorações. Não comprou o melhor das exps. de 1957 e 1961 (um dos méritos desta montagem é ir buscar algumas peças nunca vistas, melhores ou piores mas significativas, compradas por ocasião da 1a Exp.). O melhor que se mostrou em 1983 veio da Col. Brito, que devia ser melhor conhecida, se este não fosse um mundo de intrigas.
Não, o Acarte não é anterior ao CAM, e foi em 1984 inventado para arrumar a D. Madalena, que depois fez um óptimo trabalho, como já fizera antes nas músicas, mas a seguir teve um arrojo inédito. Como sou muito velho lembro-me de criticar no DN a criação do Acarte pq faltava ao CAM muita coisa para tornar-se um eficaz Centro de Arte Moderna. E foi faltando sempre: até à doença de Azeredo (o grande fundador, o visionário que se bateu pelo CAM contra a restante administração) era ele e a srª que certos sábados davam a volta às galerias para decidir as compras que lhe apontava o arq. Sommer, um director que se foi fazendo em andamento, "in progress" do princípio da casa à sua reforma. Sempre que o custo ultrapassava (já no final) os 50 contos (250 € hoje) era o Presidente a decidir.
Como é que o agora Tenes chama às "Linhas do Tempo" uma «aglomeração sem nexo», numa prosa que é um aglomerado de erros desalinhados? Erros com nexo, mas que só ele conhecerá. Uma espécie de campanha?

Em tempo: eu não conheço a nova directora dos Museus Gulbenkian. Nunca fui apresentado à Penelope Curtis, nem lhe falei ocasionalmente. Sei que veio da Tate Britain acompanhada por alguma contestação na imprensa, e sei que isso às vezes é bom sinal, outras vezes não

O ICAC, 54 anos depois: Programa / Actas (Proceedings)

Há precisamente 54 anos (não é uma efeméride redonda) decorriam em Salisbúria / Salisbury as sessões do ICAC, 1º Congresso Internacional de Cultura Africana, acompanhado por uma grande exposição de arte tradicional e moderna, uma iniciativa também inédita, especialmente significativa na "África branca", onde nem a arte dita tribal era reconhecida como arte pela imprensa colonial rodesiana (ao contrário do que acontecia com a imprensa colonial de língua portuguesa).

Foi entre 1 e 11 de Agosto de 1962 e atraíu grandes especialistas convidados de todo o mundo, incluindo universitários e alguns dignatários africanos, nomeadamente da Nigéria já independente desde 1960.  Frank McEwen, fundador do Museu de Arte da Rodésia do Sul, por iniciativa de Londres, foi o organizador do ICAC, e estiveram presentes William Fagg, Robert Penrose, Alfred Barr, Hugh Tracey,  Tristan Tzara, Amâncio/Pancho Guedes, Vincent Kofi - e também o Chefe Zandamela dos Marimbeiros de Zavala (L. Marques) - que usaram da palavra  na sessão inaugural, a 1 de Agosto. E igualmente, entre outros, Jean Laude e  Udo Kultermann, especialistas da "arte negra" e da arquitectura africana, respectivamente

O ICAC foi financiado pelo Congresso para Liberdade da Cultura, que depois foi denunciado como sendo pago pela CIA, e a denúncia pode ter partido da própria extrema-direita americana, para desarticular uma organização de carácter progressivo. A declaração unilateral de independência de Ian Smith terá sido uma segunda razão para que as Actas nunca tivessem sido editadas, embora existam as provas tipográficas em meia dúzia de bibliotecas.

O catálogo de "African Remix" faz-lhe referência, mas é um tema em geral ignorado, esquecido e silenciado. Não é de interesse para a "teoria pós-colonial", e não é "politicamente correcto", recordar o mais importante fórum internacional sobre a cultura africana, realizado no contexto das independências africanas e das oposições ao apartheid.

Fica a seguir um sumário (não publicado) das principais palestras incluídas nas Actas, que foram em geral seguidas de debates entre os assistentes.

PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF AFRICAN CULTURE
1-11 August 1962
Held at The National Gallery, Salisbury, Rhodesia

Foreword 1959, Frank McEwen,

Opening Ceremony, 1 August,
McEwen, S.O. Biobaku (Ife, Nigeria)
Tristan Tzara, Vincent Kofi, William Fagg, Roland Penrose, Alfred Barr, Amâncio d’Alpoim [Pancho] Guedes , Hugh Tracey, Chief Zandamela (Lourenço Marques, Moçambique)

August 2
Lecture 1 - Janheinz Jahn, African thinking as a background to African Art,
(comments by Barr, Guedes, McEwen)
2. Jean Laude, Aesthetics and Ethnology,
3. A.M. Dauer (Frankfurt) , The influence of African Music on Western Culture, old and new,
4. S. Okeke (Lagos), The Artist in an Ibo Community,

August 3
1. B. E. Reynolds (Northern Rhodesia), The African Craft Village, Livingstone,
2. Pierre Guerre (Marseille), African Aesthetics and Western Aesthetics,
3. Hugh Tracey, Problems facing African Music and Musicians in the Immediate Future,
(comments Mrs. Guedes)
4. James A. Porter (Washington), The influence of African art and Culture in the New World,
5 . William Bascon (Berkeley), Creativity and Style in African Art,
(comments Fagg, Porter, Guedes)

August 6
1. Percy Borde (dancer, Caribbe), African influence in the Caribbean, p
2. Helmut Gunther (Stuttgart), The influence of Africa on Modern European and American Dancing,
3. [Pancho Guedes] / Amâncio D'Alpoim Guedes (Lourenço Marques, Moçambique), "Things are not what they seem to be - the auto-biofarsical hour",  (intro Tristan Tzara)

August 7
1. H. Christoffels (Fribourg), African Art and African Spiritualy,
William Fagg (London), African Art and Life Force,
2. B. Holas (Abidjan), Untitled (about Ethnology and Aesthetics),
3. Willard Rhodes (Nee York), African survivals in American Negro Music,
4. Selby Mvusi (artist, Ghana), Towards a Contemporary Art in Africa,
5. Roland Penrose (London), African influences on Picasso and Contemporary Art (intro McEwen)
6. Udo Kultermann (Leverkussen), Traditional African Architecture and Modern Architecture,

August 9
1. Roger Summers (Bulaweyo, South Rhodesia), Architecture and Other Art at Zimbabwe (110-1820),
2. Pearl Primus (dancer, USA), The inner being of African Dance,
3. Pierre Roumeguere & Jacqueline Roumeguere-Eberhardt (Bouar, Central African Republic), Human Clay Figurines and Fertility Dolls,
4. J. Newton Hill (Lagos), Towards an Aesthetic in African Sculpture,
5. Vincent Kofi (artist, Ghana) - intro by Alfred Barr,
6. Robert A. Kauffman (Southern Rhodesia), Continuitity and Change in the African Music of Southern Rhodesia,

August 11
1 - Frank McEwen, Art in Contemporay Africa,
F. McEwen, Influence of Africa,

Summing Up, Introdutory Remarks, / Non-National aspects of the Congress / Aspects of African Culture covered by Congress / Problem of adversing Congress / Difficulty of communicating with general public / Problem of Language / Proceedings of Congress
Indepence of Congress from Government Status / Second ICAC Congress / Subject of next Congress

not-paged
«Bill» Fagg, Four Yoruba Masters..., (Lecture 5, August 2)
William Fagg, The ancient history of Art in Nigeria
Andrew Tracey, Music of Southern Rhodesia
Frank McEwen, Foreword to the Congress Exibitions

List of Delegates’ Adresses
Sheet musics and photos

 

#

O catálogo da exposição paralela ainda se encontra à venda. Grande parte das obras da representação de Moçambique fez parte da colecção de Pancho Guedes e pude expô-la em 2010 no Mercado de Santa Clara.

Pancho conseguira o apoio do Turismo de Lourenço Marques para fazer viajar as obras e o grande agrupamento dos Marimbeiros de Zavala, que fez escândalo ao tocar o hino nacional, como fazia em todas as actuações. Tristan Tzara ficou tão entusiasmado com o "dadaísmo" e a obra de Pancho Guedes que fez alterar o bilhete de regresso a Paris e foi até L.M. Infelizmente morreu no ano seguinte e o seu interesse ficou sem consequências.

P.G. já fizera em 1961 representar Moçambique como país - com a sua própria obra arquitectónica ( o Leão que Ri, etc) - na IV Bienal de São Paulo usando credenciais obtidas de um amigo do Turismo de L.M., e pensara então mudar-se para o Brasil. Nesse ano organizou também a 1ª exp. de Malangatana, no edifício das Actividades Económicas, e recebeu a visita de Eduardo Mondlane em L.M. Como muitos visitantes internacionais e muitas estadias no estrangeiro, a PIDE tinha mais razões para não o largar... A certa altura supunham-no chefe da Frelimo...

Abaixo, capa do catálogo da exposição e 1ªas páginas dos "Proceedings". Depois os Marimbeiros de Zavala actuando no 1º ICAC de 1962 , em Salisbúria, diante dos congressistas e do público. A foto é certamente de Pancho Guedes, e é pelo menos do seu espólio).

c  

 

actuando no 1º ICAC de 1962 , em Salisbúria, diante dos congressistas e do público. A foto é certamente de Pancho Guedes, e é pelo menos do seu espólio)

 

 

 

 

 

Cronologia, Moçambique

1981 - «Moçambique, a Terra e os Homens», 1º Salão Nacional de Arte Fotográfica, Maputo (Concelho Municipal, 3 Fev.), na origem da Associação Moçambicana de Fotografia - AMF - apoiada por Samora Machel, no contexto da guerra civil (1976 - 1992). Moçambique, a Terra e os Homens, ed. AMF (1982), Maputo, printed Edicomp, Roma,1984; Introdução de José Luís Cabaço, ministro da Informação - tx. pt., fr., ing., it. Com Ricardo Rangel (capa), Kok Nam, Carlos Alberto (Vieira), Daniel Maquinasse, Danilo Guimarães, João Manuel Costa (Funcho), Jorge Almeida, José Soares, Luis Bernardo Honwana, Luis Souto, Martinho Fernando, Moira Forjaz, Naita Ussene, entre 41 autores.

1981 - Rogério, Momentos, exposição na Fundação C. Gulbenkian, Junho/Julho, Lisboa. Catálogo com textos do autor.

1983 - Moira Forjaz, Muipiti, Ilha de Moçambique, textos de Amélia Muge, Luís Filipe Pereira e da autora, Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, Lisboa, por ocasião da visita de Samora Machel a Portugal. Forjaz & Susan Maiselas (photographs by), text by Albie Sachs, Images of a revolution: mural art in Mozambique, Zimbabwe Publishing House, Harare, 1983 / Imagens de uma Revolução, ed. Frelimo - 4º Congresso, 1984 (imp. Minerva Central). Ruth First, pictures by Moira Forjaz, Black Gold: The Mozambican Miner, Proletarian and Peasant, St. Martin's Press, New York - Harvester Press, Brighton, 1983.

1983 - Criação do Centro de Formação Fotográfica (CFF), Maputo, com apoio da cooperação italiana. A partir de 2001, Centro de Documentação e Formação (CDFF). Direcção de Ricardo Rangel até 2009.

1990 - Karingana ua Karingana, Il Mozambico contemporaneo visto dai suoi fotografi, a cura di Gin Angri, introduzione di Mia Couto. Ed. Coop, Associazione Nazionale Cooperative di Consumatori, Milano (Catalogo della Mostra, Palazzo d'Accursio, Bologna). Ed. bilingue, it. & pt., tx. Mia Couto e Gin Angri. Com R. Rangel, Kok Nam, Alfredo Mueche, Alfredo Paco, Fernando Martinho, Joel Chiziane, Jorge Almeida, José Cabral (capa), Luís Souto, Naita Ussene, Rui Assubuji, Sérgio Santimano, fotógrafos do Instituto de Comunicação Social (ICS), da Agência de Informação Moçambicana (AIM), da cooperativa fotográfica Alpha e também dos professores e ex-alunos do Centro de Formação Fotográfica. «A imagem de um país faminto, onde grassa a guerra e a miséria (…) que encontra ainda força para se renovar em esperança», Mia Couto.

1992 - Uma vida a reportar a vida, prefácio de Leite de Vasconcelos, ed. ENACOMO, Empresa Nacional do Comércio, Maputo. Com R. Rangel, K. Nam, J. Cabral, N. Ussene, Martinho Fernando…

1993 - Moçambique, Cinco Olhares: António Valente, Joel Chiziane, José Cabral, Kok Nam, Naita Ussene, produção CIDAC, exp. no Forum Picoas, Lisboa , 23 Abril – 2 Maio. Cat., tx. Mia Couto.

1993 - Africa, Africa, editors Olaf Gerlach Hansen and Vibeke Rosttup Bøyesen, ed. Images of Africa, Denmark. "Is the first joint presentation of so many African photographers". De Moçambique: José Cabral, Martinho Fernando, Naita Ussene, entre 20 autores.

1994 - Ricardo Rangel, Fotógrafo de Moçambique / Photographe du Mozambique, Coédition Editions Findakly, Paris/Centre Culturel Franco-Mozambicain, Maputo. Bilingue fr. & pt., tx. de Zé Craveirinha, Mia Couto. Retrato por Rogério.

1994 - Revue Noire, nº 15, déc. – jan. fev. 95, dir. Jean Loup Pivin, Paris. «Moçambique / Photographies»: tx. Simon Njami, Aida Gomes da Silva, etc. Fotografias de Ale Júnior (capa), Alfredo Paco, José Cabral, Kok Nam, Naita Ussene, Rui Assubuji, Sérgio Santimano. In "Une nouvelle photographie / L’Ombre et le noir», por Jean Loup Pivin (1ª abordagem global da fotografia africana por ocasião dos Encontre de Bamako). De Moçambique: Rangel, Ale Junior, Assubuji, Santimano.

1994 - Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine de Bamako, Mali, org. Fondation Afrique en Créations, 5-11 Déc. Ricardo Rangel apresentado por «Revue Noire» ("Notre pain de chaque jour, les nuits de la Rue Araújo", 1960)

1996 - In/sight. African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, dir. Okwui Enwezor, Guggenheim Museum, Nova Iorque, itinerante. Com Ricardo Rangel («Our Nightly Bread»).

1996 - Língua Franca, 16ºs Encontros de Fotografia de Coimbra, exp. colectiva e cat. c/ apresentação de M.C. Serén (ed. 1996 e 1998). Com Sérgio Santimano («Luisa Macuácua», 1992-95).

1996 - 2es Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine de Bamako, org. Afrique en Creations. 9-15 Dec. Ricardo Rangel in «Regards Croisées», com Yves Pitchen, John Liebenberg, Pierrot Men - cat.); «Collectif Mozambique» (?) na secção Photo-reportage.

1997 - Maputo. Desenrascar a vida, selecção, organização e textos de Nelson Saúte. Ed. Ndjira, Maputo / Comissão Nacional para a Comemoração dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, Lisboa. Tipografia Lousanense, Lisboa. Fotos Centro de Formação Fotográfica, de Rangel, José Cabral, Rui Assubuji, Martinho Fernando, Naita Ussene, Alfredo Mueche, Carlos Cardoso, Gin Angri, Lise Lotte, etc.

1998 - L’Afrique par elle-même, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, Juin-Août; Africa by Africa: A Photographic View, 1999, Barbican Centre, Londres; Eye Africa: African Photography 1840-1998, Cape Town; Berlim, São Paulo, Washington, Nova Iorque. 2003 - L’Afrique par elle-même, Un siècle de photographie africaine, Tervuren, Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Belgica; 2006 - Centro Português de Fotografia, Porto. Anthologie de la Photographie Africaine et de l'Océan Indien, sous la direction de Pascal Martin Saint Leon, N'Goné Fall, Jean Loup Pivin. Éditions Revue Noir, Paris. Ed. francesa, inglesa e portuguesa (Brasil).

1998 - 3e Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine, Bamako: Sergio Santimano, «Cabo Delgado - Une histoire photographique de l’Afrique», in «Ja Taa» / "Prendre Image", cat. ed. Actes Sud. «L'Afrique par elle-même" (extraits).

1998 - José Henriques e Silva, Pescadores Macua, Baía de Nacala, Moçambique, 1957-1973, exp. Arquivo Fotográfico de Lisboa; ed. Câmara Municipal de Lisboa e Comissão dos Descobrimentos, Lisboa.

2001 - IVs Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine, Bamako: R. Rangel (exp. monográfica); R. Assubuji, Luis Basto, S. Santimano, in «Memoires intimes d’un nouveau millénaire» (exp. international).

2002 - Iluminando Vidas - Fotografia Moçambicana 1950–2001 / Ricardo Rangel & the Next Generation, dir. Bruno Z’Graggen e Grant Lee Neuenburg, exp. Bienne, Suíça; 2003, AMF, Maputo; Bamako; 2004, Culturgest, Porto; 2005, Johannesburg e Cape Town. Iluminando Vidas - Ricardo Rangel and Mozambican Photography / …e a Fotografia Moçambicana. Cat. ed. Christoph Merian Verlag, 2002, two versions: English/Portuguese (softcover) / German/French (hardcover). Tx. B. Z’Graggen, Allen Porter, Simon Njami, António Sopa, Calane da Silva. Com Rangel (capa), K. Nam, Joel Chiziane, João Costa (Funcho), R. Assubuji, A. Paco, Luís Basto, N. Ussene, Alfredo Muache, M. Fernando, Ferhat Vali Momade, Albino Mahumana, J. Cabral, Alexandre Fenías, S. Santinano.

2002 - PhotoFesta, Primeiros Encontros Internacionais de Fotografia, prod. AMF, cat., comissários R. Assubuji e S. Santimano (capa); Homenagem a Daniel Maquinasse; exp. Rogério («Verdade»), Sebastião Langa, Luís Abelard; «Bamako 2001», etc.; 2004 - PhotoFesta, IIºs Encontros: Kok Nam («Grande angular da amizade»); João Costa («Cheiro a Independência»); colect. CFF - «Modos de Ver»; colectiva «Saudade de l’Espoir» (Ilha da Reunião, 2003); 2006 - PhotoFesta IIIºs Encontros: José Cabral («As linhas da minha mão»); S. Santimano («Terra Incógnita»); Mauro Pinto e Albino Mahumana («Ver Matola»)

2003 - Vs Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine, Bamako. De Moçambique, «Iluminando Vidas»; Rui Soeiro (exp. international, «Rites sacrés / Rites profanes»); Mauro Pinto (1974, Maputo), «Ports d’Afrique»

2004 - Africa Remix, Contemporary art of a continent, dir. Simon Njami, Dusseldorf; Hayward Gallery, London; 2005 - Centre Pompidou, Paris; 2006 - Tokyo, Stockholm; 2007 - Johannesburg. Exp. e cat. Com R. Assubuji, Luís Basto, S. Santimano.

2005 - VIs Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine, Bamako, "Un autre monde». De Moçambique: Abilio Macuvele, Acamo Maquinasse, Rui Assubuji, Tomas Cumbana.

2006 - Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, dir. Enwezor Okwui, ICP International Center of Photograpy, Nova Iorque; Miami; 2008 - Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdão. Com Luís Basto.

2006 - Sérgio Santimano, Terra Incógnita (Niassa), M'siro (ed. do autor), Uppsala, Suécia; 2007 - VIIs Rencontres, Bamako; 2008 - Auditório Conde Ferreira, Sesimbra; Galeria P4, Lisboa.

2006 - Réplica e Rebeldia, Artistas de Angola, Brasil, Cabo Verde e Moçambique, dir. António Pinto Ribeiro, prod. Instituto Camões. Exp. Maputo, Luanda, Salvador da Baí­a, Rio de Janeiro, Brasí­lia e Praia. Com R. Rangel, Alexandre Santos, L. Basto, T. Cumbana, Mauro Pinto. Cat. bilingue Pt.-Ing.

2008 - Ricardo Rangel e Mauro Pinto, Gal. Afronova, Johannesburg; 2011 - Mauro Pinto, «Maputo-Luanda-Lubumbashi», Influx Contemporary Gallery, Lisboa; Gal. Bozart, Lisboa; 2014 - Gal. 111, Lisboa.

2009 - José Cabral, Anjos Urbanos / Urban Angels, Galeria P4 Photography, Lisboa; cat. com poemas de Luis Carlos Patraquim e tx. A. Pomar; 2010 - Centro Cultural Franco-Moçambicano, Maputo.

2010 - Ocupações Temporárias, prod. Elisa Santos, Maputo: com Mauro Pinto (e Filipe Branquinho, documentação), catálogo em DVD; 2011 - com Filipe Branquinho (1977, Maputo) e Camila de Sousa (1985, Moç.); 2013 - Ocupações Temporárias – Documentos, Fund. Gulbenkian, Lisboa. Coord. Elisa Santos e António Pinto Ribeiro. Camila de Sousa, F. Branquinho, Mauro Pinto.

2011 - IXs Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine, Bamako. Expo. Pan-Africana. Mário Macilau (1984, Maputo) (The Zionists / Maziones). 2012 - Mário Macilau, «Taking Place», Gal. Influx Contemporary, Lisboa; 2013 - «Tempo», Gal. Belo-Galsterer, Lisboa; 2014 - «Moments of Transition», idem.

2011 - BES PHOTO, CCB - Museu Berardo/CCB, Lisboa, e Pinacoteca, S. Paulo, Mário Macilau (Maziones); 2012 - idem, Mauro Pinto, «Dá licença!» (premiado); 2013 - CCB e Instituto Tomie Ohtake, S. Paulo, Filipe Branquinho, «Showtime».

2013 - Filipe Branquinho, «Occupations», portfolio, Revue Caméra, dir. Brigitte Ollier, nº 2, Avril-Juin, Paris; Gal. Photo FNAC Montparnasse, Paris; Gal. Bozart, Lisboa; exp. col. «Regarde-moi», Photoquai, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris; Jack Bell Gal, Londres «Showtime».

2013 - JoburgArtFair, Johannesburg, Mauro Pinto, Filipe Branquinho, Mário Macilau «TempoRealTime», Associação Kolungwana.

2013 - Present Tense, fotografias do sul da África / Photography from Southern Africa, exp. col., «Próximo Futuro», Fund. Gulbenkian, Lisboa, Porto e Paris. Org. António Pinto Ribeiro, cat. pt., fr., ing. Mauro Pinto e Filipe Branquinho («Chapa 100»)

2013 - De Maputo, José Cabral e Luís Basto, com homenagens a Moira Forjaz e Rogério. Org. Alexandre Pomar, A Pequena Galeria, Lisboa.

2015 - Filipe Branquinho, Paisagens Interiores / Interior Lanscapes, org. Alexandra Pinho, Instituto Camões, Maputo, cat.; Rencontres de Bamako, Exp. Pan-Africana «Telling Time»; 2016 - Gal. Av. da Índia, EGEAC, Lisboa; Gurué 15° 28‘ S 36° 59’ E; Kulungwana, Maputo.

2015 - Bienal de Veneza, Mário Macilau, Growing in Darkness, «In the Beginning the World Became Flesh», col., Pavilhão do Vaticano; 2016 - Growing in Darkness, tx. Gabriela Salgado, Mia Couto, Mário Macilau, Olivia Nitis, Roger Ballen, Simon Njami; design Christine Béroff, ed. Kehrer, Heidelberg (180 pág., En. fr. pt)

2015 - Moira Forjaz, Mozambique 1975/1985, Jacana Media / Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung, Cape Town. Tx. Gillian Slovo, Albie Sachs, etc (242 pág.)

2016 - Novo Banco Photo, Lisboa: Félix Mula (1979, Maputo), «Idas e Voltas» (premiado).

Fotografia em Moçambique, História antiga

 O que faz a importância excepcional da fotografia de Moçambique, se valorizarmos não a actual concorrência internacional no mercado dos festivais e instituições mas a continuidade e pluralidade criativa de várias gerações de fotógrafos? De facto, essa continuidade - pouco sustentada externamente, embora divulgada - só parece ter paralelo na fotografia da África do Sul, que obviamente está um patamar acima, porque é um imenso país com uma imensa história. Como se devem ponderar as variáveis que fazem a diferença da fotografia de Moçambique? Atravessam-na duas marcas constantes, a insistência no documentário social, renovando os seus caminhos, e a recusa (ou incapacidade) do exotismo, que ocupa muito do panorama africano e africanista.
A fotografia moderna de Moçambique começou pela década de 60 com dois fotojornalistas mestiços de longas carreiras, ambas iniciadas na imprensa colonial: Ricardo Rangel (1924, Lourenço Marques - 2009, Maputo) e Kok Nam (1939, LM - 2012, Maputo). Fica datada uma clara ruptura com o tempo anterior com a publicação do semanário ilustrado «Tempo», a partir de 20 de Setembro de 1970, onde Rangel publicava os «editoriais» fotográficos («Objectiva R.R.») e as reportagens da vida dos bairros negros, com a cumplicidade do jornalista e poeta José Craveirinha. Antes, houve alguma actividade do Núcleo de Arte e salões de amadores. E, muito mais atrás, os dez «Álbuns Fotográficos e Descritivos da Colónia de Moçambique» editados por José dos Santos Rufino (1929, impressos por Broschek & Co., Hamburgo), que continuaram sempre presentes.

Tem de sublinhar-se a personalidade forte de Ricardo Rangel e a capacidade de se afirmar como profissional brilhante e fotógrafo insubmisso numa carreira sempre ascendente na imprensa colonial. Foi também activista do Jazz, a música dos negros que muito se cruzou com a fotografia. E certamente reconhece-se a transigência táctica do poder colonial perante o fotojornalista mestiço (de ascendência grega e chinesa) oposicionista, a favor da aparição de elites intermédias entre as veleidades dos extremistas brancos e as ambições dos nacionalistas negros, como quem divide para reinar e aposta em vários tabuleiros. Entrou como aprendiz num laboratório fotográfico, nos anos 40, tornou-se um impressor reconhecido e foi o primeiro fotojornalista "de cor" na imprensa branca - desde o «Notícias da Tarde», em 1952, no «Notícias», em 1956, e chegando a chefe em «A Tribuna», 1960-64; depois, 1964, no «Notícias da Beira» e no «Diário de Moçambique» e na revista "Voz Africana", estes dois publicações da Diocese da Beira, presidida por D. Sebastião Soares de Resende. De novo no «Notícias» 1966-70 e a seguir o «Tempo», de que foi um dos fundadores. Após a independência, foi fotógrafo-chefe no «Notícias» em 1977, director do semanário «Domingo», 1981, etc. Foi também o pilar da criação em 1983, com apoio da cooperação italiana, do Centro de Formação Fotográfica, que continuava a dirigir aos 85 anos.

A repressão política poupou-o (foi preso a distribuir panfletos no final dos anos 40, como conta no filme de Licínio de Azevedo «Ferro em Brasa», de 2006), e a censura nunca o silenciou, mesmo se algum trabalho terá desaparecido. Depois, atravessou a revolução socialista e a guerra civil e a normalização relativa, dita social-democrata, também como figura independente e como formador de fotógrafos. Foi eleito para a Assembleia Municipal de Maputo (1998-2003) pela lista de cidadãos Juntos pela Cidade, e criticou a nova imprensa oficial em "Foto-jornalismo ou foto-confusionismo" (2002, ed. da Universidade Eduardo Mondlane), manifesto muito ilustrado contra o mau uso da fotografia e da legendagem (foto-aberrantismo, copulismo, ilogismo, ilusionismo, etc) no principal diário de Maputo, o «Notícias».) Travou sempre a mesma luta em diferentes condições políticas, com habilidade e firmeza.

Em 1994, a cooperação francesa editou um primeiro livro, «Ricardo Rangel, Photographe do Mozambique / Fotógrafo de Moçambique» (Éditions Findakly, Paris), que o mostrava como fotógrafo crítico da sociedade colonial, autor de imagens emblemáticas sobre a diferenciação racial e social, incluíndo os brancos pobres. E logo nos 1ºs Encontros de Bamako, no mesmo ano, a sua obra começou a ser divulgada com a série «Notre pain de chaque jour, les nuits de la Rue Araújo (1960)», apresentada pela «Revue Noire», que então publicava um número monográfico sobre Moçambique (nº 15, Décembre). Note-se que a «descoberta» de Moçambique acontece quando surgiam os primeiros panoramas da fotografia africana - «As (suas) fotos envelhecem como as de Doisneau ou de Strand alguns decénios mais cedo; ou seja, pouco ou nada, só o cenário é marcado pela história», escrevia Jean Loup Pivin nessa «Revue Noir», em «Une nouvelle Photographie - L’ombre et le noir»).

Enwezor Okwui consagrou-o como um dos grandes fotógrafos africanos em 1996 na exposição e no livro «In/sight. African Photographers, 1940 to the Present» (Guggenheim Museum, Nova Iorque). Também aí era a longa série das fotografias dos bares e das mulheres da Rua Araújo ( "Our Nightly Bread» ), que lhe assegurava a maior notoriedade. Iniciara-a ainda nos anos 60 com a aparição das películas mais sensíveis, e continuou, com uma notória cumplicidade hedonista, até que a governo da Frelimo deteve a «última prostituta» - é essa foto que está na origem do filme «Virgem Margarida», também de Licínio de Azevedo, 2013. O álbum «Pão Nosso de Cada Noite», bilingue, só foi editado em 2005 (ed. Marimbique, Maputo, impresso em Santo Tirso). Rangel compareceu também em «The Short Century - Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994», organizada por Okwui Enwesor, em 2001 (Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; depois, Berlim, Chicago, Nova Iorque). Um último livro: «Ricardo Rangel, Insubmisso e Generoso», de vários autores, org. Nelson Saúte, série Kulungwana, ed. Marimbique, Maputo 2014 (imp. Norprint, Santo Tirso).

É indispensável juntar a Rangel o nome de Kok Nam, outro fotojornalista notável e de carreira corajosa e muito longa. Começou a trabalhar nos anos 50 no laboratório e casa de produtos fotográficos Focus, onde já estivera Ricardo Rangel como impressor. Em 1966 passa como repórter fotográfico para o "Diário de Moçambique" - na delegação em Lourenço Marques e depois na sede na Beira. Em 1969 e 70 trabalha no "Notícias" de Lourenço Marques e no vespertino "Notícias da Tarde", sob a chefia de Rangel. Acompanhou a criação da revista "Tempo", onde continuou depois da independência e onde em 1990 era chefe de redacção. Foi entretanto um grande repórter das destruições e da fome ao tempo da guerra civil, também capaz de devolver a dimensão humana aos combatentes da Frelimo, forçado a manter-se na rectaguarda por precaução política, em contraposição e diálogo com o fotógrafo-guerrilheiro Daniel Maquinasse, que viria a morrer com Samora Machel em 1986.

 

Repórter do tempo colonial e da «revolução popular», são particularmente relevantes as fotografias de grupos e os retratos, deixando um espólio imenso ainda a desbravar, de que dá conta o livro «Kok Nam. Preto no Branco», vários autores, org. Nelson Saúte, série Kulungwana, ed. Marimbique, Maputo, 2014 (imp. Norprint).
Depois da aprovação da primeira Constituição multipartidária do país, em 1990, e da Lei da Imprensa, em Agosto de 1991, fundou com outros jornalistas, vindos quase todos dos quadros da Agência de Informação de Moçambique (AIM), da revista «Tempo» e do semanário «Domingo», o primeiro orgão de comunicação independente do controlo estatal e governamental, o projecto Mediacoop (1992). Ao «MediaFax», marco na mudança pluralista da imprensa moçambicana, sucedeu o semanário «Savana» em 1994, de que foi director até à morte.

Outras datas

Em 1972 Rui Knopfli (1932, Inhambane - 1997, Lisboa ) publicou um álbum de poemas e fotografias sobre a Ilha de Moçambique: «A Ilha de Próspero», Edição Minerva Central, Lourenço Marques. Era um «roteiro privado» e também patrimonial, publicação pioneira, sem continuidade.
Do mesmo ano é «Moçambique a Preto e Branco», com Rangel, Kok Nam, Rui Knopfli e outros, amadores salonistas, edição natalícia da CODAM, empresa portuária de Lourenço Marques, com organização não creditada de José Luís Cabaço, que viria a ser ministro da Informação da República Popular.
Em 1973 aconteceu a primeira exposição de Rangel, Rogério e Basil Breakey, fotógrafo de Cape Town, realizada no Núcleo de Arte (e parece que também na Beira). É o jazz que os liga e deverá ter sido Rogério a fazer Rangel passar da página impressa à parede. Expõem de novo em 1975, na Casa Amarela, com mais nomes: Rangel, Kok Nam, B. Breakey, Peter Sinclair e outros (sic - Informação do catálogo de Rogério, F. Gulbenkian, 1981.

Rogério ou Rogério Pereira (1942, Lisboa - 1987, Setúbal) é uma figura mais meteórica, um artista inconformado e informado, que terá sido especialmente influente graças à circulação pela África do Sul. Fez a transição do tempo colonial para o pós-independência, foi professor de fotografia durante dois anos em Maputo, mas regressou a Portugal em 1979, inadaptado em todos os regimes.
Fotografou desde 1966, em Lourenço Marques, trabalhou no «Sunday Times» de Johannesburg, em 1968; teve colaboração publicada na revista «Drum» (1969, 1973). Participou em exposições colectivas em Johannesburg e Cape Town desde 1969 (refere "Images of Man", promovida pelo International Fund for Concerned Photography»). São informações do catálogo de uma mostra desgarrada (descontextualizada) que realizou na Fundação Gulbenkian («Momentos», 1981), mal recebida por António Sena mas saudada na revista «Nova Imagem» de Pedro Foyos (importante portfolio no nº 1, Julho de 1980, com entrevista de Victor Dimas, «‘O fotografo tem de estar dentro da razão’»). Estava-se diante de um fotógrafo radical, revoltado, com imagens de uma grande veemência crítica, indisciplinadas, sintonizadas com rupturas dos anos 60/70. Fotografias vibrantes, duras, «tremidas», sub-expostas, inquietas.
O espólio regressou a Maputo e é conservado pela sua família africana. Em 1990 foi-lhe dedicada uma retrospectiva em duas partes na Associação Moçambicana de Fotografia, com a colaboração de Rangel, Kok Nam e José Pinto de Sá, que escreveu o texto do catálogo. Em 2002, a 1ª edição do PhotoFesta, Encontros Internacionais de Fotografia de Maputo, dedicou-lhe uma exposição antológica com o título “Verdade”. Em 2013 n’A Pequena Galeria recordei-o numa mostra de grupo com duas magníficas fotos esquecidas na Colecção Gulbenkian («De Maputo», com José Cabral e Luís Basto, também Moira Forjaz).

Bem relacionado com jornalistas-escritores como Luís Bernardo Honwana e Craveirinha, e em geral com o meio das artes, Pancho Guedes (Amâncio de Alpoim Miranda Guedes, 1925, Lisboa - 2015, África do Sul), formado em Johannesburg, fez desde o início dos anos 60, pelo menos, um uso funcional e eficaz da fotografia, sem que a tenha valorizada como objecto de arte e exposição. Arquitecto, pintor e escultor, fotografou sempre muito, e tudo, coligindo retratos e informação documental; é relevante a sua presença fotográfica impressa, com o respectivo design gráfico: “A cidade doente, várias receitas para a curar. O mal do caniço e o manual do vogal sem mestre”, manifesto em dupla página de «A Tribuna», 9-6-1963; artigos ilustrados em «Aujourd’hui: Art et Architecture», nº 37, 1962, Paris, sobre os «Mapogga» (agora, Ndebele), e «Architecture d’Aujourd’hui», 1962, Juin-Juillet, sobre a sua arquitectura. Moira Forjaz frequentara a casa-atelier da rua de Nevala desde 1961, ao tempo das pontes estabelecidas com o Ibadam Club e a revista «Black Orpheus», de Ulli Beier, na Nigéria.

Panco Guedes, Malangatana, c. 1960

Viria a ser descoberto como fotógrafo, nas mais tardias fotografias de viagem, a partir da África do Sul e Lisboa, em «Pancho Guedes nunca foi ao Japão», edição de José Luís Tavares, Lucio Magri e João Faria, ESAD, Matosinhos, 2015.

À margem desta narrativa ficou José Henriques da Silva (1919, Lisboa - 1983, Lisboa; em Nampula desde 1956). Engenheiro civil, fotógrafo activo entre 1957 e 1973, com um uso caloroso e intimista (relacional - fez em especial retratos) das imagens, junto das populações negras locais, mas sem expressão pública. Viu-se no Ar.Co, em 1983, uma selecção organizada por Joana Pereira Leite, a que se seguiu em 1998 a edição de «Pescadores Macua. Moçambique, Baía de Nacala 1957-1973», com impressões de Michel Waldmann e grafismo de Victor Palla. Com exposição no Arquivo Fotográfico de Lisboa, e também em Moçambique.

 

Jornal da Exposição. SINES

sumario

Fotografias no Estado Novo / Antes e depois de 1945

1º Um regime considerado retrógrado que teve até ao fim da 2ª Guerra uma relação moderna com a fotografia:

apropriou-se das linguagens vanguardistas (Portugal 1934); atraiu os melhores profissionais (Panorama, desde 1941, por ex.) e o meio dos amadores da arte fotográfica (os Salões do Grémio, secção da Sociedade Propaganda de Portugal).

Elmano Cunha e Costa, Firmino Marques da Costa e a Viagem Presidencial de 1938.

A Objectiva (1937...) e a polémica do "flagrante". Álvaro Colaço e A. Lacerda Nobre.

Mário Novais e Horácio Novais.

 

2º Os "desencontros" do período pós-1945.

Maria Lamas (1948-50). Adelino Lyon de Castro (1946-1953). Artur Pastor.

As Exposições Gerais (46-56), o neo-realismo e a fotografia (o Salão do Jornal do Barreiro, 1950; "ciclo do arroz, 1953).

A recusa "aristocrática" do salonismo (o "grupo de Cascais").

A abertura à informação internacional (a fotografia subjectiva de Fernando Lemos (1952); a fotografia "pura" e formalista dos grupos Câmara e 6x6 (o Salão da Cuf,1952, e Harrington Sena); a influência de Family of Man, desde 1954 (Victor Palla).

O Inquérito à Arquitectura Popular (1955-60). Etc

No Centro Intercultura, 16 de Maio

Nuno Viegas na Colecção Cachola

Certamente a lista de artistas da Colecção António Cachola está ainda "in progress", mas parece-me chocante notar-se já a falta de um pintor que o próprio colecionador quis associar especialmente à inauguração do seu Museu em Elvas: o Nuno Viegas, que pintou três grandes telas à escala dos corredores do antigo hospital, com destino à instalação inaugural: essas grandes pinturas sobre tela, que se referem ao lugar do museu enquanto hospital e à específica função deste, bem como uma série associada de trabalhos sobre papel, foram realizadas num atelier em Benfica, alugado durante um ano - e aí as pude ver logo que concluídas. Mas as obras não foram apresentadas na inauguração, de que encarregou João Pinharanda, e só algumas outras obras foram mais tarde expostos (2012).

Acho o Nuno Viegas um dos artistas mais importantes entre os surgiram ou se afirmaram nas primeiras décadas do novo século, mas o "gosto oficial", o mecanismo das exclusões institucionais, com a sua lógica clientelar, tem coartado a visibilidade da sua obra. Aposto que é uma das grandes apostas originais da colecção - que na maior parte dos nomes segue a rotina dos artistas do sistema galerístico-oficial. N.V. teve uma única mostra institucional em 2004, “A tinta envenenada”, no Centro Cultural de Cascais, e expõe regularmente, desde 2002, na galeria Arte Periférica. Não é fácil resistir ao muro de isolamento que é habitualmente levantado à volta dos artistas que se destacam da mediania que o sistema favorece, mediania formada por pequenas promessas surgidas à volta de três ou quatro nomes oficiais, envolvidos num sistema protector que eles próprios controlam, sob a tutela das "galerias líder". Acontece que a protecção dada às emergências fugazes e à mediocridade ambiente - tal como a insignificância de uma crítica oportunista - está a tornar o meio das artes visuais num terreno sem credibilidade, minado pelas suspeitas e só sustentado por tutores institucionais, de que se afastam espectadores e compradores. Os leilões, onde o segundo mercado estabelece os valores do reconhecimento das carreiras, estão a confirmar o descrédito do sistema oficial.

 

Duas pinturas de grande formato do Nuno Viegas mostradas na exposição "Génesis" do Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas (na foto instaladas no Museu): "A colisão improvável", 270 x 360cm, 2008, e "A nuvem que nos separa", 270 x 360cm, 2008.

Têm o defeito de serem a cores e não do preto e branco, conforme o regime vigente, e de não serem "minimalistas" - pelo contrário, são maximalistas, podem ser observadas como comentários do presente (em vez de serem apenas um exercício formal, ou uma obra de arte sobre a ideia de arte), são comunicativas e despertam emoções, são livres de tutelas escolares ou críticas, são formal e materialmente poderosas na sua realização pictural, são abertamente imaginativas quanto à sua temática figurativa e narrativa.

Da colecção António Cachola fazem parte as três telas adquiridas pelo coleccionador na perspectiva da inauguração do seu museu, a que acima me refiro, mais 14 desenhos dentro da mesma temática, bem como outras duas telas de grande formato adquiridas mais tarde e que integraram a exposição "Génesis" do MACE em 2012. Defendo que são obras mais poderosas e radicais do que a generalidade das peças da colecção. Suspeito que é por isso que se exerce alguma censura - ou será distração?

Por um Observatório Civil das Políticas Culturais

 

Parece ser oportuno criar um Observatório Civil das Políticas Culturais (talvez começando no FB como grupo fechado) para seguir a evolução de casos que recentemente foram objecto de queixas ou denúncias logo apoiadas por muitos leitores e intervenientes, e apontar outros casos que surjam e vão sendo comunicados. Não faltam temas nas áreas do Ministério da Cultura e em especial na Câmara de Lisboa, ou no seu braço empresarial, a EGEAC

1. o caso do Museu do Chiado, que até Outubro não expõe uma síntese da colecção histórica no seu pouco espaço disponível, agora muito reduzido por motivo de obras, e que aí apresenta o que é, sem margem para dúvidas, uma mera exposição de galeria privada (este caso mereceu já o protesto público da galerista Cristina Guerra por ocasião da apresentação da Arco/Lisboa : https://www.publico.pt/…/arcolisboa-uma-feira-de-arte-atent…) Ver  (http://www.museuartecontemporanea.pt/pt/programacao) ‪#‎MuseudoChiadoMC‬

2. O caso da direcção das galerias da EGEAC
(http://www.egeac.pt/egeac/ ), que está atribuída a uma pessoa que dispõe também de uma galeria privada - o próprio João Mourão apresenta-se assim no Facebook: "Trabalha em Galerias Municipais de Lisboa e Kunsthalle Lissabon" (ver https://www.facebook.com/Kunsthalle-Lissabon-116922748416/… ). O facto de se servir da relação de apoio da EGEAC à Feira de Arte Arco/Lisboa para aí apresentar a sua galeria Kunsthalle Lissabon é apenas um excesso da falta de vergonha que lhe é consentido pela tutela, a CML  ( http://www.egeac.pt/evento/arco-da-nova-arte-contemporanea/ ) ‪#‎GaleriasJoaoMourao‬ ‪#‎GaleriasEGEAC‬ ‪#‎GaleriasCML‬

3. O caso da passagem do chamado "Projecto Africa.Cont" para a EGEAC , sem que essa designação, usada desde 2008, corresponda a uma qualquer entidade identificada na estrutura da CML, com finalidades e responsáveis conhecidos. (Ver Proposta 105/CM/2016, alínea b) - Adenda ao contrato-programa celebrado com a EGEAC em dezembro de 2015: http://www.am-lisboa.pt/301000/1/004693,000343/index.htm
Debatida e votada: 104ª reunião, 26 de Abril 2016
Resultado da Votação: Aprovada por Maioria com a seguinte votação: Favor: PS/ PNPN/ 6 IND – Contra: PCP/ CDS-PP/ PEV/ MPT - Abstenção: PSD/ BE/ PAN)  Ver ‪http://www.africacont.org/ - numa anterior página do Facebook lê-se: "Infelizmente, este conteúdo não está disponível neste momento" #‎casoAfricaCont‬

4. O caso do programa «LISBOA COMO FUTURO - CULTURA» iniciado em 19 Março 2016 pela Vereação de Cultura da CML, entregue a um centro/empresa Dinamia, organizado de uma forma fechada e por convites e que, no seu formato organizativo, impede todo o debate aberto e democrático sobre o funcionamento das estruturas camarárias e sobre o que possa ser o respectivo futuro. Na sessão inaugural interrompi a ordem dos trabalhos para ler parte de uma declaração sobre o programa em questão e sobre diversos casos contestáveis da política cultural camarária, documento que entreguei ao presidente Fernando Medina e à vereadora Catarina Vaz Pinto: Contribuição (ver também: www.cm-lisboa....debate-estrategias-para-a-cultura)  #cmlculturadinamia

5. O caso da acumulação de funcões do sub-director geral do Património Cultural David Santos como comissário geral da Bienal de Fotografia de Vila Franca de Xira (lugar que ocupou antes daquela nomeação e deveria ter abandonado por manifesta incompatibilidade). ‪#‎DavidVFXSantosDGPC‬

NOTA: É necessário distinguir a observação crítica das políticas culturais do MC e DGPC, e da CML e EGEAC, das eventuais queixas pessoais de quem se sente excluído ou marginalizado. Os protestos e ressentimentos individuais, por mais legítimos que sejam, devem ter outros canais de comunicação.

A queixa de Cristina Guerra tem solução fácil no Museu do Chiado

Continuando a reflectir sobre as declarações de Cristina Guerra, membro destacado do comité organizador da feira Arco-Lisboa (ver notas anteriores), a respeito da inexistência de museus que dêem a conhecer a arte portuguesa do século XX, nomeadamente aos visitantes estrangeiros ("Nós não temos um museu de arte contemporânea a funcionar como deve ser – a arte contemporânea que se faz hoje cá está confinada às galerias" - Jornal Público, Cristina Guerra/ArcoLisboa), parece-me que é da máxima oportunidade e urgência que os responsáveis pela área (desde o novo ministro da Cultura, Luis Castro Mendes , ao sub-director geral do Património Cultural, David Santos, por sinal ex-director do Museu do Chiado), tomem imediatas medidas no sentido de dar satisfação a uma queixa legítima e bem fundamentada, com efeito fácil no único museu nacional que deles directamente depende, o Museu do Chiado.

Uma decisão imediata é tanto mais acertada quanto a exposição que ocupa o espaço disponível do mesmo museu, na imponente Sala dos Fornos e na escadaria de acesso, é uma mostra individual de um artista representado pela Galeria Cristina Guerra (e também pela Galeria Pedro Oliveira no Porto), a qual contou, aliás, com a sua colaboração directa. Está assim obviamente assegurada a concordância com essa medida e com a respectiva fundamentação, graças à autoridade profissional que se reconhece a Cristina Guerra.

 

Com efeito, é inadmissível que, por causa dos trabalhos actualmente em curso no Museu, toda a sua colecção histórica (séc. XIX e XX, até aos anos 60) esteja actualmente invisível - até Outubro, segundo o calendário divulgado. Em vez de Columbanos, Malhoas e Almadas, os visitantes têm ao seu dispor Cepedas ( http://www.museuartecontemporanea.pt/pt/programacao/1784 ), o que é manifestamente menos satisfatório.

A feira abre no dia 26, na Cordoaria Nacional, e há assim tempo bastante para resolver a absurda situação denunciada, mediante a escolha de umas duas dezenas de obras que se considerem mais representativas da colecção histórica e da arte portuguesa. Note-se que a actual directora, Aida Rechena, entrou em funções há muito pouco tempo e ainda não teve oportunidade de assumir uma programação própria. A actividade regular do Museu do Chiado tem sido sacrificado à apresentação de exposições individuais de jovens artistas que teriam o seu lugar natural nas galerias comerciais de arte contemporânea (e que provêm do restrito círculo das “galerias líder”), pelo que a situação criticada por Cristina Guerra deve viabilizar uma nova orientação mais consensual, assente na presença da colecção histórica e em mostras temporárias complementares.

 

O Museu do Chiado ao serviço de uma galeria

“Nós não temos um museu de arte contemporânea a funcionar como deve ser – a arte contemporânea que se faz hoje cá está confinada às galerias, e a que se fez passa por exposições pontuais. Se eu quiser dizer a um estrangeiro que visita Lisboa onde é que pode ir ver arte portuguesa do século XX, tenho de consultar o programa da Gulbenkian para ver o que é que lá está hoje...” É uma “falha gravíssima”, sublinha. “Estamos atrasados, continuamos atrasados. As colecções têm de estar à vista.” Nem um histórico como Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso escapa a este diagnóstico de invisibilidade: “Quando o Amadeo vier de Paris [a obra do pintor está exposta no Grand Palais até 18 de Julho], vai para a Gulbenkian e depois? Onde é que fica? Quando é que o vemos outra vez?”

Quem disse? Quando? Surpresa! foi a Cristina Guerra.

"Urroz < é o director da Arco Madrid e Arco Lisboa> acredita que um museu para a arte contemporânea portuguesa – nem o director da feira nem Cristina Guerra parecem dispostos a olhar para o Museu do Chiado nem para o de Serralves como tal – pode contribuir para uma dinamização, mas defende que, para haver mudanças, é preciso “uma atitude global”, que passa por apoios continuados aos artistas e aos galeristas."" - é o parágrafo seguinte da notícia do Público sobre a "feira-boutique".

 É provável que a líder da galeria líder (Cristina Guerra) diga com facilidade uma coisa e o seu contrário - é versátil e hiperactiva. Ela aponta o caminho - olha para o que eu digo, não olhes para o que eu façohttps://www.publico.pt/.../arcolisboa-uma-feira-de-arte...

Ora, o que vemos agora no Museu do Chiado? Em vez de uma selecção emblemática da colecção histórica (já que o espaço principal está em obras para o ligar ao ex-Governo Civil, onde se mostra em especial Colecção Pernes - Colecção SEC atribuída a Serralves, anos 60-80. Fotografias de André Cepeda.http://www.museuartecontemporanea.pt/pt/programacao/1784

ANDRÉ CEPEDA. DEPOIS "A exposição reúne uma série de fotografias recentes, na sua maioria inéditas, realizadas no Porto, a cidade…"

 

Acontece que se trata, sem qualquer dúvida, de uma exposição de galeria (nada a distingue de uma exp. de galeria), apresentada na grande Sala dos Fornos do Museu do Chiado, e acontece também que o artista é representado agora precisamente pelas Galerias Cristina Guerra e Pedro Oliveira, e que a mostra contou com a colaboração de ambas as galerias - suspeito até que todo o projecto (incluindo o comissariado de Sérgio Mah) foi custeado pelas galerias. Suspeito, não sei nada.

 

 #

 

A nova directora do Museu do Chiado - Aida Rechena, escolhida por concurso - está no início das suas funções. Espero que abra um novo capítulo numa casa dificil, que tem estado ao dispor de directores (Pedro Lapa e mais tarde o seu discípulo David Santos, por concurso) e dos respectivos conservadores-curadores (...), em vez de cumprir cabalmente o seu papel.

 

Voltámos apenas a ter uma montagem da colecção durante a direcção de Paulo Henriques, num período em que o SEC Elísio Summavielle impôs o mesmo critério a outros museus, como o MNE. Paulo Henriques não quis continuar no cargo, e fiquei sempre com a ideia que a Helena Barranha, outra anterior e efémera directora, vencedora em concurso sobre o referido Pedro Lapa, a qual começara por fazer uma muito interessante e original montagem do acervo, teve a vida dificultada pela pressão ambiente.

 

Temos aqui duas questões a considerar, para além da posição bipolar da Cristina Guerra: 1. o Museu do Chiado não mostra a colecção histórica (séc. XIX-XX), e apenas exibe os anos 60-80 no edifício anexo. Até Outubro não há Columbanos nem Malhoas, há Cepedas. Como o edifício está em obras, a Sala dos Fornos devia acolher uma escolha de highlights ou obras-primas (ideias recusadas pelo establishment ideológico que nos tutela). Não é isso que acontece se não houver uma intervenção de força de quem de direito.

A segunda questão é que a exposição do André Cepeda não se distingue de uma habitual exp. de galeria e nada justifica que ocupe lugar num museu (não é antológica, não é uma nova criação que responda a uma encomenda ou desafio do Museu, não faz parte de um programa conjunto com outros artistas). Nada a justifica. Para além disso não é uma boa exposição.

Este é mesmo, por todas as razões, um caso exemplar de mau uso do museu. E é também uma prova que a passagem prematura pelo museu não serve o crescimento das obras dos jovens artistas. Induz a facilidade, a perda da ambição e da auto-avaliação. A seguir ao museu, o que acontece aos artistas ditos emergentes que por perversas razões são levados cedo demais ao museu?

Moura: um Outsider-Pop

José Mendes Alves, "Os 6 amigos que fourom passar uma paródia no Guadiana" (zona da barca do Ameixial). 1978; colagem e pintura sobre madeira.

Um artista espontâneo de Moura, já falecido, que vendia os seus trabalhos pelas tabernas mais populares.

 

Apresentado na exp. "Água", Museu Municipal de Moura, curadoria e textos de Santiago Macias (presidente da Câmara e também autor da 2ª fotografia). Avenida da Salúquia 34

José Luís Tinoco

Arquitecto, músico e autor de canções de sucesso, pintor, etc - mostrado no Pavilhão Preto do Museu da Cidade, ou de Lisboa, pela Divisão de Galerias da EGEAC . "Loop" (titulo geral e nome de uma longa e curiosa pintura que passa em "loop"). De 1 de Abril até 22 Maio.

Antologia informal de uma obra começada há muito (n. 1932, Leiria), mas aparentemente acelerada nos últimos anos (1990/2011). Não é uma pintura amável ou fácil (menos ainda facilitada), mas sim uma pintura que se vai ensaiando - desde 1953, a obra mais antiga, e ao longo do tempo -, com saber e talento, através de géneros específicos e entre a figura e a "abstracção", sempre num diálogo respeitoso com muitos pintores portugueses (Resende, R. Ribeiro, Querubim, Dourdil - depois Menez, Sena) e estrangeiros (em especial Gorky, em muitos trabalhos em papel, e Millares, ambos directamente referidos e o 1º retratado; e também Rauschenberg, nas suas incorporações de fotografias, e talvez Diebenkorn). Não se impõe uma marca definitiva, mas o trânsito é agradável de seguir, marcando sucessivos tempos de experimentação e de indecisão entre inspirações. Sem catálogo.

1º Paráfrase de Rubens, 1998/2011; e no final, Jardim, 1990.

http://www.egeac.pt/

África.Cont em “projecto” de 2008 a 2016

 

Numa altura em que a Câmara de Lisboa se propõe introduzir o "Projecto África.Cont" na EGEAC - Empresa de Gestão de Equipamentos e Animação Cultural de Lisboa, mediante aprovação de uma proposta na Assembleia Municipal (proposta adiada em 19 de Abril), convém recordar uma informação de 23 de Dezembro de 2008:

 

"O Centro <Centro Cultural de Arte Africana em Lisboa, designação que à data coexistia com África.Cont> irá tornar-se uma fundação no início de 2009, por forma a que instituição tenha autonomia em relação ao ciclo político e não possa ficar dependente das eleições e da mudança de governo. O modelo de Fundação que nós adoptámos é muito semelhante ao da Fundação de Serralves, e no seu organigrama de funções existe a figura de director artístico e cientifico, que é o lugar que irei ocupar. Serei o responsável pela programação e pela organização de exposições e dos eventos. "

 

Quem então falava era o putativo ocupante de tal lugar, José António Fernandes Dias, antropólogo e então professor na Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa, coordenador do Mestrado em Estudos Curatoriais e também consultor da Gulbenkian no Serviço de Belas Artes para temas “multiculturais”. A sua fala faz parte de uma muito extensa entrevista publicada no site/magazine ArteCapital ENTREVISTA

 

Nunca houve Fundação África.Cont e o Centro, "com inauguração da sua sede marcada para 2012", dizia-se, não saiu do papel. A obra anunciada teria um custo estimado de 15 milhões de euros e o anteprojecto encomendado ao arquitecto anglo-tanzaniano David Adjaye custou 65 mil euros, suportados pela Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (sujeito a devolução em caso da sua não edificação).

Em Janeiro de 2011, o Executivo da CML procurou integrar o projecto África.Cont no âmbito da Frente Tejo SA, mas o desígnio não chegou à Assembleia Municipal. A autarquia entraria na estrutura accionista da Frente Tejo S.A. (já então ameaçada de extinção), com uma participação de 49 por cento no capital social, sendo 2,5 milhões de euros em dinheiro e outro tanto em espécie correspondente ao valor dos edifícios propriedade do município atribuídos ao projecto África.Cont. Na reunião de Câmara a proposta aprovada recebeu então os votos contra do PCP, do CDS e de Vítor Gonçalves (PSD), e as abstenções dos restantes vereadores do PSD e dos vereadores do movimento Cidadãos por Lisboa (eleitos na lista do PS).

Por essa altura, o Público (J. M. Cerejo, 10-01-2011) dizia em título "Africa.cont ainda não saiu do papel e já custou 570 mil euros".

Mas o projecto da sede a instalar entre a Rua das Janelas Verdes e a 24 de Julho (uma ambiciosa operação de requalificação urbana que submergiu a lógica da divulgação da cultura africana e da cooperação lusófona e internacional) já estava abandonado em Junho de 2012, quando a CML de António Costa tentou vender o Palacete Pombal, ainda ocupado por serviços do Instituto do Património, a uma entidade do Quatar (o que implicaria recobrir os seus painéis figurativos em azulejo!).

Entretanto uma entidade sobrevivente que manteve a designação África.Cont continuou a promover ou apoiar exposições e algumas outras escassas actividades (ver programas desde 2010 em www.africacont.org . Depois de ter existido sob a tutela directa do Presidente da CML passou para alçada e o orçamento da Vereadora da Cultura.

 

Não existe qualquer informação oficial sobre a estrutura e o funcionamento do que continua a ser designado como África.Cont. A proposta de passagem do "Projecto" para a EGEAC surgiu sem qualquer acréscimo de informação. Supõem-se que Fernandes Dias continua a ser o África.Cont. #casoAfricaCont

 

 

 

PROPOSTA À Assembleia Municipal

"Projecto Africa.Cont" - a implicação forçada da Gulbenkian em 2008/09

Nunca divulguei este documento, de 19-01-2009, embora não tenha havido pedido de reserva. ‪
Rui Vilar então presidente da FG, distancia-se do África.Cont, e distancia a FG, afirmando que "ficou estabelecido no contrato que assinámos com a Câmara que a não realização daquele equipamento cultural no prazo previsto (5 anos) determina a resolução do contrato e implica a restituição à Fundação das quantias entregues". Restituiram? #‎casoAfricaCont‬

Em vez de transferir o "Projecto Africa.Cont" para a EGEAC Cultura Em Lisboa, a actual CML deveria elaborar um livro branco sobre uma história que desde 2008 condicionou e fez estagnar a colaboração de Lisboa, e do governo de Portugal, com os artistas dos países africanos de expressão portuguesa, coisa que não interessava nada ao prof. J.A. Fernandes Dias e associados comparatistas (Arte África, Fac. de Letras de Lisboa e outros ditos pós-colonialistas - colonialistas de facto). Há quem goste de passear por África e se tenha perdido nas selvas (alarme na CML, diziam-me) mas opte pelo comércio com os artistas das diásporas, como provou a exp. "Looking bouth Ways" (2004, FG) preferida à oportunidade de mostrar o "Africa Remix".

O "projecto" tem uma história confusa, mas cresceu com os delírios megalómanos de Sócrates e com o desejo de Costa de encontrar solução para a Av. 24 de Julho e as Tercenas do Marquês, para onde havia uma antigo projecto utópico de abrir uma praça no lugar do edifício da DGAP - que em vez de ser demolido tem agora algum outro mafioso destino. O Sócrates mandou associar ao "projecto", além do MNE, onde nasceu com o Luís Amado (ministro ex-galerista africanista e colecionador com a Bozart), o MC e o Min. da Economia, mais as diversas fundações (Serralves, Berardo, CCB, etc) e empresas com negócios em África.

A fundação de fundações nunca avançou e não teve a concordância das diversas entidades "convidadas" a aderir, até porque não tiveram acréscimos orçamentais para cobrirem esse desígnio - por sinal, pude ler o "Projecto" fundacional no gabinete do ministro José António Pinto Ribeiro, totalmente em desacordo com a ordem recebida (estava eu a travar o projecto de fazer Museu da Língua no MAP). Todos os outros envolvidos (à força) que contactei - João Fernandes, Joe Berardo, etc, estavam igualmente contra.

É óbvio que o presidente Costa devia ter encerrado então a aventura, mas em vez disso acolheu o Fernandes Dias na roda do seu gabinete, tanto mais que perdera o lugar de consultor na FG (enquanto consultor teve a oportunidade de aconselhar o projecto que ele próprio apresentara - em guerra aberta, já, com o outro consultor de R. Vilar para estas questões, o António Pinto Ribeiro). É provável que a questão urbanística - ligar as Janelas Verdes à 24 de Julho através das galerias e telhados das Tercenas - tenha sido sempre o seu objectivo principal. Levado a ver as vistas sobre o Tejo desde o Palacete Pombal, numa madrugada de jogging, o Socrates disse: faça-se! Sem olhar a meios. Tudo isto é uma história pelo menos absurda e certamente criminosa.

04-04-2016

Ainda sobre o Africa.Cont. ‪
Em 2004, quando o António Pinto Ribeiro organizou a presença de artistas e galerias africanas na feira Arte Lisboa (essa podia ser uma direcção com sentido estratégico), veio de Moçambique o Muvart, movimento de jovens artistas.

Em 2008 quiseram voltar e procuraram apoios. Tentei a CML, que patrocinava a feira, e dirigi-me ao Pedro Portugal, que era então assessor cultural do presidente Costa (por mais que isso nos surpreendesse - a situação durou alguns anos e até passou depois a depender administrativamente do gabinete da vereadora C.V.P.). Respondeu-me ele que eu e eles só conseguiríamos alguma coisa se conseguisse fazer aceitar a ideia pelo África.Cont do Fernando Dias.

Não valia a pena tentar porque a ideia das continuidades é recusada por quem manda e pq Pinto Ribeiro e Fernandes Dias eram reconhecidos inimigos a ocupar os mesmos terrenos. Consegui então que o Rui Vilar avançasse com alguns dinheiros da Gulbenkian (para viagens?) e eu apoiei outras despesas (mais alguém?).

O Africa.Cont era uma ideia megalómana e "elitista" (colonialista, de facto), a quem essas coisas africanas menores não interessavam. Aconteceu depois que a representação foi muito fraca e economicamente errada - em especial as fotos do Ricardo Rangel não assinadas que não podiam ter compradores.

Muvart Arte Lisboa 2008

Bibliografia

1. África.cont, um centro cultural africano na Av. 24 de Julho, Alexandra Prado Coelho , 06/01/2009 Público 2009

 

2. Africa.cont ainda não saiu do papel e já custou 570 mil eurosPor José António Cerejo-Público(Sócrates chamou-lhe "prioridade nacional", Costa fez dele uma bandeira, mas não há dinheiro. Em viagens já foram gastos 70 mil euros)  Publico / Cidadania 2011

 

3. Uma notícia de 28-06-2012 sobre o "Projecto Africa.Cont" que agora aparece proposto à EGEAC - ArteCapital e jornal I: 

AFRICA.CONT. - CÂMARA DE LISBOA ABANDONA PROJECTO QUE CUSTOU MEIO MILHÃO

2012 ArteCapital / I