Africas: Photographs from the Permanent Kodak Collection
Exhibition Features Photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, Arnold Newman,
Malick Sidibé and Others
Malick Sidibé, Christmas Eve
(Happy Club). 1963/2002.
ROCHESTER, NY.- George Eastman House International Museum of
Photography & Film presents Africas: Photographs from the Eastman House
Collection, a look at the museum's collection photographs that suggest some of
the many ways Africa has touched our lives. It is on view through Sept. 28,
2008. The Africas exhibition is part of a three-exhibition series by the same
title, "Africas," which focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, on view at
Eastman House this summer.
Africas: Photographs from the Eastman House Collection features a rare 1845
daguerreotype from Mozambique — one of the first photographs ever taken in
Africa — and contemporary portarits by West Africans Malick Sidibé and
Hamidou Maďga. Also on view will be stereoacards from the 1920s, work
originally published in LIFE by Margaret Bourke-White and Eugene Smith, a home
movie of big-game hunting made by George Eastman, and an Africa safari album
made by Eastman with his friends Osa and Martin Johnson. Other featured
photographers are Mary Ellen Mark, Nickolas Muray, and Arnold Newman.
The photographs feature African tribes, Nelson Mandela on the day of his
release, goldminers in South Africa, children and animals of Africa, dancing and
music, and portraits of the people. The exhibition displays work made by
journalists, tourists, artists, and ethnographers. Mining the collection to
create the Africas exhibition has inspired Eastman House to be more aggressive
in collecting images of Africa, including images of Africa by Africans.
"This exhibition is not in any way an exhaustive survey of African
photographs, nor is it an African take on Africa," said Dr. Alison Nordström,
Eastman House curator of photographs. "Rather it is a random slice of our
collection that reveals as much by absence as by presence."
Eastman House´s extensive holdings of 19th- and 20th-century French, British,
and American photographs have made the museum one of the most important
photography collections in the world. However, most of the photographs in the
collection reflect the interests and biases of Euroamerican photographers.
"Collections are a product of their circumstances, shaped by curators,
trustees, institutions, and the political and cultural climate, as well as
happenstance and serendipity," Nordström said. "Part of our mission
is to share and interpret our collections with the public and in doing so we may
be rewarded by unexpected insights about the depth and/or deficits of our
holdings; what we donŐt have in the collection is sometimes as interesting as
what we have."
Ed Kashi (American, b. 1957). NIGERIA, 2006.
Curse of the Black Gold
50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta
June 14-September 1, 2008
This exhibition of 37 photographs features images by world-renowned
photojournalist Ed Kashi, taking a graphic look at the profound cost of oil
exploitation in West Africa. This work traces, in an original and compelling
way, the fifty-year impact of Nigeria’s relationship to oil interests and the
resulting environmental degradation and community conflicts that have plagued
the region.
"This exhibition provides a visual inventory of the consequences of a
half century of oil exploration and production in one of the world's centers of
biodiversity," said Kashi, who photographed the region from 2004 to 2006.
'These images expose the reality of oil's impact and the absence of sustainable
development left in its wake. My eyes and heart were opened and my anger and
disgust were ignited. To tell this difficult but profoundly important
geopolitical story in a visual way became the focus of my work."
Nigeria, Africa's most populous country with 148 million people, is the sixth
largest producer of oil in the world and is currently one of the major suppliers
of oil to the United States. However, a recent United Nations report shows that
in quality of life, Nigeria rates below all other major oil nations. Almost all
of Nigeria's oil is pumped from the nine states that make up the Niger Delta in
the southeast part of the country. While the Delta produces 95 percent of the
country's wealth, it is the poorest region in the nation. The first oil
wellheads were tapped in 1958, and since then $500 billion worth of oil has been
pumped out of the fertile ground and remote creeks of one of Africa's largest
deltas and the world's third largest wetland.
Oil production has caused devastating pollution to the Niger Delta due to the
uninterrupted gas flaring and oil spillage. According to Kashi, these operations
have destroyed the traditional livelihoods of the Niger Delta. Fishing and
agriculture are no longer productive enough to feed the area and the residents
are lacking schools, proper housing, and clean water.
"From a potential model nation, Nigeria has become a dangerous country,
addicted to oil money, with people increasingly willing to turn to corruption,
sabotage, and murder to get a fix of the wealth," wrote Tom O'Neill, in the
2007 National Geographic article illustrated by Kashi's images.
"The cruelest twist is that half a century of oil extraction in the delta
has failed to make the lives of the people better. Instead, they are poorer
still, and hopeless."
Even without Kashi's powerful photographs, O'Neill's words evoke images of
despair: "Villages and towns cling to the banks, little more than heaps of
mud-walled huts and rusty shacks. Groups of hungry, half-naked children and
sullen, idle adults wander dirt paths. There is no electricity, no clean water,
no medicine, no schools. Fishing nets hang dry; dugout canoes sit unused on
muddy banks. Decades of oil spills, acid rain from gas flares, and the stripping
away of mangroves for pipelines have killed off fish. Nigeria has been subverted
by the very thing that gave it promise—oil."
While working on that National Geographic assignment in 2006, Kashi
was captured and held for four days by the Nigerian military, unsure of his
fate. He was freed due to intervention from his wife, Nigerian friends, human
rights workers, and National Geographic. "Most people are not as fortunate
and would have endured a much longer, more painful incarceration," he said.
"This event left me even more determined to create a body of visual work
that would tell the story of the Niger Delta."
Kashi's photographic subjects include a resident cooking her tapioca cakes
against the heat of the refinery's flame; shanty houses on the riverbank
overshadowed by pollution and smoke; workers covered in oil; and the work of
MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta), an armed and formidable
militant group responsible for restricting 40 percent of Nigeria's oil industry
through direct attacks on its facilities and the taking of hostages.
"Today, a military struggle is taking place in the Niger Delta between
state security forces and a violent state machinery, yet little is known about
it in the United States," Kashi explained. "The violence of the Delta
is a reaction to a long history of exploitation, the presence of transnational
corporations, a style of politics that encourages violence, and the sheer number
of factions, gangs, and cults without leadership."
And, Kashi noted, this region has long been a victim of exploitation, as it
was key in the 1500s' slave trade between West Africa and the New World. From
these same ports, centuries later, depart ships carrying oil to the rest of the
world.
Curse of the Black Gold is part of the a three-exhibition series
titled "Africas," which focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, on view at
Eastman House this summer.
About Ed Kashi
Ed Kashi has dedicated his photographic career to documenting the social and
political issues that define our times. Kashi, after earning a degree in
photojournalism from Syracuse University, has been photographing professionally
since 1979. He has photographed in more than 60 countries and his images have
appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Fortune,
Geo, Newsweek, and many other domestic and international publications.
Kashi's collaboration with National Geographic, among other
publications, has produced a growing body of work on the modern Middle-East. He
has received numerous awards, including the World Press and Pictures of the Year
competitions. Kashi and his wife, Julie Winokur, founded Talking Eyes Media, a
non-profit educational multi-media company that explores social issues through
visually compelling materials. The first documentary project for Talking Eyes
Media produced a book and traveling exhibition on uninsured Americans called, Denied:
The Crisis of America's Uninsured.
Curse
Of The Black Gold
Author: Michael Watts, Ed Kashi; Buy New: $29.70
His latest book, Curse of the Black Gold, was published in April
2008 (powerHouse books, $45).
see also http://www.curseoftheblackgoldbook.com/
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Africas Photographs