Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Description

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 Hela Ammar, Fatoumata Diabate, 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.

Darren Newbury is Professor of Photographic History and Director of Postgraduate Studies (Arts and Humanities) at the University of Brighton. He is the author of Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (2009) and People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited. Photographs by Bryan Heseltine (2013); and co-editor of The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies (2015) with Christopher Morton, and a Special Issue of Visual Studies on 'Photography and African Futures' (2017) with Richard Vokes. He was editor of the international journal Visual Studies from 2003 to 2015, and has curated exhibitions at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and District Six Museum, Cape Town.Lorena Rizzo is an associate researcher and lecturer in the Center for African Studies at the University of Basel (Switzerland). She has widely published on Namibian and South African visual and gender history. She is currently finalizing a book entitled Shades of Empire. Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa (forthcoming Routledge). Kylie Thomas is a Research Associate at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice, University of the Free State, South Africa and currently holds a European Institutes for Advanced Study Junior Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria. She is the author of Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality after Apartheid (Bucknell University Press & Wits University Press, 2014) and co-editor, with Louise Green, of Photography in and out of Africa: Iterations with Difference (Routledge, 2016).

'From the early committed generation of African female studio and press photographers to the contemporary generation of artists and curators, this long-overdue book is a stimulating invitation to further investigation into the rich and unique contributions of African women to the field of photography, and brings new perspectives to research.' Erika Nimis, Department of Art History, Universite du Quebec a Montreal