Photo: Mali. By Jerome Delay, LagosPhoto Festival.
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She continues, “It turns out, of course, that photographs do lie, as that was an obviously doctored shot. But the lying can be less dramatic: we all have photos of ourselves where we look nothing like what we see in the mirror, where our vanity tells us, the camera lied. And yet, photography is really about truth, of many shades and layers of truth; I have lately come to think of photography as a repository of truth.”
Muscelemn. Photo by Leance Raphael Agbodjelou, LagosPhoto Festival
Africa Under the Prism is a treasure trove of truth, of ideas, impressions, inspiration, and understanding woven into one volume. The first survey of Africa’s contemporary photography scene in Nigeria, as presented by the LagosPhoto Festival, the book is a tremendous compendium of stories and moments. The book is organized into five chapters, presenting each year of the festival, from 2010–2014, exploring a variety of themes.
As LagosPhoto Festival Director & Founder Azu Newgbogu writes in the book’s introduction, “Africa has a perverted image in history, rooted by poisonous epistemic foundations and perpetuated by contemporary culture with film and photography as the in-your-face-culprits. The others: literature, music, fashion, and materials culture are subtler but just as pernicious. One of our more condensed goals was to challenge the foundations of these stereotypes nurtured into one ballistic word: Afro-pessimism. The concept of the noble savage, the general dystopian outlooks, and the consistent overrepresentation of the four Ds—disease, death, destitution, and displacement—in international media coverage of African is self-perpetuating and vapid…. Our antidote was to seek out more intelligent, nuanced, create, and well-thought-out, long term projects produced by artists and photographers from every part of the globe who represented what we felt was the diversity of African sensibilities.”
This is what hatred did. Photo by Cristina de Middel, LagosPhoto Festival
And indeed the sensibilities are as diverse as the continent from which they spring, revealing a global diaspora in glorious four color and black and white works. We see Africa through its own eyes, that of insiders reflecting on what exists. It is a refreshing, revitalizing image that explores the complex intricacy of a continent whose history dates back to the beginnings of mankind. Africa Under the Prism is a love letter that is honest, appraising, and exceptional, speaking in local dialects and regional patois. The references are their own; this is not the projection of Western narratives but rather Africa telling its own.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
