Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Darren Newbury (Editor), Lorena Rizzo (Editor), Kylie Thomas (Editor)

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Publication Date: October 27th, 2020

Publisher:

Routledge

ISBN:

9781350136557

Pages:

296

Description

This collection explores women's multifaceted historical and contemporary involvement in photography in Africa.

The book offers new ways of thinking about the history of photography, exploring through case studies the complex and historically specific articulations of gender and photography on the continent, and attending to the challenge and potential of contemporary feminist and postcolonial engagements with the medium. The volume is organised in thematic sections that present the lives and work of historically significant yet overlooked women photographers, as well as the work of acclaimed contemporary African women photographers such as H la Ammar, Fatoumata Diabat , Lebohang Kganye and Zanele Muholi. The book offers critical reflections on the politics of gendered knowledge production and the production of racialised and gendered identities and alternative and subaltern subjectivities. Several chapters illuminate how contemporary African women photographers, collectors and curators are engaging with colonial photographic archives to contest stereotypical forms of representation and produce powerful counter-histories.

Raising critical questions about race, gender and the history of photography, the collection provides a model for interdisciplinary feminist approaches for scholars and students of art history, visual studies and African history.

About the Author

Darren Newbury is Professor of Photographic History and Director of Postgraduate Studies (Arts and Humanities) at the University of Brighton. He is the author of Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (2009) and People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited. Photographs by Bryan Heseltine (2013); and co-editor of The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies (2015) with Christopher Morton, and a Special Issue of Visual Studies on 'Photography and African Futures' (2017) with Richard Vokes. He was editor of the international journal Visual Studies from 2003 to 2015, and has curated exhibitions at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and District Six Museum, Cape Town.Lorena Rizzo is an associate researcher and lecturer in the Center for African Studies at the University of Basel (Switzerland). She has widely published on Namibian and South African visual and gender history. She is currently finalizing a book entitled Shades of Empire: Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa (forthcoming Routledge). Kylie Thomas is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. She is the author of Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality after Apartheid (Bucknell University Press & Wits University Press, 2014) and co-editor, with Louise Green, of Photography in and out of Africa: Iterations with Difference (Routledge, 2016).