Edited by means of Annette Czekelius and Michael Thoss Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Edited by means of Annette Czekelius and Michael Thoss

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Munich, 2000 119 pp 88 color & 93 b/w illustrations. DM 24 softcover

Portrat Afrika: Fotografische Positionen eines Jahrhunderts (African Portrait: A hundred of Photographic Positions) may assume uncannily familiar. The 1996 Guggenheim exhibition "In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present" largely introduced African photography to a Western art community. after exhibitions on this subject, including the united associated with the catalogue subject to review (curated by Michael Thos at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, January 15-March 12 2000) and the Revue Noire exhibition and catalogue Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography (1998) have highlighted abundant of the same work. Many of the essays in Portrat Africa build upon chapters in the Anthology and other sources, of that kind as Snap Me One! Studio-fotografen in Afrika (Prestel 1998) In this way, the catalogue portrays its own anthology of writings onward African photography. What becomes apparent, especially when the part is examined in relation to the Anthology and In/sight, is that it illustrates an emerging canon of African photography.

While one images may look familiar, Portrat Afrika is establish apart from earlier sources from one side its visually stimulating design with an interweaving of subject and image, full-page bleeds of many photographs, and interesting passage and color changes from chapter to chapter. The part extends beyond the German-language audience, as most numerous chapters or interviews are also included in their original French or English. Not solely does this make the volume marketable and useful to a non-German-reading public, however it ensures that the author's or interviewee's original words take rise through unfiltered. This said, the distinctions between the rounded pillars of text in German and the other languages are repeatedly difficult to decipher because of the switch in visual tones from chapter to chapter These visual disruptions make it necessary to become reacquainted with the printed word in each section, and many times where translations are included, to scan the page to distinguish between the different round pillars of language.

Portrat Afrika approaches African photography through acknowledging first a colonial heritage and then indigenous innovations. In his introductory essay Thos prompts that the "colonial shadow," no matter for what cause distant, is still at play in African photography: "The exhibition `Portrat Afrika' narrates an alternative perspective of the combat between Europe and Africa and their mutually foreign cultivations At no time was this skirmish one-sided" (p. 5). While colonialism is a distinct part of the history of African photography, many catalogues do not transcend that history to focus forward the theoretical material of contemporary photography. Portrat Afrika is at its greatest in number interesting when it approaches the contemporary material.

Like the Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography, this part makes an effort to include artists' voices by the and of several extensive interviews. Some of these closely overlap or republish earlier material; Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa's interview with Zwelethu Mthethwa, "Township in Color," is an abbreviated version of their earlier dialogue published in Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from southerly Africa (Museum for African Art, 1999) Others, however, provide just discovered information, such as the interviews with Malick Sidibe and Dorris Harron Kasco, and permit the photographers' voices to arrive through. In "All Roads Lead to Lagos," for example, the photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi beckons us to crossroads in Lagos as if he wishes us to behold the city from his unique perspective, or at least to gain a sense of the perceive sounds, and smell of the city life captured in his images.

Hubert Filser and Peter Stepan's interview with Malick Sidibe echoe previously published dialogues with the artist if it be not that also moves beyond these in its theoretical ease When asked the distinction between photography and painting, Sidibe provided insight into his relation to his clients: "Photography is plenteous more direct than painting. Beyond that, there is the social side. united doesn't see the camera, on the other hand one sees the photographer who is also capable of embellishing the figure and rendering the photo more beautiful" (p 31) In contrast, Thoss's interview with Samuel Fosso focuses more in succession the artist's trajectory from studio photographer to a well-known entity upon the global art market. Rather than analyzing theories of self-portraiture in relation to Fosso's work, Thos directs the audience to focus in succession the idea of discovery. Fosso is asked to relate the story of how a French photographer sought his work for an exhibition in Bamako, Mali, and suggests: "This was by what means I was discovered" (p. 23) This interview reads as a story of the artist's life since his manner of moving into a foreign market. the same can only lament that Fosso was not asked questions of greater stillest part to provide insight into his interesting self-portraits.