Text by Michelle Loukidis

Where does one start with the enormous task of compiling an article on African photography, when there is a deep richness of diversity, culture, history and politics within each of its 54 countries. Africa has always been a contested place, dealing with the ravages of colonialism and imperialism, which deeply impacted the way in which communities were represented and seen. Representation, in all of its manifestations, was not something afforded Africans, it had to be fought for. Photography arrived on the African continent very soon after its invention in 1822, and was used vastly to document its countries and people through a very distorted lens.The tradition of classificatory and ethnographic documentation of the peoples under colonial rule is well known. The question of who is telling whose histories is one of consequence.

Despite this nuanced history, West and Central African photographers such as Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, Jean Depara, Sanlé Sory, Mama Casset and James Barnor embraced the medium with their distinctive black and white photographs. Marking this period of independence, the popularity of photography was cemented by its accessibility and its ability to memorialise. The resurgence of photography in the mid 1980’s serves as an insightful view of the burgeoning culture at that time. At the bottom of the continent, dealing with the realities of apartheid and oppression, South African photographers like David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole and Santu Mofokeng documented a polarised reality and were central in shaping the representation of oppression and resistance during apartheid.

Throughout the continent postcolonial photography has emerged as a dynamic and compelling art form, subjectively embracing their own narratives and the myriad of emerging voices, a new generation of visual artists are redefining Africa’s role in the global art discourse. Through platforms eg ; Addis Photo, Lagos Photo, Lubumbashi Biennale and the Bamako Encounters Biennial, a wider audience has been reached and emerging artists given the opportunity to present their talents. In 2022, Ethiopian visual artist Aida Muluneh launched the African Foto Fair aimed at building a global community promoting and supporting the further development of photography from Africa. This article looks at a small selection of these artists working within themes of identity, representation, histories, counter-histories, traditions and imagined futures.

Merging photography, theatre and literature, South African visual artist Lebohang Kganye, explores themes of personal history and ancestry, against the backdrop of South Africa and apartheid. Incorporating both memory and fantasy into her work, she proposes that photography does not represent an ultimate truth, but rather a constructed memory or history.

In Search For Memory (2020), she creates moments she hasn't personally experienced drawing inspiration from the Malawian writer Muthi Nhlema’s science fiction novella TA O’REVA, where he suggests an alternate history travelling between realities in a post apocalyptic South Africa. In, The Stranger stood before what was to him a monstrosity (2020), the protagonist stands on the edge of an unsightly Johannesburg, which has been taken apart and imperfectly spliced back together into a dystopian landscape. The scene is uncanny, recognisable, but the illusion of another world is created, opening questions about the fabricated nature of history and memory . Using a variety of photographs, from personal archives and images from trips to old industrial areas around Johannesburg and Pretoria, Kganye constructs the scenes using cardboard cutouts and places them into white boxes. These delicate scenes are then photographed. The second iteration of In Search for Memory is presented in the form of a large-scale mechanised pop-up book installation titled Staging Memories (2022). The contrived nature of history and memory reinforced by the creation and construction of these scenes.