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.

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.