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.

Andrew Esiebo (2)

About six months ago I wrote this post prompted by a picture by the talented Nigerian photographer Andrew Esiebo. That image was drawn from his project "Lagos, life goes on ..."; I've just come across another project of his - "Soccer World." Unfortunately, no images from this series are readily available on-line, so I simply recommend that you follow the link over to Afriphoto. That said, Esiebo is a founding member of the Black Box Collective which held its intial group exhibition "Lagos - Nocturnal Vibrations" this past spring. Here is one of Esiebo's contributions to that show:

You can find other samples of the collective's work on-line at Afrique in visu.

[Photograph © Andrew Esiebo.]

Andrew Esiebo

One of the photographers featured in the new issue of PRIVATE is Nigerian photojournalist Andrew Esiebo who provides a series of photograhs from Lagos, including this image of a billboard. The sales pitch, while humorous, also is serious.


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PS: On the seriousness of closing "the sanitation gap" between the developing and developed world see, for instance, this 2002 report - Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries - from the Disease Control Priority Project, "a joint effort of the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)." (Quoted phrases are from this press release.)