Unknown Artist (Senegal) Seated Man, 1930s-1940s, Gelatin silver print, 5 x 3 in (13.3 x 8.3 cm)
Visual Resource Archive, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
When photography arrived on the continent of Africa in the early 1840s, and was immediately adopted by local communities and adapted to a wide array of strikingly distinctive visual cultures. The portrait photograph first began to flourish in the 1880s, as West-African, African-American, and European photographers had traveled along the Atlantic coast of the continent and founded temporary and permanent studios catering to the local elite.
The art of the portrait has long been a favorite genre of the form, appealing to both subjects and viewers alike for the way in which it allow one to look and be looked upon in the most private of terms. To sit for a portrait is to establish one’s worth, for it commands money to produce. It also communicates one’s status in terms of presentation, pose, and positioning. To sit for a portrait is to center oneself in another person’s gaze. It is here that subject becomes object, to be perceived at length through the act of looking, an experience of pure sensation itself.
Malick Sidibé (Malian, b. 1936) Self-Portrait, 1956 Gelatin silver print in original frame of reverse-painted glass, tape, cardboard, string Gift of Jack Shainman and Claude Simard, 2014 (2014.638)
The portrait photograph can provoke, charm, inform, and even delight. It offers a way in which we can look upon each other for as long as we may like. In celebration of this image, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, presents In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa, a survey of nearly 80 photographs taken between the 1870s and the 1970s, on view now through January 3, 2016.
Featuring photographs, postcards, real photo postcards and original negatives taken both inside and outside the studio by amateur and professional photographers active from Senegal to Cameroon, and from Mali to Gabon, the exhibition includes works by renowned artists, such as Seydou Keïta, J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, and Samuel Fosso, and lesser-known practitioners who worked at the beginning of the century, including George A. G. Lutterodt, the Lisk-Carew Brothers, and Alex A. Acolatse. Many of these works are being shown for the first time.
George A. G. and Albert George Lutterodt (Ghanaian, active from 1876) Five Men, ca. 1880-5 Albumen silver print from glass negative 6 x 4 in (15.2 x 1.5 cm) Purchase, Ross Family Fund Gift, 1999 (1999.184.1)
From the 1950s to the 1970s, photography began to flourish, as the continent began the painstaking transition from the colonialism to nationhood. A middle-class was born with a taste nourished by foreign films and magazines. Through these changing conditions of production, patronage, and reception, photography became one of the most prolific and popular media. It allowed artists and patrons alike to express their articulation of what modernity looked like—one that was constantly re-invented.
In and Out of the Studio shows the possibilities of the medium as it developed over the century through revealing self-portraits, staged images against painted backdrops or open landscapes, and casual snapshots of leisurely times. It shows us Africa through the continent’s own eyes. The exhibition reveals to us the significance of the photograph in the developing sense of self, as held by both the subject and the viewer alike. We come to see how personhood it presented, and how it makes us feel, as we gaze upon those who had the ability and means to create these works. Could they know that they might appear one day at The Met? Something in the spirit of these works resoundingly says yes.
In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa is on view now through January 3, 2016.
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.
