Paris Photo 2021, kaleidoscope of Africa

LThe event took place at a time when the Covid pandemic had given the impression of losing its fatal vigor. It is mid-November. The public is in a hurry to rediscover the sensations of still images that got bogged down last year with the cancellation and postponement of the 24th edition of Paris Photo, the most prestigious event dedicated to the black box, the main tool of the one of the 8th so-called media arts. The location chosen says a lot about the ambition that accompanies the Paris Photo 2021. It is the ephemeral Grand Palais, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Illustration of the success met this year: 178 exhibitors, coming from 29 different countries, and 876 artists were deployed in this space which, over nearly 10,000 square meters, has already hosted the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC),

Buyers and collectors are there. The red dots appear under the frames, proof that the photo is sold.

If economic studies describe how the pandemic encouraged savings, we can clearly see that the mood is for buying and for crushing. It must be said that the event attracts private and institutional collectors from all over the world, not to mention the more than a hundred museums that made the trip. In this environment, women have particularly asserted themselves.

African photographers particularly prominent

For this year, women represented 34% of the artists presented. Among them, Africans were particularly highlighted.

Since 2018, Elles x Paris Photo, a program initiated in partnership with the Ministry of Culture has been promoting the visibility of women artists and their contribution to the history of photography. Some galleries are really playing the game, such as Afronova who presented four young South African photographers on her stand: Lebohang Kganye, Phumzile Khanyile, Alice Mann and Dimakatso Mathopa.

The latter illustrates quite well the profile chosen in the Elles x Paris Photo course. Using ancient photographic printing techniques, Dimakatso Mathopa questions gender and race stereotypes. “Mathopa’s work examines representations of black women in a colonial context and explores how the colonial gaze has subverted their representation today,” explained the gallery owner. For her first participation, Émilie Demon, head of the Afronova gallery, was delighted: a large format by Alice Mann entered the collection of the JP Morgan Chase Foundation.

Stevenson, another South African gallery has also dedicated its stand to exclusively three women: Mame-Diarra Niang, Jo Ratcliffe and Zanele Muholi. The latter, who presents herself as an activist visual artist, offered frontal self-portraits in black and white to illustrate the LGBT + community in her country.

At the same time, there was of course the superb Allegoria series by Omar Victor Diop exhibited at the stand of the Magnin A gallery. A print of the first portrait of the series has also entered the collection of the JP Morgan Chase Fund.

African artists discovered through Curiosa

In the Curiosa sector, inaugurated in 2018 and dedicated to emerging artists, three artists from the African continent were presented.

Curator Shoair Mavlian, director of Photoworks and former assistant curator of photography at Tate Modern, notably selected Prince Gyasi. This Ghanaian photographer, presented by Galerie Nil, is recognizable by his ultra-colorful images taken with a smartphone. There was also the young Congolese photographer, Gosette Lubondo who lives and works in Kinshasa who has been present for two reasons.

On the one hand, the Angalia gallery exhibited its work produced in the form of series, a work already shown at the Quai Branly Museum in the exhibition “To you belongs the gaze”. One of his photos had been chosen to illustrate the exhibition poster.

On the other hand, rewarded by the photography price of the house of champagne Ruinart 2021, awarded to an emerging artist presented in the Curiosa section, Gosette Lubondo benefited from an artist residency, from June to September, in the House cellars. During this residency, she produced a series entitled Manu Solerti (expertly) which pays tribute to the centuries-old know-how of the men and women who make champagne and whose images are exhibited.

A large South African THK gallery also showed the work of Johno Mellish. This photographer is inspired by his environment to create images that bathe in a strange and tense atmosphere. Particularity: each image appears as a universe in itself.

Figures of the photo evoked

If new or new photographers have been put forward, old figures have been brought back to the fore by South African galleries.

For its first participation in Paris Photo, the Bonne Esperance gallery scored a great achievement. She presented an iconic figure of the South African photography scene who died last year: Jurgen Schadelberg, Founding member of the iconic magazine Drum, the Rolling Stone of the black community, this figure of German origin was one rare whites to have been accepted by the black community to document daily life under apartheid. His photos tell the story of the country through great figures of jazz, like Miriam Makeba, portraits of Nelson Mandela, but also pictures that have become symbols like “We won’t move”. Like the one that shows Sophiatown, the only mixed neighborhood in Johannesburg. It was razed in 1955 under the apartheid regime and its black residents forcibly moved to Soweto.

Another structure, the Dominique Fiat gallery, also presented another figure in South African photography, in this case Sue Williamson. At 80, she is one of the most important artists in her adopted country. Born in the United Kingdom, she arrived in South Africa at the age of 7. In the 1970s, she joined the fight against apartheid by devoting herself to documenting segregation. His gaze now focuses on the discrimination that still haunts South Africa but also on the fate of new migrants from other African countries.

However, it was not just South Africans who were exposed.

The images of another great African photographer, the Ghanaian James Barnor, were presented by the Clémentine de la Féronnière gallery. Born in 1929, this portrait painter opened his Ever Young studio in Accra. He immortalized his country at the time of its independence. Moving to London in the 1960s, he photographed the African diaspora before returning to Ghana to open a new studio called X23.

This is one more illustration that the African cachet of this 2021 edition of Paris Photo has been particularly strong and has allowed us to take a fresh look at the trajectory of African photography over the past sixty years.