Robert Goldwater Library blog

Rare Africa Photos Go Online, Open New Options for Africa Research

From a press release issued by Northwestern University

EVANSTON, Ill. --- This week -- for the first time ever -- a searchable collection of thousands of rare photographs chronicling Europe's colonization of East Africa becomes available to anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world, thanks to the efforts of staff at Northwestern University Library.

Turkana. Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston. Object 19-23-1. 29 June, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2166.DL/inu-wint-19-23-1.

The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960 began attracting the interest of Africa scholars and others in 2002 when it was acquired by Northwestern's Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. The library officially launches the online collection today (June 25).

"The 7,000-plus photographs in this extraordinary collection document the changing relationships among Africans and between Africans and Europeans during 100 years of dramatic historic change," says Herskovits Library curator David Easterbrook.

They include formal and informal portraits of Africans and their colonizers, photos of slaves and slave traders, and images depicting the building of railroads and urban areas and of traditional African life.

They represent the work of explorers, colonial officials, settlers, missionaries, military officers, travelers and early commercial photographers.

Visitors to the site can search for photographs by subject or browse them in a way that replicates how British collector Winterton organized the collection into 65 albums, scrapbooks and boxes. A "browsing feature" developed by Northwestern University Library technology specialists, for example, reproduces the experience of flipping through a photo album's pages.

Jonathan Glassman, a Northwestern associate professor of history in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and specialist in 19th- and 20th- century East Africa and comparative race and slavery, says the collection's special value lies in its unusual subject matter.

"The most familiar photographs from this era tend to dwell on what photographers considered East Africa's glamorous aspects -- its spectacular wildlife, landscapes, settler life or the occasional posed portrait of an African sultan or Maasai warrior," he says.

 "What stands out about the collection is the large number of items that document prosaic matters -- matters that are precisely the most difficult for the student of African history to get a handle on," adds Glassman.

Because the images are tagged with extensive metadata, they can be searched by date or keywords. A school group viewing the site in its pilot stage, for example, asked Easterbrook to see if the collection included any photos relating to President Obama's ancestry. The result: 31 photos of people and places were found.

According to Easterbrook, photos going back as far as the 1860s are extremely rare in the history of photography in Africa, and opportunities to see and study them are rarer still. The creation of the digital Winterton site changes that.

One of its oldest photographs depicts a Zanzibar slave market circa 1860. Although faded and in poor condition, the photo can be viewed online in detail. It is one of many images in the collection relating to slavery and the slave trade.

Among them is a portrait of Tippu Tip, a businessman, plantation owner and advisor to the Sultans of Zanzibar. Of African and Arab descent, he was an active slave trader even after the British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833.

To optimize its value as an education tool for students of all ages, the online collection was designed in consultation with a group of kindergarten to high school educators and members of Northwestern's own renowned Program of African Studies.

In addition to explaining how elementary and high school teachers can use the collection for classroom projects and curricula, the online site links to other resources on teaching about Africa.

Generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services made it possible for Northwestern University Library not only to digitize the Winterton Collection images but also to design innovative tools to preserve and display them in electronic form.

With today's launch, the Winterton Collection becomes the third Herskovits Library collection available online. The others are a collection of 113 antique African maps dating from the 16th to the early 20th century at http://www.library.northwestern.edu/govinfo/collections/mapsofafrica/

and a collection of 590 posters reflecting the culture and politics of contemporary African nations at http://www.library.northwestern.edu/africana/collections/posters/

These and other digital collections are part of an innovative digital repository being designed by Northwestern University Library to most effectively preserve and display electronic text, visual, audio and video materials for online access.

Northwestern's Herskovits Library of African Studies is home to the world's largest separate collection of Africana materials.

Precolumbian architecture in photographs, from Charnay to today

An exhibit of vintage and contemporary architectural photographs, "Sacred Architecture in the Americas", is now on display at Throckmorton Fine Art in New York City through June 20. (Throckmorton, 145 E. 57th St. 212-223-1059)

Martin Chambi, Panoramic View of Machu Pichu, c. 1930s Gelatin silver print (Inv# 49092)
Image from Throckmorton Fine Art

The web site includes a slide show of fifteen photographs from the exhibition featuring Desiré Charnay, Martin Chambi, Hugo Brehme and Marilyn Bridges.

From the press release:

The photographs included in the exhibit are from a wide span of time, from the late nineteenth century to the beginnings of the twenty-first century. Thus, the photographers approached the sacred architecture of the Americas differently. Some early images, such as those by Désiré Charnay and William Henry Jackson, were the outgrowth of expeditions seeking to “discover” the unknown. Photographs were documentary-like, seeking to inform and dazzle the public. Other photographs, such as those by Hugo Brehme, are couched in a pictorialism that invites a pleasant emotional response. The images of Martín Chambi are emblematic of intellectuals’ efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to reassert the values and accomplishment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Marilyn Bridges uses the technology of the day to take aerial photographs, giving us views of ruins that we otherwise would never see. Each photograph in the exhibit is informed and enriched by the circumstances of its creation, and the skills of the artist behind the image.

Malick Sidibé: Prints and the Revolution

 

Aichata Sylla wears an Oscar de la Renta navy-and-white polka-dot blouse. Miu Miu black-and-white skirt. Marc Jacobs sash. Belt from New York Vintage. Miu Miu bag. Cole Haan shoes. Philip Treacy hat. Louis Vuitton earrings. Photo: Malick Sidibé for The New York Times

For the fashion pages of last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, the newspaper commissioned the renowned Malian photographer Malick Sidibé. In response the photographer invokes his trademark black-and-white studio photography style featuring bold geometric backgrounds and local subjects, here in the service of haute couture and prêt-a-porter. In a departure from the customary blurbs, the Times was obliged to note not only the clothes' designer but the colors as well.

View slideshow

READ MORE: Click for works on Sidibé in WATSONLINE / WorldCat

Samuel Fosso featured in NYT

From the New York Times T Men's Fashion Spring 2009:

Samuel Fosso, Man of a Thousand Faces
by Leslie Camhi

Fosso satirized the corruption of Africa’s leaders in a color picture he created in 1997, when the Parisian department store Tati invited him to set up a photography studio (with, for the first time, a budget for makeup and costumes) in Barbès, a neighborhood popular with African immigrants. ‘‘People think it’s Mobutu,’’ he said of a comically surreal image that shows the seated artist, draped in gold jewelry and leopard skins and holding sunflowers, a symbol of traditional African medicine. (In other pictures from that series, he appears as a Japanese sailor and a ‘‘liberated’’ African-American woman.) ‘‘In fact,’’ he explained, ‘‘it’s a photograph that represents all those African chiefs who sold their continent to the whites.’’

See the whole article here.

Met Museum joins in Wikipedia Loves Art contest

 

"MoMa Photographer" by tilanseven

Wikipedia is teaming up with Flickr and a number museums and cultural institutions worldwide, including our own Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a photographic scavenger hunt. The contest's ultimate aim is to source illustrations for Wikipedia articles.

During the month of February 2009, small teams of photographers will seek out images within a given museum or cultural institution that illustrate subjects on a list provided by Wikipedia. Images uploaded to the Flickr group will be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles. When an images is used, points are awarded to the team that provided them. Score the most points and win a prize.

Each institution has its own photography and documentation guidelines and each its own prize. (The Metropolitan Museum will award prizewinners a lecture-tour by curator Jeff Rosenheim of the upcoming Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard exhibit.)

For more information:

Wikipedia Loves Art Flickr Group

Wikipedia Loves Art Facebook Group

Bamako 2007 reprises in Berlin exhibition

Aida Muluneh, "Spirit of Sisterhood" from the series "Ethiopian Light", 2000

A selection of photographs from the seventh Bamako photograph biennial is now on view at the ifa Gallery in Berlin through January 11, 2009.

The exhibit, "Spot on ... Bamako 2007: VII Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie," is curated by Akinbode Akinbiyi, co-curator of the original biennial. The theme of the biennial was "In the City and Beyond." The eleven photographers deal with the issue of urbanization in a transnational context through photographs of urban and rural structures.

The eleven photographers are: Sammy Baloji, Berry Bickle, Jodi Bieber, Mohamed Camara, Saïdou Dicko, Mouna Karray, Amal Kenawy, Aida Muluneh, Soavina Ramaroson, Michael Tsegaye, and Nontsikelelo "Lolo" Veleko.

-- Reblogged from Universes in Universes

African textiles, then and now, at The Met + Grey Art Gallery

African textiles, then and now (above, a video by Grace Ndiritu). More Photos >

via NYTimes:

Art Review | 'The Essential Art of African Textiles'
African Art, Modern and Traditional: Seductive Patterns From a Rich Palette

To the casual Western eye “African art” equals “African sculpture” — masks, headdresses and ritual figures. As two new exhibitions make clear, this picture is laughably outdated.

Many contemporary African artists would point to textile, rather than sculpture, as the tradition with the strongest impact on their work. The Nigerian-born, London-based artist Yinka Shonibare, for one, has extrapolated an entire career from the fascinating colonial history of the fabrics known as Dutch wax prints.

“The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents 19th-century fabrics alongside a few relevant contemporary artworks. Flipping the scales, “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art,” at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, emphasizes the place of traditional textiles in works by contemporary African artists.

The exhibitions were conceived and organized independently, and there is considerable overlap on the contemporary end. Both, however, are worth a visit.

The older textiles at the Met are rare, exceptional pieces, many on loan from the British Museum. They contain “the DNA,” in the curator Alisa LaGamma’s words, of contemporary works by El Anatsui and others. But the 20th-century textiles and contemporary artworks at the Grey, organized by the gallery’s director, Lynn Gumpert, offer a more generous swath (so to speak) of Africa’s current visual culture.

“Sibu VIII,” from “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder,” 2003, by Nontsikelelo "Lolo" Veleko

Their heir apparent, the young South African Lolo Veleko, takes color photographs of Johannesburg teenagers modeling brightly hued sportswear on the street.

Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met’s 2005 exhibition “Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams” hinted that textiles had been undervalued in the Western canon, offering ample proof that North African cloths were as important to Matisse as Gabon figures and Grebo masks were to Picasso. The museum’s current show may not have the same blockbuster appeal, but it goes deeper into the techniques and traditions that make the fabrics so striking and seductive.

The patterns of African textiles fall into three categories: woven, dyed, and printed or painted. In many woven fabrics, like kente cloth, narrow hand-loomed bands are joined together. Curiously, the designs of many dyed fabrics echo the structure imposed by the loom, conveying a sense that the strip, or band, is to African art as the grid is to Western postwar painting.

One of the Met show’s most spectacular pairings matches Mr. Anatsui’s “Between Earth and Heaven,” a recent acquisition, with a kente prestige cloth from Ghana (in the collection of the British Museum). Using folded and linked aluminum caps from liquor bottles, Mr. Anatsui echoes the rhythmic tension between warp- and weft-face stripes exemplified in the kente. The works also share a palette of red, indigo and gold, although gold dominates in Mr. Anatsui’s shimmering metal “tapestry.”

As the son and brother of Ewe weavers in Ghana, Mr. Anatsui has clearly internalized some of the principles of kente cloth design. This easy, familial relationship to fabric is typical of the contemporary artists in the exhibition. Another Ghanaian, Atta Kwami, is the son of the noted textile designer Grace Salome Kwami. In a statement that accompanies his small paintings and prints, Mr. Kwami mentions his mother’s work in the same breath as the paintings of Sean Scully and Piet Mondrian -- with none of the art-craft, insider-outsider hang-ups Westerners so often display.

An alternative to weaving can be seen in several adinkra and adire wrappers (Yoruba textiles made by stamping fabric with dark pigment or painting on it with a starchy paste that resists dye). These feature quiltlike blocks of pattern instead of bands and are often dyed a deep indigo blue. The contemporary artist Rachid Koraichi, who appears in both exhibitions, makes reference to the complex history and geography of indigo in large vertical banners filled with text from an eighth-century Sufi mystic. They are beautiful, if arcane.

While some of the larger textiles at the Met were commissioned as architectural decoration, others were made to be worn. Most impressive are two voluminous men’s robes, from Nigeria and Liberia, with Islamic-style embroidery over striped weavings.

Women, particularly in Nigeria, were traditionally outfitted in many layers of fabric. As one 19th-century observer, quoted in the catalog, described the wives of Bonny chiefs, “They sported sometimes five, six, or more pieces of different kinds of cloth about them, especially when going to any of their festivals, so that the body looks like a roll or truss of yarn at both ends.”

One of the show’s discoveries, Grace Ndiritu, uses printed fabrics in videos. In “The Nightingale” (2003), at the Met, she coyly winds and unwinds a headscarf. In a more evocative four-screen video installation at the Grey, she tweaks the seductive role of textiles in Matisse’s paintings: allowing her bare limbs to peek out from behind curtains or posing as a mummified Olympia.

At both the Grey gallery and the Met, studio portraits by the Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé make abundant use of textiles as props and backdrops. Their heir apparent, the young South African Lolo Veleko, takes color photographs of Johannesburg teenagers modeling brightly hued sportswear on the street.

Any show of contemporary African textiles would be incomplete without some reference to commercial wax-print fabrics (the ubiquitous brightly patterned cloth made in the Netherlands and, more recently, East Asia for an African market). The Grey’s selection illustrates the breadth of wax-print designs: some reproduce images of political and religious leaders, while others feature bold abstract motifs.

Mr. Shonibare, the best known of the contemporary artists in these shows, makes exhaustive use of wax prints — sometimes as autobiography, sometimes as postcolonial satire. At the Met his benignly decorative installation “100 Years” consists of a grid of rectangles of stretched wax-print fabric, each one selectively modified with a paintbrush. The works at Grey are toothier: a wax-print upholstered dollhouse of the artist’s home in East London, a child-size mannequin in a wax-print dress cut to a Victorian pattern.

Seeing Mr. Shonibare’s art in an Afrocentric context, one comes to realize how much it relies on the history, and vernacular artistry, of wax-print cloth — and on Western viewers’ relative ignorance of both. The work of Mr. Anatsui, on the other hand, only becomes more profound as its underlying conventions are exposed.

“The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End” continues through March 22 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art” continues through Dec. 6 at the Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village; (212) 998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 10, 2008, on page C32 of the New York edition.

Picture of the Day

the americas exhibit, originally uploaded by urinepublic.

From our flickr pool!

Webliography of photographic research

Haidy Geismar has started an interesting thread in a recent Material World post, "Photography and Materiality". In it she and Josh Bell, "Material World editor-at-large", have compiled links to exhibitions and publications focused on the material qualities of photographs. She invites her readers to add to the list.

The Tibet Album. "Ragashar and wife, with group" 05 Dec. 2006. The Pitt Rivers Museum. Accessed 31 Jul. 2008 <http://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk/photo_1998.285.113.html>

Photographic Analysis Helps in Museum Object Attribution

Chief Smoke's (Oglala Teton Sioux) shirt. 
Credit: Smithsonian Institution, Department of Anthropology.

Johanna Scherer, emeritus anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, posted a link and description for Material World of an online exhibition she has developed that traces her research into "a historical photograph of a manikin of a Native American and using it as evidence to re-identify museum artifacts that had lost their provenance over the course of more than a century."

The site, Red Cloud's Manikin and His Uncle's Shirt: Historical Representation in the Museum as Seen Through Photo Analysis, includes a discussion of using historical photographs in museum research, the use of manikins in museum displays, biographical information on Red Cloud, and a description of the shirt (above) held by the Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution.

A fuller version of her research will be published at a later date.

The site also links to a slide show produced in conjunction with the exhibition "Picture Puzzles: Red Cloud and His Uncle's Shirt" held at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.