Through the Lens: How Photography Became Africa’s Most Popular Art Form

Last fall, Jeanne Mercier, a French critic and curator based in Portugal, traveled to London to launch a new book. Her destination was the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, then commencing its fifth edition in the city of its founding, and the subject was Being a Photographer in Africa: The Ten Years of Afrique in Visu. Lavishly illustrated and packed with essays and interviews, the book draws on a significant history accumulated by the website Afrique in Visu, which has become an indispensable resource for followers of African photography. It also chronicles the emergence of a medium that, in the last two decades, has become contemporary Africa’s foremost art form.

Mercier created the site—whose name melds French with Latin and loosely translates as “Africa as we see it”—with her husband, the photographer Baptiste de Ville d’Avray, in Mali in 2006. As its editor-in-chief ever since, she has played a role in lending visibility and coherence to the continent’s flourishing, if often disconnected, photo communities. Mercier’s enduring work made her an ideal partner for Othman Lazraq, part of a new wave of African collectors who have demonstrated an appreciation for photography in its many and various forms. At 29, Lazraq is the energetic young president of the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL), a nonprofit institution recently established in Morocco and currently home to “Africa Is No Island,” an ambitious survey of contemporary photo work drawing on 40 photographers and collectives from across the continent.

“Photography is a medium I love and care for,” Lazraq said in February at the launch of the show, which was curated by Afrique in Visu with the input of associate curator Madeleine de Colnet. “The role of a museum is to engage and educate people, to somehow bring a small touch of light and hope.” To that end, Lazraq said, Afrique in Visu has aided in his aim to connect Africa’s disparate photographic communities by having “created bridges and completely destroyed boundaries between all these African countries, showing the cultural diversity between them.”

In the new museum set within a private golf estate on the outskirts of Marrakech’s famed medina, “Africa Is No Island” not only reveals African cultural diversity but also highlights intersections and commonalities in expression and subject matter across the continent. One pairing in the show presents South African Lebohang Kganye next to Congolese Sammy Baloji. Both make innovative use of archival photos and collage, with Kganye using her family archives and Baloji drawing on photographs made by white photographers during his country’s colonial subjugation by Belgium. Also included is a strong selection of documentary work, such as that of François-Xavier Gbré and Nicola Lo Calzo, both working on long-term projects respectively focusing on 20th-century architectural ruins and the embodied legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Among the striking features of “Africa Is No Island” are portraits of and by women. Some of the pictures could be classified as documentary, such as a series on facial scarification by the Ivorian Joana Choumali, titled “Hââbré: The Last Generation” (2013–14). Others lean more toward performance, such as a seated self-portrait by the American artist Ayana V. Jackson. Under the title Sarah Forbes (2016), the photo is a contemporary reimagining of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, an orphaned Yoruba royal who was gifted by King Ghezo of Dahomey to Britain’s Queen Victoria in 1850.

Lazraq came to photography through portraiture. While still living in New York he became friends with Leila Alaoui, a Paris-born, Marrakech-raised documentary photographer. Lazraq proudly recalled his earliest photographic purchase. “I bought Leila’s first-ever prints of ‘The Moroccans,’ ” he said, in reference to Alaoui’s series documenting Morocco’s cultural traditions and ethnic diversity. One of his acquisitions from this celebrated group, made between 2010 and 2014, depicts a watch seller with an elaborate headdress, photographed in a souk in the Atlas Mountains; another portrays an elderly man from Morocco’s northern coastal region. Alaoui viewed her coolly observed frontal portraits as upending “folkloric” and “orientalist” depictions of Moroccans. In 2015 she told Al Jazeera, “My motivation in this project was to revisit the portrait practice and show Morocco in a way that I consider more natural, though no less objective, through the eyes of a native Moroccan.”

Art collecting in Africa, as elsewhere, is often marked by entrenched nationalisms. Rich Nigerians collect Nigerians, wealthy South Africans collect South Africans, and flush Moroccans—like Lazraq’s father, Alami Lazraq, a property tycoon—collect Moroccans. The younger Lazraq is not of this tradition. Early on as a collector, he bought work by Peter Beard, a New Yorker famous for, among other things, his photographs of East African wildlife. He owns as well a small image by Japan’s Nobuyoshi Araki, which sits next to Lazraq’s bed at his home in Casablanca, where he also keeps portraits by Malick Sidibé and the emerging South African talent Phumzile Khanyile.

Lazraq’s photography collection is relatively small. Numbering just over 100 works, it in no way compares with the holdings of collectors of Africa-based photography such as the German-American Artur Walther and Frenchman Jean Pigozzi. But on a continent where the collectibility of photography has long been questioned, Lazraq’s holdings signal a beacon of what he called “light and hope” for a medium that has been increasingly vying for space at continental art fairs and fledgling museums devoted to new work, including the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in South Africa.

Located at the other end of the continent, in the port city of Cape Town—some 7,250 miles from Morocco—Zeitz MOCAA focuses on 21st-century African art, with a concession to the continent’s vast diaspora. Unsurprisingly, its holdings—the full extent of which remains a jealously guarded secret—show a strong tilt toward lens-based work, notably photography. Key examples include Angolan Edson Chagas’s photographic installation Luanda, Encyclopedic City (2013), which won Angola the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. But Chagas’s project, which pictures detritus viewed against anonymous urban infrastructure, is an outlier in a museum whose primary focus is on visualizing black subjects.

Zeitz MOCAA has six departments, including one devoted solely to photography. The photo section is named after Roger Ballen, an American-born photographer who has resided in Johannesburg for nearly four decades, and who made a sizable donation of work as well as funds to the institution. The museum’s director and chief curator Azu Nwagbogu—who moved into his role in May after the resignation of founding director Mark Coetzee—maintains close connections to photography as well.

In 2010 Nwagbogu founded the LagosPhoto Festival in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. An annual event with a lineup of global talent, LagosPhoto forms part of a growing number of specialist festivals that now include Addis Foto Fest, started in Ethiopia in 2010 by the photographer Aida Muluneh, and Rencontres Picha, a biennial founded in 2008 by Sammy Baloji in the Congolese city of Lubumbashi. LagosPhoto has not reached the level of influence and recognition achieved by Bamako Encounters, a benchmark photo festival held in the Malian capital since 1994, but competition was not Nwagbogu’s motive when he founded it.

“My primary focus at the time was to challenge conceptions, in the West and on the continent, of ourselves,” Nwagbogu said. Motivated by the “urgency and immediacy” of the medium, he saw LagosPhoto as an opportunity to “build a community on the continent.”

Industry peers acknowledge that Nwagbogu’s entrepreneurial zeal is paying off. “It is a really important initiative that has made photography far more accessible,” said Bisi Silva, a Lagos-based curator and art historian. “They have programs targeting young photographers, and because of its international focus, LagosPhoto also brings diverse photographic practices to the city.”

Within the wide range of subjects surveyed in African photography is a newly prominent variety of performance-based portraits now ubiquitous in galleries, at fairs, and on museum walls. This kind of photography often combines self-portraiture with gestural cues and tends to favor lavish costumes and assertive—sometimes even unambiguous—politics in a manner that raises questions. What might such work say about the continent today? And, equally important, what does its apparent collectibility say about Africa’s burgeoning art scene?

“I have always found the politics of representation complicated,” said Nandipha Mntambo, a Swaziland-born sculptor best known for her cowhide installations but whose output also encompasses photography. In 2008, working with photo retoucher Tony Meintjes, Mntambo created Europa, a startling self-portrait in which the artist made herself up to resemble a minotaur. A print of this work fetched £6,000 ($8,400) at Sotheby’s March sale of contemporary African art in London. To put that in perspective, Seydou Keïta, Mali’s venerated mid-20th-century portraitist, typically achieves around the same price at auction.

“How we portray or represent ourselves to the world is quite a complex thing that shifts all the time,” Mntambo said. “And the use of other peoples’ bodies in our work is also complicated, because I don’t know if you can ever have a clear and true conversation with somebody else about how you want them to be seen within work that you’re creating. The body is a complex political space.”

Nwagbogu expanded on Mntambo’s line of reasoning. “If you look at international museum culture, there is an absence of the black figure, an absence of the African figure.” Citing a current trend in the work of numerous women artists, including the South Africans Zanele Muholi and Tony Gum, Nwagbogu said such subject matter “is always about identity. ‘Hey, I’m here! Look at me.’ ”

Of course, women are not alone in their interest in self-portraiture. At the 2013 edition of LagosPhoto, Samuel Fosso, a pioneering Cameroonian-born Nigerian self-portraitist, used the festival to premiere his series “The Emperor of Africa” (2013), a set of staged scenes in which he presents himself as the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. Fosso started to produce his theatrical self-portraits in his commercial studio in the 1970s and achieved a measure of prominence for this body of work when he exhibited it at the inaugural Rencontres de Bamako in 1994