colonialism Archives | 1854 Photography

Igor Furtado’s work stands for “the people, their importance, their story”

Reading Time: 5 minutes The Brazilian photographer celebrates the expression of those who live in constant fear of their lives, in a country where their very being is rejected.

Marisol Mendez’s portraits of Bolivian women celebrate resilience in the face of ongoing patriarchal stigmas

Reading Time: 6 minutes Reappropriating Catholic imagery, Mendez highlights the impact of the colonial history in the ongoing sidelining of indigenous women in her home country

Agency and reclamation of the Black, female body is at the heart of Jessica Gianelli’s new work

Reading Time: 4 minutes Gianelli draws on her heritage and response to the Black Lives Matter protests to create a fictional world where modern women express and represent themselves as they are.

Me, Myself & I

Reading Time: 8 minutes Adopting a variety of guises and costumes, Samuel Fosso has spent a lifetime subverting cultural stereotypes with his performative self-portraits

Intersections of religion in Giya Makondo-Wills’ South Africa

Reading Time: 3 minutes “South Africa is a deeply religious country,” says Giya Makondo-Wills, whose work-in-progress, They Came From the Water While the World Watched, maps out the interplay between Christianity and ancestral religion in the region. With four trips to the country under her belt so far, the 23-year old has travelled as much into the past as in the present, tracing the indelible repercussions of 19th-century European migration as they resonate through South African culture today.

Makondo-Wills, who is British-South African, became interested in her African grandmother’s faith while shooting another project. “She’s very Orthodox Christian but she also still practises ancestral religion, and that’s a core part of who she is. She prays to a God and the gods,” the photographer explains.

This duality got her thinking about the intersections of belief systems and how they were brought into contact. How did Christianity become so influential? How does it co-exist with indigenous religions? Building on her interests in race and identity, these questions soon elicited many others, spawning a long-term project that has carried her from a BA to an MA at the University of South Wales.

Africa in the Photobook

Reading Time: 4 minutes Only a small percentage of the 400 books that Ben Krewinkel has collected and featured on his website, Africa in the Photobook, are actually African. Many are historical publications, political pamphlets, or children’s books, written, photographed, and published by Europeans – including old colonial texts, which seem to obsess over hairstyles and traditions of scarification. Even the books by contemporary African photographers are mostly published in the West. As a collection that covers more than a century from 1897 to 2018, Africa in the Photobook follows the changing visual representations of the continent through the medium of the photobook – and soon it too will be transformed into a series of photobooks.

Krewinkel, a Dutch photographer, curator, and educator, is working with South African publishers Fourthwall Books on this series, and hopes to publish volume I by the end of 2019. Focusing on Africa under colonialism, it will include a long historical introduction, 40 case studies, and plenty of space to show large spreads from the books. Volume II will sketch a path from the beginnings of decolonisation in the 1950s to the late 1990s, marking the end of Apartheid and also the “re-evaluation of African photography”. Krewinkel then hopes to create a third volume, focusing on contemporary African photo books.