The Lives of OthersOctober 22nd, 2015

A look at how some recent photobooks, featuring African subjects, rehash pejorative tropes. Thisarticle first appeared in Issue 17 of the Aperture Photography App.

By Stanley Wolukau­Wanambwa

The cover of Jan Hoek’s New Ways of Photographing the New Masai (Art Paper Editions,2014)

Dutch photographer Jan Hoek’s New Ways of Photographing the New Masai (Art Paper Editions,2014) has the appearance of a handwritten school notebook. Its spine and cover are adorned witha mishmash of spidery letters that spell out the title in an irregular and child­like script. The bookscarcely contains any writing to contextualize the project and define for readers what is meant by“old” versus “new” ways of photographing this traditionally semi­nomadic tribe of Kenyan people,save for a very small image of leaping tribesmen that appears on the book’s first page. That imageis uncredited, and appears to be a fairly conventional travel photograph in which the Masai arephotographed jumping skyward in traditional red costume while grinning for the lens. Hoek’swebsite offers some more information:

“The Masais are always photographed the same: jumping in nature while wearing traditionaloutfits and jewellery. Almost like it is a group of animals. But more and more Masai start to live intowns and buy their first Nikes and put mobile phones in their stretched ears. Together with sevenurban Masai I tried to find a new way to photograph the new Masai.”

Hoek’s book contains a series of portraits of seven Masai tribespeople, made according to what weare told are their preferences as to how to be pictured:

Filemon: “Doesn’t like: To be photographed naked.” Seuri: “Doesn’t like: To be photographednaked.” Mike: “Likes: Masais [to be] photographed in a modern way.”

We later discover only six are true Masai tribesmen, and that the seventh individual falsified hisidentity. His portraits are still included but appear struck through with thin black lines, so that hisdeception is theatrically punished, while the competence of whomever he deceived is left excludedfrom the record, along with the nature of the relationships and intentions that led Hoek to makethis book.

Pages from New Ways of Photographing the New Masai

The provenance of these pictures; the very reason for their having been made at all; the manner oftheir making; the nature of the “collaborative” relationship with the photographer; the necessitythat Westerners see Masai tribesmen according to Hoek’s “new way”—none of these crucial butunstated questions—are deemed worthy of an answer. Hoek’s “New Masai” are left as protagonistsand independent actors, reaching out to us (apparently) at their own behest, and ostensibly in themanner of their own choosing. The specific hopes, desires, and experiences of seven people arereduced to an itemized list that continually restates their desire not to be forced to strip naked forthe delectation of a Western lens. In this way, these individuals are imagined within the confines oftheir role as objects for visual representation. Their lives as people are pared back to the narrowparameters of how they choose to live as images.

These seven people are left to respond to the unstated prerogatives of an artist whose virtual silencewithin the written content of the book confers on them responsibility for their unskilledappearance. They are rendered in poorly lit, poorly exposed, technically mediocre images, whichonly succeed in demonstrating their inexpert grasp of new technology. The only choices declared inthe book are those of the individuals who are the subjects of images credited to Hoek as thephotographer. Thus, in “addressing us” through a premise constructed so that Hoek might showhis new way of seeing black bodies, these individuals take up the centuries­old mantle of thecolonial subject responding to white Western preoccupations. And as in so much orientalistimagery, their bodies exist purely to serve.

Pages from New Ways of Photographing the New Masai

There has latterly been a recurrence of pejorative photography of the black body in contemporaryphotobooks. Such work operates on the implicit premise of the primitivism of the Other, accordingto which blackness and black bodies are defined by a rudimentary existence in a premodern,mystical world. Such work depends upon this assumption in order to celebrate the vibrancy ofAfrican culture, the athleticism of the black body, or to delight in the richness and beauty of blackskin. In this way, the black Other serves to alleviate the complexities of modern Western life, byoffering an anachronistic alternative to white Western identity.

New Ways of Photographing the New Masai is characteristic of this growing corpus ofphotographs that portray the black body as “a socius without writing or the Word, history orcultural complexity,” as Hal Foster wrote in his 1985 essay “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of ModernArt, or White Skin, Black Masks.” Foster’s essay title underscores the way in which blackness servesas a theatrical mask that conceals a troubled white identity. His essay critiqued thedecontextualization necessary to argue for an affinity between ritual tribal objects and the productsof modernist art, and argued that the “primitive” is instead made to serve as a phase in thedevelopment of properly Western traditions. The primitive serves as a marker of the antiquated, theuncivilized—as a point of abjection against which Western modernity can be mapped andcelebrated. Recent instances of such primitivism in contemporary photography tend to depend onthe unstated clause of white Western intellectual superiority, as it is contrasted with the inherentlyretrograde sensuality of the black body. Such work often stresses the earthly, folkloric, andanimalistic as inherent virtues of the black body and its attendant “culture,” although anycontextualization of such culture is habitually excluded.

Pages from Viviane Sassen’s Pikin Slee (Prestel, 2014)

These tropes are also apparent in the work of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen, in books suchas Flamboya(contrasto, 2009), Parasomnia (Prestel, 2011), and in her latest Pikin Slee (Prestel,2014). Made at various points in Africa and across the African diaspora, the black body isrepeatedly rendered as an anachronistic contrast to Western norms, whether these are intimatedby architecture, by fashion, or by other commonplace commercial goods. Sassen’s photographs arecharacterized by the solubility of blackness into shadow, or by its vivid difference from garish color.Her portraits incessantly emphasize the black body’s pliability and malleability in a series of strangegestures of physical contortion. In her photographs, the black body is mute, dark, gestural, andinanimate: an object made up exclusively of deep brown and black contours, pools of impenetrableshade, counterpointed by vibrant dollar­store goods, lurid paint, or the patterned effects of lightand shadow.

Pages from Pikin Slee

In photographs such as Anansi (2007) or Ivy (2010), supine black bodies fuse together intosculptural oddities that are born out of a soluble relationship to the earth. And yet a certain ironic

dissonance is produced by the whiteness of a shirt in shadow, or the presence of England’s ThreeLions on a pair of football shorts. The antinomies of blackness and whiteness, of the earthly andthe intellectual, the savage and the savior, are here overt structuring elements of the image. Butsuch aesthetic tensions as these contrasts evoke do not trouble a long history of ethnic degradation;they reinforce it as a further instance of the theatrical acquiescence we have come to expect fromsubservient, primitive blacks.

Pages from Pikin Slee

Sassen’s black bodies are very frequently abstracted into postures that intimate strange bodilyrituals, invoking a kind of voodoo ergonomics of spontaneous contortion, and frequently displayingacts of apparently voluntary self­effacement. They are cast as primitives, denuded of any locallyspecific cultural history. Sassen herself has said in an interview with Planet magazine in 2010:

“I never intend to dismantle misconceptions of the ethnic ‘Other,’ though I like to play with thesepreconceived ideas people in the West have. I show them things they think they know or they don’tunderstand (like the paint), and in that way [my photographs] indirectly provoke questions aboutour Western view of the ethnic ‘Other,’ which is often a very limited view.”

Pages from Pikin Slee

It is apparent from the figurative language of Sassen’s images that she plainly does not seek to“dismantle misconceptions” of the “ethnic Other,” but rather to use the black body as one amongmany manageable objects in a series of portraits perhaps better understood as still lifes. However, itis extraordinarily difficult to avoid the conclusion that her photographs regurgitate a limited viewof alterity, which frames the black body as an object and not as an individual.

Pages from Cristina de Middel’s The Afronauts (self­published, 2012)

Cristina de Middel’s The Afronauts (self­published, 2012) set out to lament “the fact that nobodybelieves that Africa will ever reach the moon,” by re­staging images derived partly from documentsshe discovered recording an aborted attempt to launch a Zambian space program in 1964. DeMiddel’s project was photographed in Spain following her discovery, in 2009, of the story ofEdward Makuka Nkoloso, founder and sole member of Zambia’s National Academy of Science,Space Research, and Philosophy. His goal was to launch a woman, two cats, and a missionary tothe moon, and then on to Mars.

De Middel’s book relates an approximate version of this story from elements that are sometimesfactual but often fictitious, incorporating diagrams and news stories alongside images of“afronauts” in garishly patterned spacesuit costumes sewn by her grandmother. This spaceprogram is recreated in the midst of a wild landscape that lacks any traces of aeronauticalinfrastructure, but contains a strangely pliant elephant. While the photographs delight in a farcicalretelling, De Middel’s description for the book on Amazon.com argues that this work contains a“subtle critique” of “our position towards the whole continent and our prejudices.”

Pages from The Afronauts

Ostensibly this is a story about the unbridled ambitions of African people, and about the injustice oftheir relative lack of freedom in achieving them. The absurd and implausible attempt at spaceflight depicted in the work underscores a profound disjuncture between Africa and the West. Theriches of the slave trade provided the capital for the Industrial Revolution, without which spaceflight would have remained a pipe dream. The farcical tenor of the The Afronauts acts as a comicreprieve and disguises the formative role of exploitation in the production of poverty on onecontinent, and unbridled freedom on another.

If the past decade of extraordinary photographic production has demonstrated any one thing inthe arts, surely it is the apparently inexhaustible adaptability of the photographic book tocontextualize and address the specificity of an artist’s own intentions? In the photobook we have aform capable of embodying, rather than vaguely approximating, the vision of those artists who seekto use it. The recurrence of orientalist work that deals with race and its representation in such awillfully tenuous fashion suggests the spectacle of the primitive is resurgent in contemporary visualculture. This recurrence stands at odds with other meaningful advances in the general discussionaround race and politics, but it also highlights the deeply contested and complex nature of theissues at hand. Just as modernity is inseparable from colonial history, so too is the abjection of“primitive” blackness inseparable from white privilege. We would do well to question thecontextualization of race in such photographic work, so that we might more clearly see the whiteskin lurking beneath its black masks.

Stanley Wolukau­Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and editor of The Great LeapSideways where portions of this essay originally appeared. He was an artist­in­residence at LightWork in 2015; has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Vanessa Winship,George Georgiou, and Paul Graham; and is a faculty member in the photography department atPurchase College, SUNY.