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English
Background Information
"Photography plays a role in most of our lives - but rarely in our deaths. If you happened to live in the West African country of Benin * in the 1960s and 1970s, photography was literally a matter of life and death. It is a In many non-Western cultures, there is a general belief that a person's soul lives on as if trapped in a photograph. In Benin, with its rich spiritual traditions of animism (voodoo was born here and is now Benin's official religion)-where fetishes or objects are seen as powerful spirits-the photographer played a fascinating role in the rituals of death.
* The West African country of Dahomey was colonized by the French in 1872 and gained independence in 1960. Since 1975, it has been officially known as the People's Republic of Benin. It borders Niger, Nigeria, Togo and Upper Volta.
Content
This unique collection of portrait photography, carefully assembled and preserved by West African art specialist Alex van Gelder, opens a new chapter in the history of African photography. Most people's knowledge of African photography is limited to the Bamako School in Mali, whose masters Seydou KEITA and Malick SIDIBE were discovered in the early 1990s. But where Seydou KEITA and Malick SIDIBE worked mainly in the city, taking pictures of a young urban population trying to establish the modernity of their lives, here in Benin the photographers were very often ambulant, riding bicycles to faraway places to find their clients and sometimes developing their exquisitely designed photographs in makeshift darkrooms in the bush. Their portraits are tinged with dark drama and deep mysticism, depicting a people caught between a pre-colonial past and a post-colonial future. For many of the people in the photos, it would be their first and last encounter with a photographer. Among the weddings and communions, the courting couples and proud parents, lie startling images of revenants and juju men; voodoo priests and priestesses; thieves and assassins; prostitutes and pimps - and above all, an extraordinary succession of 'apres-mort' - or deathbed - portraits." (freely translated, © Phaidon Publishing, 2005)About Malian photographer, Seydou KEITA (1923-2001)
About Malian photographer, Malick SIDIBÉ
Photo books about the work of the photographer Seydou KEITA
Photo books about the work of the photographer Malick SIDIBÉ
- Ed(s)/Author(s)
- Okwui Enwezor, Alex Van Gelder
- Format
- HC, 25,5, x 29 cm., 136 pp., text language: English