"Black man, Chinese man, penguins" ~ Sports Illustrated

Did you know that Africa is home to many, many spear chuckers? This is a series of images from the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit issue for 2013. And here at Jezebel is an appropriately acerbic commentary on the spread. Model: Emily DiDonato. Location: Namibia.

Nii Obodai

Alice (From: Who Knows Tomorrow) © Nii Obodai

Nii Obodai is a Ghanian photographer. You can find a brief interview with him, along with a sampling of his work, here at Another Africa.

From the Corners of Africa

At The Guardian, I discovered a story by Sean O'Hagan that usefully links to nearly a handful of photographers from across Africa - Adolphus Opara and Andrew Esiebo (Nigeria),  Michael Tsegaye (Ethiopia),  and Daniel Naude (South Africa).  Of these photographers I am familiar only with Esiebo; I've posted here on his work a couple of times. The work is uniformly impressive not only in its variety but in the way it departs both from the too common tendency to present of the entire continent as a disaster zone and from the temptation to depict Africa as a freak show. A good example of a photographer who, it seems to me, tacks back and forth between those unfortunate approaches is Pieter Hugo.

Picturing Dictators

Laurent Gbagbo and his wife in Abidjan after his arrest on Monday.

Photo Credit: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

This is the image that accompanies reports in The New York Times regarding recent events in the political crisis in Cote d’Ivoire. Gbagbo is the former dictator who has refused to relinquish power in the wake of elections last fall. Here is a man who wielded dictatorial powers but appears now, having been captured by opposition forces, rather pathetic. Perhaps he can rely on his friends among prominent American conservatives and evangelicals for solace. And, of course, it remains to be seen whether the opposition - headed by Allassane Ouattra - will be an improvement.

Elections in Exotic Places (3)

Conakry, Guinea: A Guinean woman holds her voting card as
she enters a polling station. Photograph Jerome Delay/AP.

I have been remiss in my effort to build a base of images from which to discuss the conventions that govern 'election photojournalism.' I made some desultory efforts early last summer [1] [2] [3]; consider this a renewed effort. For this installment I offer the image above, lifted from The Guardian.

I have been prompted to take up this task again by reports from Burma on the "elections" being orchestrated there today. You can find the reports here and here; notice that one of them is image-less. Granted, this particular casting and counting of votes hardly qualifies as an election. But does the absence of photographs mean it has not happened at all?

Elections in Exotic Places (2)

There were national elections this past week in both Burundi and Equatorial Guinea. Here are the requisite images of the current, slightly ominous, leaders of the respective countries, each accompanied by a retinue of security personnel, casting their ballots.

Burundian president Pierre Nkurunziza (R) casts his
vote at a polling station in his hometown of Mumba,
in northern Burundi's Ngozi province (28 June 2010).
Photograph: AP.

General Konate, the transition president, votes on
Sunday in the capital, Conakry (27 June 2010).
Photograph: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

Elections in Exotic Places (1)

A while ago I promised a set of posts on the conventions that govern images in the Western press of elections in 'faraway places.' Here is the first installment. This week there have been elections in Burundi.

A voter goes to a voting booth to make her mark at a polling station in
Bujumbura, Burundi, as people prepare to vote in the presidential election
Monday, June 28, 2010. After all the opposition parties pulled out of the
race, the voters have only the choice between the ruling CNDD-FDD party
or declaring their votes invalid. Photograph © Marc Hofer/AP.

A voter at the Burundian presidential elections shows his inked finger to prove
he has cast his ballot, after voting at a polling station in the Burundian
capital of Bujumbura, Monday, June 28, 2010. After all the opposition
parties pulled out of the race, the voters have only the choice between the
ruling CNDD-FDD party or declaring their votes invalid. Despite many fears
that the voting will be disturbed by violence, the polling stations remain calm,
and attendance is not brisk. Photograph © Marc Hofer/AP.

The folks at the Lens blog over at The New York Times included the top image among the "Pictures of the Day" (28 June 2010).

My plan is to simply start posting sets of images; once I get a 'critical mass' up, I will write something. For the moment, the images are food for thought.

The Problem With Conventions

Election observers taking notes at a polling station. Voting in
Sudan’s elections has been extended by two days to ensure
technical problems do not prevent voter participation.
Photographer © Pete Muller/AP (The Guardian, 13 April 2010).

David Campbell has written this typically smart post on the photography of famine generally and famine in Africa more particularly. His concluding comments, referring to the image I've lifted above, are especially on point:

"One of my refrains for how we should understand photographs in these situations is that the problem lies with the absence of alternatives as much as it does with the presence of the stereotypes. Which means I should conclude with a double-page spread published by The Guardian this morning on the Sudanese elections. Clearly any place that is home to both food insecurity and a practicing democracy cannot be simply represented."

David is concerned with the conventions of documentary photography and photojournalism that inform depictions of large-scale human suffering in forms such as famine, epidemic, war, and other sorts of mayhem. He is especially concerned that such depictions dominate the ways that African countries appear in the Western media. David has put his finger on two distinct problems:

(1) How can one depict famine and so on in ways that do not assume stereotypical form (familiar images of starving babies, lines outside of distribution centers, the crush of people with outstretched hands as aid workers distribute provisions, etc.)?

(2) How can one depict the diversity of social and political experience in African countries in ways that, while not ignoring the difficulties that people face across the continent, nonetheless do not perpetuate what some refer to as 'Afro-pessimism'. (I've posted on this matter here a number of times.)?

These are daunting questions and David is correct both to raise them and to suggest that on both dimensions we are captive to conventions. The problem, in other words, is not necessarily one of bad intentions on the part of photographers or the NGOs who host them. Moralism, after all, is a none-to-attractive convention too.

My suspicion, though, is that very similar conventions inform photographic depictions of democracy, especially in African countries and in other 'exotic' places that have yet to embrace our own faith in that political form. It is not so much that I want to question the faith (although it is important to keep an eye on how it actually manifests itself) but that I think we need to keep an eye on how we serve up democracy as antidote. This is a theme I plan to take up over the course of the summer. Thanks David.

Malick Sidibé

Christmas Eve, 1963. Photograph © Malick Sidibé

According to this report in Agence France-Presse, Malian photographer Malick Sidibé has received the top prize at this year's PhotoEspana. Sidibé has won numerous awards and prizes
and is perhaps best known for his portraits. I think his work too is a standing counterexample to those who insist on forcing discussion of African photographers (and of photography about Africa more generally) into the dichotomy of optimism and pessimism. Where does Sidibé's work, created over the course of several decades, fit?

Optimism & Pessimism ~ About Africa in Particular

At The Guardian yesterday Jonathan Jones published this provocative post on South African photographer Guy Tillim. Jones seems to start off contentiously:

"You won't often hear me call a photographer a genius. I think there's too much homage paid to an art that's basically just holding up a piece of machinery and pushing a button.

There are great photographs and great photographers. But far too much fuss is made now of average photographs by average artists. It's not so much a cult of the camera as of the run-of-the-mill."

But notice that, having denied the appellation"genius" to anyone engaged in so mechanical a process as "pushing a button," he then more or less immediately takes it back. The alternative would be to appear just plain silly and, of course, to deprive himself of a subject - namely Tillim. The problem is not with photography but with the art world and those who inhabit it as, regardless of medium, tends to push the mediocre work of "artists" in the cause of making a buck.

O.K., let's not use the word "genius." How about talented, insightful, or whatever. Tillim is indeed a terrific photographer. The portraits to which Jones links are pretty ominous. And here Jones really raises some important issues. There has been a push recently to decry "Afro-Pessimism" [1] [2] and how it informs the conventions that frame too much of how photographers depict events and conditions on vast, variegated African continent. It seems fair enough to complain that we too often get predictable images of tragedy, violence, deprivation, and chaos and little more. But it also seems fair to insist that there is too much of such such things across Africa and, as Jones intimates, ignoring them does not make them go away.

"Tillim is a South African photographer whose work is at once a report on contemporary Africa and an artistic image of it. His pictures deliver the shock of classic photojournalism as he traverses the continent, visiting crisis zones such as the Democratic Republic of Congo or, on his home ground, downtown Jo'burg. But they are at the same time chosen and composed images. Tillim photographs Africa in a way that communicates ambivalent and disturbing ideas and perceptions; every one of his pictures is at the same time a record of something seen and something he seems to have thought about for a long time.

Tillim is a provocative artist. At a time when art museums in the rich world often seem to want to create a fictionalised modern Africa – as if by celebrating something that does not exist it can be brought into being – he portrays a continent in chaos. His portraits of child soldiers are particularly scary. In his recent body of work, Avenue Patrice Lumumba, he documents buildings whose modernist idealism dates from the early years of African independence. Today these buildings are in various states of decay and transformation. It is not an optimistic series.

But I don't think Tillim is a dubious gloater over misery and poverty. He is a truth-teller. And it's in telling the truth - directly or indirectly, prosaically or poetically - that photography discovers its artistic power."

The most obvious problem in this discussion, I think, is that it is cast in dichotomous terms ~ optimism or pessimism. I don't think this dichotomy captures Tillim's work. Nor does it capture the work of other terrific African photographers such as David Goldblatt, Andrew Esiebo, Phillip Cartland, Santu Mofokeng or others whom I've commented on here in the past. Nor does it capture the work of non-African photographers who have depicted the continent ~ James Nachtwey, Robert Lyons, Sebastiao Slagado, Ron Haviv and so on. Even when such photographers depict tragedy, violence, deprivation, and chaos, they hardly do so because they think such conditions are irremediable. If they did they would be either wasting their time, or playing the role of voyeur in which critics like Sontag notoriously cast them. If the latter interpretation (or some variation on it) were not so common, it would be too obviously shallow to merit a response.

A second problem is that in thinking of the problems Africans confront and the accomplishments of which they can boast the parties to this disagreement reduce the role of photography to how this or that photographer is representing one or another truth. What about thinking of a conversation among photographers - one that does not rely solely on textless images, which I think is a hackneyed conceit of the profession - as though a picture (or set of pictures) speaks for itself? Different photographers might bring different perspectives and talents to bear on the continent. And we might recognize that there is way more in "Africa" than any one photographer might capture. So we could tack back and forth between the work of the many talented and insightful folks who are working there.

A third problem is related to the last. Photography does not simply depict reality; it does not simply capture some pre-existing "truth." It can also be transformative and prefigurative. And while Jones is no doubt correct to say that we cannot simply bring something into being by celebrating our aspirations (a form of dangerous wishful thinking that does not take the travails off real people seriously), he is way to harsh in his judgement. Why? Because photography can also play a role in prefigurative role in social and political change. It cannot accomplish such change on its own. But it can enter into movements for change and hold out possibilities that will motivate actors and animate movements. Call me naive or utopian. Want an example? Think of Josef Koudleka's (anonymous) photographs of Prague in 1968. Did they stop the Soviet brutality? No. Could they? No. But they entered into the politics of oppositions across Eastern Europe and came back to haunt the Soviets. I am sure you can think of other examples. Chuck your pessimism and cynicism overboard.

Representing Genocide: Intimate Enemy

"Great numbers . . . cause particular difficulties for our imagination. As if we observe humanity in a way that is not permitted for humans, and allowed only to gods. ... In other words, they can think in categories of masses. A million people more, a million less - what difference does it make?" ~ Czeslaw Milosz

Among my abiding interests in thinking about photography and its uses are how it effects audiences, and especially how photographers might use their work to prompt political reflection on any of a range of large-scale catastrophes that, to a considerable if shifting extent, are humanly created ~ war, famine, poverty, environmental degradation, epidemic, genocide, displaced populations, and so forth. The difficulty is a species of the one Milosz articulates ~ how to use photography as an instrument to help us grasp - to imagine, to conceptualize - any such immense event and the innumerable human suffering it creates.

A recent book, an extremely innovative collaboration between political scientist Scott Straus and photographer Robert Lyons, offers a provocative approach to this problem. The book is Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide (Zone Books/MIT Press, 2006). It consists of introductory comments, first by Straus, then more briefly by Lyons, followed by fifty-plus pages of transcribed interviews Straus conducted with men convicted of having participated in the genocide, and finally, a series of photographs by Lyons.

Straus states the aim of Intimate Enemy quite nicely: "[T]he book is an experiment in trying to see and present details of the genocide in ways that are not already interpreted and categorized and do not sensationalize and shock. In so doing, the book aims to help readers confront unimaginable violence in a manner that stimulates, rather than stifles, reflection." The stress here on experiment seems to me just right. And two features of the experiment strike me as especially innovative. The first is how Lyons focuses the photographs themselves; the second concerns the oblique interaction between text and images.

Often, when photographers depict the sorts of catastrophe I just mentioned they depict individuals or groups enduring suffering and hardship. This practice has at least two sorts of unfortunate effects. First, it regularly generates resentment in viewers, or at least in critics who write about their reactions. Second, it raises the expectation that viewers should have compassion for those who are suffering. While I will not argue the case here, it seems to me that (i) these responses are themselves intimately related insofar as viewers often resent demands on their compassion when the latter has no purchase (due to distance, time or the scale of events) and (ii) both resentment and compassion are deeply and unavoidably depoliticizing.

Lyons approaches the task of representing the Rwandan genocide from a different trajectory. Intimate Enemy contains seventy-seven of his images made between 1998 and 2001. Nearly all of these are portraits. While some of these are of survivors, the bulk are of suspected or convicted génocidaires, that is, of individuals (nearly all men) who at the time were alleged to have participated in the killing of Tutsis or who had actually been found guilty in court of so doing. Lyons presents his portraits without captions or accompanying information (these follow in a 'List of Plates'). In short, he places a burden on the viewer to set her preconceptions aside when first confronting the portraits.

"Through stark black-and-white portraiture, with limited depth of field and a background obscure in detail but present nonetheless, I wanted to make the audience enter a more intimate space, ask questions, experience directly the ambiguous physical resemblances between génocidaire and survivor."

This is not simply an ex post adjustment; it was a conscious aesthetic strategy. And the invitation Lyons extends hardly is a naive one. As he wrote in his field-notes: "This is the most documentary project I have ever attempted. I am allowing the images little poetic and emotional space; viewers will have little room for escape." He sought to prompt, perhaps even compel viewers to confront ambiguity and the ethical questions it raises. In the process, I think, he deflates the moralism that fuels the dynamic, too familiar among those who view the "pain of others," in which compassion, thwarted or misplaced, fuels resentment or despair.

Exactly two years ago I wrote this post on the predicament of trying to use photography to depict power as well as powerlessness. In that post I tried to connect observations made by several photographers - Larry Towell, Gordon Parks, Sebastião Salgado - as well as demands articulated by some critics. Lyons, it seems to me, is not just depicting power. His portraits of Rwandan génocidaires in fact call into question the sharp distinction between power and powerlessness. He thereby allows us to bracket enough of the horror and repulsion to ask, 'how did these otherwise unexceptional men and women undertake such exceptionally violent and hateful acts?". The point is not to excuse, but to understand.

Moralism is an invitation to demonize, all the better to condemn. It seems to me that the space of ambiguity that Lyons seeks to construct subverts moralism by rendering the judgment on which it trades much less certain. The narratives that Scott Straus juxtaposes to Robert Lyons' photographs abet that ambiguity. These narratives are transcribed first person accounts of the genocide by some of those those who perpetrated it. Not only are they anonymous (for reasons Straus explains), but they are not the words of the individuals portrayed in Lyons's photographs. Straus and Lyons worked in parallel rather than tandem in Rwanda. Like Lyons, Strauss too worked in prisons. The narratives he supplies here are excerpts of interviews he conducted in 2002 with convicted génocidaires.

The effect Straus and Lyons create in Intimate Enemy is to reverse the conventional relationship between text and photographs. Here the texts illustrate the photographs. In combination, the texts and the images they illustrate, ultimately call into question the grounds of our judgment. They challenge our propensity to dehumanize the perpetrators of violence - as "monsters" or "psychopaths" or as "evil" - and focus on their actions and what prompted them. Perhaps more importantly, the disjunction between text and images generates a creative tension which, in turn, allows us to keep in view both the individual perpetrator and the grisly collective action to which he contributed. By seeing that context we are less able to reduce the agent to his or her actions. This is important because only once we understand the latter can we hope to formulate a just, potentially constructive response political response to political crimes. Ironically, perhaps, Lyons and Straus represent the Rwandan genocide by humanizing it. In so doing they help us to ponder if not entirely grasp what initially seems unimaginable. That is an incredibly important step.

~~~~~~~~~~

Background: Some time ago I received an email from Jörg Colberg who, despite the fact that we've never actually met, I consider a friend and whose good sense I trust and good humor I respect. Jörg explained that he was trying to put me in touch with another friend of his, photographer Robert Lyons. At this point, Robert and I have had intermittent email contact, but still have not met. In the process of tracking down some of Robert's work, of course, I also inevitably encountered his collaborator Scott Straus. Although both Scott and I are political scientists we have not met either. Such are the virtues of the internet! In any case, that is the background to this post.

William Kentridge (2)

" I. The Dead

A heap of forensic photographs, almost impossible to look through. A man half tumbled out of bed, pyjamas pock-marked with bullet holes, blood on the floor below. A close-up of a man's head in a pool of blood, one cheek swollen - his jaw shattered. Someone - Man? Woman? - under newspapers, one hand sticking out. As specific photographs, it was extremely difficult to look at any of them. In the act of drawing from these images, the photos change. It is not simply that they become a series of greys, and tonal gradations and contours; but rather, the horror of their origin is put on hold."

~ William Kentridge, (2006). From
"Two Thoughts on Drawing Beauty."

Sontag, among many others, worries about photographic depictions of human pain and suffering. In particular, such critics worry about what happens when such depictions project what has been called "beautiful suffering." How does the move from photographic depiction to drawings change things? Why are our assessments different? Is the horror, as Kentridge suggests, really "put on hold"? If so, how?

African Imagery

For many in the North and West, I suspect, Africa may as well be blank. When we fill in that blank, raise appropriate concern about how, by whom and to what ends the continent in its immense variety is photographed. (For instance ~ [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] ~ among others.) It is difficult to know even how to approach this problem - and I point out that the problem resides here, in the North and West, not there. Photographer Philip Cartland (whose own work is terrific) maintains this page ~ African Imagery ~ which, unsurprisingly, focuses on African photographers. It is a good place to start.

Blogposts on African Photography

I want to call your attention to a promised and promising series of posts at Conscientious that will feature photography from Africa. This is a terrific idea. As is typically the case, there are those, like me, who grumble, and those like Jörg who take a much more constructive approach. He is inviting us to take a look. The initial installment already is up - here.

Africa as Freak Show ~ Pieter Hugo

Mallam Galadima Ahmadu with Jamis, Nigeria.
Photograph © Pieter Hugo.

At The Guardian you can find this slideshow and this story on South African photographer Pieter Hugo. I have been wondering about his work for a while now but have been uncertain what I think. So, here you go:

Much of Hugo's work seem to me fairly unexceptional - more or less standard portraits albeit some of albinos or members of various Christian sects. Those that stand out, like the one I've lifted here, seem to me to portray Africa as a freak show - men and boys posing with baboons dressed in human clothes or huge, slouching hyenas on leashes. Is he trying to recreate the exotic? Is he trying to portray menace? Is he establishing a continuum between the local fauna in Africa and its human inhabitants? Beats me.

Sure, we need to see Africa as much more than as series of civil wars, refugee camps, famines, epidemics and droughts. I could not agree more [1] [2]. The alternative, however, is hardly just to present the continent as an open-air circus. Hugo has won a bunch of awards. And in The Guardian piece "Elisabeth Biondi, visuals editor of the New Yorker magazine and one of the most influential taste-makers in modern photography," is liberally quoted singing his praises. Count me among the skeptics though. Biondi exaggerates by way more than half.

Photographer Embedded With NGO Reproduces 1970s Famine Photos

I do not know photographer Nick Danziger or his work. Today in The Guardian you can find this slide show of his photographs - a set of images of the worsening "humanitarian" crisis in East Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Djibouti and Kenya). According to the introductory comments: "Photographer Nick Danziger shot these images for Oxfam." And they are being published to publicize a new fund-raising campaign for Oxfam.

Two things are striking about this project. The first is that these images, more or less, are conventional "famine" images - animal carcasses, desperate individuals traversing parched terrain, women and the elderly with protruding ribs cradling dehydrated, malnourished children, and so forth. This is 2008 and the photographic conventions to which the photo-essay in today's Guardian conforms were well worn in the 1970s. They have been subject to extensive critical discussion, including via this exhibition that, ironically enough, was co-sponsored by The Guardian a couple years back.

Second, there has been a lot of comment and hand-wringing about the way journalists and photographers have been "embedded" with military units in war zones. But, as I have noted here since the outset, embeddedness is in the eye of the beholder. Would Danziger have had access to the subjects of his photographs absent his connection to Oxfam? Are the images published by The Guardian stock scenes because they fit into the stock fund-raising strategies of humanitarian organizations like Oxfam? What might a talented photographer like Danziger have done absent such organizational imperatives? Would Oxfam have funded his project had he produced less conventional images? More generally need the photographic ecology that makes up much of popular culture - and to which the famine images peddled by Oxfam and others are significant contributors - be driven by crisis?

Let me be clear. I am not questioning Nick Danziger's intentions or character or his talent. Nor am I saying that Oxfam and other humanitarian organizations should turn their backs on starving people. (The problem here is political not ethical or humanitarian. But if you do not regularly support Oxfam or Médecins Sans Frontières or some other such outfit you should.) Nor am I calling into question the editorial judgment of those at The Guardian who linked to the Danziger/Oxfam slide show from page one of their e-edition. Nor, finally, am I launching some sort of po-mo complaint about how Danziger's photos injure their subjects over and above the dire existence they already endure (to say nothing about the related, resentful complaint that such images make "us" feel bad).

The question I want to re-pose, for others have posed it too, is whether there is not a better way to proceed. We here in the U.S. hear a lot these days about the "facts on the ground" in various theaters of war and how they ought to determine policy choices. Is there a way for NGOs, photographers and journalists, and mass media publications to address problems of severe poverty and deprivation in more effective ways? Are there alternatives to humanitarian appeals that might mobilize political support for less crisis-driven, more systematic responses to political-economic problems? These questions may seem stale. Nick Danziger's photographs in The Guardian today simply raise them again.

Oil Curse

We here in the developed world tend to look at what oil-dependence has gotten us - war, environmental mayhem, impending economic crisis - and think maybe our addiction to "foreign oil,", heck to domestically produced oil too, is problematic. Tonight on npr I hear this report on a new book by photographer Ed Kashi entitled The Curse of Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta which chronicles the disasters - a politically corrupt dictatorship, grinding poverty, environmental degradation - that have befallen Nigeria due to oil production there. And while the host of the show I was listening to, Farai Chideya, is truly mediocre interviewer, Kashi and the other person she was talking to Omoyele Sowore (an exiled Nigerian human rights activist) made me want to track down the book.

For those of you living in or traveling through lovely Western New York this summer, you can see some of Kashi's work for this project on exhibit at the George Eastman House, here in Rochester. The exhibit runs through September first.

Best Shots (27) ~ David Goldblatt

(53) David Goldblatt ~ In an abandoned mineshaft, Pomfret Asbestos
Mine, North West Province. December 25 2002. (29 May 2008)

William Kentridge

"I have been unable to escape Johannesburg. The four houses I have lived in, my school, studio, have all been within three kilometers of each other. And in the end all my work is rooted in this rather desperate provincial city. I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and films are certainly spawned by and feed off the brutalized society left in its wake. I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures, and uncertain endings; an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay”
~ William Kentridge

Untitled (chairs) [2003, Photogravure with drypoint] © William Kentridge

Not too long ago I posted this rather pejorative assessment of the major art institutions, and especially the Memorial Art Gallery, here in Rochester. Well Marjorie Searl, who is the Chief Curator at the MAG emailed me with an invitation to have coffee, which we did - joined by Jess Marten, who works for Margie as Assistant Curator. Who thought anyone actually read this blog! And who thought anyone at the MAG in particular would not only notice but respond so graciously? Well, we had what I thought was a terrific conversation and have been exchanging irregular emails since.

Zeno at 4am ( 9 prints on one sheet )
[2001, Etching and sugarlift]
© William Kentridge

Yesterday Margie sent me this link to work by South African artist William Kentridge from which I borrowed (and corrected and expanded) the comment at the start of this post. There Kentridge both notes how his art is grounded locally and offers what I take to be an extremely articulate characterization of how art and politics intersect. The latter is germane to my concerns on this blog generally, but to recent discussions of art and politics in particular. I am totally unfamiliar with Kentridge's work which appears to straddle the line between drawing and projection and printmaking and film in really quite remarkable ways. So now I have to find out some more about Kentridge. Thanks Margie!

Best Shots (10)

Multiple narratives ... detail of Mikhael Subotzky's best shot.
Photograph: © Mikhael Subotsky, Magnum

(28) Mikhael Subotsky "Mallies Family, Beaufort West, South Africa" (6 September 07)