![]() From there, necessarily, the exhibition reaches beyond those three countries in following the flows of visual culture, of populations, of ideas. I began to think that focusing on Ghana as well could further complicate and complement those explorations. Yet, despite those differences and their geographic distance, through the circulation of images, through the circulation of publications, there were overlaps and connections and themes in conversation. In thinking about that work, I reflected on the overlap in time frame but the radically different histories of these places. And so I thought about what I could build with that work as a starting point. And all four photographs were made in the 1960s. When I began my two-year curatorial fellowship at the museum in 2019, I noted that only four photographs in the Smart Museum’s collection were made by African photographers: three photographs by the South African photographer Ernest Cole and one photograph by the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé. I started with the Smart Museum of Art’s collection and built from there. Could you talk about the role of place and what led you to focus on these nations? This juxtaposition offers a heterogenous view of Africa during this period-one articulated by the shifting map of independent African nations on the 1964 cover of the magazine Bingo, featured at the beginning of the exhibition. You also look at South Africa-reconstituting itself as a Republic in 1961, this so-called independence advanced the National Party’s discriminatory agenda and the ongoing disenfranchisement of Black South Africans. The exhibition’s geographic scope includes the postcolonial context of West African nations Ghana (formerly Gold Coast) and Mali, which had both gained independence by the start of the 1960s. Installation view, “not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s,” Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago And I think we can really see that through the dynamic practices and the very high stakes of photography amidst the major political and social shifts in Africa in and around the 1960s. I wanted to make space for the hopes and the risks of making photographs and making claims to and about photographs. ![]() I wanted to hold space for the hope that the makers of photographs have for the medium’s capacity to represent aspects of lived experience. And by that I mean a thought process that might sound something like: “I know realisms can be problematic and that I shouldn’t trust photographs and the ways that people and systems use them, but not all realisms are bad.” Or, “I know some really great realisms.” Against a lot of the distrust that people-that we-express about photographs on a daily basis, we make exceptions for the photographs we believe in or want to believe in. This exhibition is interested in that potential.Īs for the lack of capitalization, that actually reflects that in turning over the phrase from Sekula, “not all realisms,” I started to read it anachronistically through what we might call “hashtag logic,” as in #notallrealisms. ” Writing this in the essay’s last paragraph, Sekula suggests that even though photographs can be used in repressive ways, they may still provide “testimony” about lived experiences that support meaningful challenges to unjust systems. Reflecting on the impact of Cole’s work, Sekula wrote, “Not all realisms necessarily play into the hands of the police. While that essay largely focuses on North American and European examples, at the very end, Sekula turns his attention to the work of the South African photographer Ernest Cole, whose book House of Bondage: A South African Black Man Exposes in His Own Pictures and Words the Bitter Life of His Homeland Today, published in 1967, was a powerful indictment of South Africa’s brutal system of racial segregation known as apartheid. At its heart is the tension between a medium that can be used all at once to make the portrait of a loved one and a mug shot, between what he frames as the “honorific” and “repressive” functions of the photograph. Wilson: “Not all realisms” is a phrase taken from the last paragraph of the American photographer and photo theorist Allan Sekula’s 1986 essay “The Body and the Archive.” That essay focuses on how photographs have been used as a means to represent, to study, and surveil different types of people. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & RecreationĪlexandra Drexelius: Can you discuss the title of the exhibition, “not all realisms”? The lack of capitalization suggests an ambivalence towards authority or a troubling of universal statements.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.Get your Best of Chicago tickets! Ticket prices go up May 15 > Close
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