Women and Photography in Africa
Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges
Edited by Darren Newbury, Lorena Rizzo and Kylie Thomas. London: Routledge, 2020.
Join the book launch on on 25 November, 18h15 CET, via Zoom:
https://unibas.zoom.us/j/91730440317?pwd=YXcvN01kSFp0MzVqRE9XS1A3US9iQT09
Meeting ID: 917 3044 0317
Passcode: 758192
The collection, Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges draws on recent conceptual and methodological developments in photographic scholarship to embrace hitherto neglected photographic practices, which brings the work of women and non-binary photographers in Africa to the fore.
Aïda Muluneh’s photograph “The Departure”, from her series, “The World is 9” provides the cover image for Women and Photography in Africa.
The perspectives of Black African women have been marginalised within the disciplines of art history and within the field of visual studies and photography. Women and Photography in Africa begins to address this, both through the inclusion of essays by Black African women scholars, and through detailed analyses of the work of Black African women and non-binary photographers and curators.
The book includes chapters by Tina Barouti; Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann; Dora Carpenter-Latiri; Inês Vieira Gomes; Tessa Lewin; Biddy Partridge; Nomusa Makhubu; Jessica Williams; Anna Rocca; Marietta Kesting; Lorena Rizzo; and Tina Smith and Jenny Marsden. The individual case studies evidence photography’s multiple iterations across the continent, in North Africa, West Africa and Southern Africa, including Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone contexts; and they speak to an overall interest in refining understandings of the historical and contemporary relationship between gender and photography.
The book begins to map the history and critical role of women and non-binary photographers, white and Black, in establishing photography and photographic practices in Africa, and attests to how the work of African women and non-binary photographers is slowly, but steadily, moving out of the shadows of history.
For more information about the collection and to buy copies, visit the Routledge website.
White Mannequin 'Sarah' in various locations, South Africa, 1980s. Photograph by Biddy Partridge. Image Courtesy of Biddy Partridge.
