Women And Photography In Africa

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

Women by Women: 50 Years of Women's Photography in South Africa showcases photographs of and by South African women. Editors Robin Comley, George Hallett and Neo Ntsoma made their selection from a range of what 75 photographers considered their most significant images of women. A rich and varied picture of women's lives emerges from the diversity in both content and types of photographic practice, including press photography, social documentary, fashion, lifestyle, sport, art and conceptual photography in chemical and digital format. The photographers include well-known names, established professionals, emerging talent and rising stars. In the captions and essays written by the photographers, we learn of their experiences in the field and the passions that drive them, and we hear their individual voices - at times enigmatic, intimate, passionate, incisive, activist. The women photographed in this collection comprise our national heroes, sport and fashion icons and strugglistas, as well as unnamed women from all walks of life: they are our mothers, sisters, aunts and daughters. Commissioned by the Ministry of Arts and Culture to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Women's March, Women by Women is the first publication to record and promote the positive contribution made by women to the art of photography in this country.

Although photography is well along in its second century, until now virtually nothing has been written about the work of black women photographers. In this historical survey Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe presents an impressive selection of photographs, commenting on the careers of the professional and fine arts photographers, from the pioneers to the women of today. The book is divided into six parts, each "Overview" describing the triumphs and struggles of various photographers of different eras. The careful attention to detail is illustrated in the photographs of early twentieth-century photographer Elnora Teal and in the work of Eslanda (Mrs. Paul) Robeson from her travels throughout the world. It also offers glimpses of black Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s and of New York's Harlem during the same period. The photographs of contemporary photographers, among them Coreen Simpson, with her flamboyant style, and Fern Logan, with her strong eye, demonstrate the talent and style black women continue to show in the field of photography. This collection of photographs - meaningful, striking, handsome - will give pleasure to photo buffs, historians, and to anyone fascinated by this neglected but vital part of history.

Beautifully illustrated, Portrait Photography in Africa offers new interpretations of the cultural and historical roles of photography in Africa. Twelve leading scholars look at early photographs, important photographers' studios, the uses of portraiture in the 19th century, and the current passion for portraits in Africa. They review a variety of topics, including what defines a common culture of photography, the social and political implications of changing technologies for portraiture, and the lasting effects of culture on the idea of the person depicted in the photographic image.

A book of photographs that explores and documents the realities of the lives of women from Africa south of the Sahara. Divided into seven sections, (Motherhood, Home, Work, Markets, Celebration, Elderhood and Beauty and Elegance), the reader is treated to a profusion of 175 outstanding and magnificent images comple-mented by an anthology of creative, inspiring and thoughtful poems by 15 contributors that capture the essence, humanity and wholeness and whole-someness of African women.

Gives an ethnographic account of the complexities of the use of photography in Africa, both historically and in contemporary practice. This collection of studies in African photography examines, through a series of empirically rich historical and ethnographic cases, the variety of ways in which photographs are produced, circulated, and engaged across a range of social contexts. In so doing, it elucidates the distinctive characteristics of African photographic practices and cultures, vis-à-vis those of other forms of 'vernacular photography' worldwide. In addition, these studies develop areflexive turn, examining the history of academic engagement with these African photographic cultures, and reflecting on the distinctive qualities of the ethnographic method as a means for studying such phenomena. The volumecritically engages current debates in African photography and visual anthropology. First, it extends our understanding of the variety of ways in which both colonial and post-colonial states in Africa have used photography as a means for establishing, and projecting, their authority. Second, it moves discussion of African photography away from an exclusive focus on the role of the 'the studio' and looks at the circulations through which the studios' products - the photographs themselves - later pass as artefacts of material culture. Last, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between photography and ethnographic research methods, as these have been employed in Africa. RICHARD VOKES is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and author of Ghosts of Kanungu

UN pub. Photographic account of the living conditions and working conditions of black women and woman workers under Apartheid in South Africa R - contrasts the way of life between coloured and White Africans, family situations, re-human settlement, etc.; traces their historical political opposition and political participation in mass campaign political movements since 1913 as well as current trends in the struggle against Apartheid. Photographs and references.

This book offers a range of perspectives on photography in Africa, bringing research on South African photography into conversation with work from several other places on the continent, including Angola, the DRC, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. The collection engages with the history of photography and its role in colonial regulatory regimes; with social documentary photography and practices of self-representation; and with the place of portraits in the production of subjectivities, as well as contemporary and experimental photographic practices. Through detailed analyses of particular photographs and photographic archives, the chapters in this book trace how photographs have been used both to affirm colonial worldviews and to disrupt and critique such forms of power. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Dynamics.