The luminous continent: the revelatory power of images—whether from high-art sources or elsewhere—marked the most recent biennial of African photography in Bamako

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Richard Vine

For all the fashionable talk about a postcolonial redress of the imbalance between major cultural centers and a neglected "periphery," the tact remains that current art, and the critical and commercial attention it generates, still tends to coalesce where the money is--in New York, not New Guinea; in Basel, not Bakersfield. It is, therefore, something of a salutary shock to realize that, for a decade now, one of the world's best gatherings of fine-art photography has occurred biannually in one of the earth's poorest countries--a nation with an average income of less than $300 per capita. Moreover, the event's participants are drawn almost exclusively from a continent whose resources have long been expropriated by foreign powers or squandered by homegrown tyrants.

The Rencontres de la Photographic Africaine, now a fixture in Mali, West Africa, was conceived following a confab between French and Malian emissaries charged with seeking ways for the French government to foster cultural production in the former colony. France controlled Mali (then known as French Sudan) from 1893 to 1960 and today retains strong ties with the predominantly Muslim country of 11 million, still a source of cheap cotton, that covers an area nearly twice the size of Texas and stretches 1,000 miles from the sub-Saharan region around Timbuktu through the Dogon country of the scrub-growth Sahel to the mid-reaches of the Senegal and Niger rivers. French remains the nation's official language (though a half-dozen local tongues are also spoken), and some 100,000 Malians now live in France--roughly 40 percent of them legally. Following independence, Mali passed through decades of state socialism and strongman rule before embarking tentatively, beginning in the 1990s, on its present course of moderate privatization and constitutional multiparty government.

Although other towns in Mali are now being considered as a future site, the country's capital, Bamako (population 953,000), has hosted all five of the Rencontres photo festivals to date. Centered on the north shore of the Niger, the city features a sprinkling of modern structures knit together by an extensive in-fill of improvised stalls and sheds, where many of the inhabitants live, work and trade amid dusty arid heat or seasonal downpours. Roads are few and often unpaved, but the vibrant street life constantly threatens to upstage any and all formally organized civic activities. Odd sounds arise from the goat markets; vividly patterned garments are washed in the river and left to dry on the grass behind the Maison de la Culture; drivers park their long-distance trucks near the soaks and stretch out to sleep underneath; women with infants slung on their backs and towering loads balanced on their heads stride, with superb grace, through the shantytown jumble; children swirl gleefully across open lots; drumming and dancing invariably follow the speeches that open each segment of the biennial. Even at the French ambassador's welcoming lawn party last fall, convivial speakers had to compete for attention with a baby gazelle nibbling randomly at the toes of international guests.

On a budget of $1 million (more than three-fourths of it from French government and European Union sources), the fifth Rencontres brought together works by about 100 participants from throughout Africa and parts of the diaspora, most notably Cuba and Brazil. In addition, 14 artists from Germany were represented in a guest section. Artistic director Simon Njami, an art critic and independent curator based in Paris, headed a team of 13 curators who mounted shows in seven major venues under the general thematic rubric of "Sacred and Profane Rites." Along with seminars and workshops for aspiring professionals, other "fringe" programs included outdoor exhibitions in heavy, foot-traffic areas, a lycee-level photography competition, neighborhood studio setups, nightly projections accompanied by live music from popular Malian groups, and a daily festival newspaper and on-line report.

The monthlong biennial was opened officially by Malian president Amadou Toumani Toure at the Musee National du Mali, a campus-style institution that houses permanent installations of Mali's celebrated textiles, ritual objects and archeological artifacts, as well as a new 7,500-square-foot temporary exhibition hall. Here works from the last half century by five African photographers, each in some way intent on capturing life through the lens, stood in stark contrast to the highly sophisticated--and bloodless--exercises of Germany's reigning image strategists.

Algerian writer Mohammed Dib's mid-1940s street scenes from his native Tlemcen are standard between-two-cultures fare that only obliquely presage his 1959 political banishment, but other African works at the Musee displayed considerably more formal inventiveness. To judge by his beefcake self-portraits, Youssef Safieddine, a Lebanese emigre who opened a commercial studio in Dakar, Senegal, in 1956, apparently considered himself a looker. The charm of his blatant narcissism--here I am, dark-eyed and wavy-haired, in bulging swim trunks, in cool resort wear and sunglasses, in sleeveless T-shirt while playing the accordion--found a fortunate diversion in his wife, Fatmeh, whom he fetishized for decades in "real-life" glamour shots, often including himself, derived from the visual vocabulary of the era's popular photo-romance magazines.