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IN/SIGHT
African Photographers, 1940 to the Present
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
New York, New York
May 24-September 22,1996
Until recently, most exhibitions and publications dealing with the subject of photography in Africa have tended to emphasize images of Africans taken by anthropologists or European commercial studio photographers. Though they are important recastings of the relationship between the production of knowledge in the West and images of Africa, these explorations have unfortunately neglected the ways in which Africans have represented themselves through the medium of photography "In/sight,' the first United States museum exhibit to look critically at the work of African-born photographers, was a valuable and important first step in a new direction.
Western consumers usually encounter photographs of Africa as ethnographic evidence, as tabloid images of starvation in Somalia or genocide in Rwanda, or as armchair tourist images in National Geographic which exoticize and eroticize African peoples. Curated by Clare Bell, Okwui Enwezor, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya, "In/sight" suggested other worlds of visuality and experience, and offered an alternative to misrepresentations of Africa, especially from the period in which African nations had ostensibly freed themselves from colonial rule by Western powers.
In order to reach "In/sight," located in the Mapplethorpe and Tannhauser galleries upstairs, visitors passed through the spiraling main exhibition space where the blockbuster "Africa: Art of a Continent" was on display. Musicians played drums and thumb pianos in the lobby below, and demonstrated how to make rudimentary instruments. As Octavio Zaya pointed out to me, it is unlikely that the Guggenheim would have a pianist playing Erik Satie and painters demonstrating the Cubist style of painting in the lobby during a Picasso show. "In/sight" provided a quick and efficient antidote to just this sort of watering down of the intellectual and aesthetic achievements of Africans for the American public. The thirty artists displayed came from many fields, including photojournalism, portraiture, documentary photography, and art of the Western gallery variety.
A large group of photos from Drum magazine, dating mostly to the 1950s, anchored the show (Fig. 1). Originally published in South Africa, the magazine later appeared in regional African editions and in the West Indies. It was a major source...