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

Freshest-looking among the images by four participants from Senegal, where art photography has been ascendant since the 1980s, were the deceptively casual shots of handsome young people cavorting on a beach taken by Pape Seydi, winner of the festival prize for work from a francophone country. Photography in Zimbabwe, which arrived with 19th-century expeditions to sites like Victoria Falls, evolved into news-media and commercial studio work in the Rhodesia of British rule. Under the "liberation" (occasioning a national name change) brought by President Robert Mugabe in 1980, photographers have been subject to varying degrees of state control. Works shown at the Bibliotheque ranged from the Thatha Camera collective's portraits detailing social modernization in the Bulawayo township through 1980 (pop-music girl groups, fab Western suits, record players) to Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi's recent journalistic snaps of arrested white farmers piling, in handcuffed pairs, out of an armored truck (a reminder of recent Zimbabwean land reapportionment actions).

Egyptian photographers seeking autonomy in an artistic zone somewhere between Islamic strictures and Western orientalist cliches included Jihan Ammar, offering behind-the-scenes glimpses of brides being dolled up for their weddings; Hala El Koussy, with her poignantly staged takes of individuals alone in public places such as a bus station or empty cafe; and Maha Maamoun, whose long horizontal color strips (a wall, the side of a bus, etc.) radically crop floridly dressed figures on the street. A monographic section featured Coptic rituals and spaces shot by fellow Egyptian Christian Nabil Boutros, while Youssef Nabil won the Seydou Keita Award for portraiture with his unnaturalistically colored fantasy constructs like My Frida (1996), a prettified version of the iconic Mexican artist.

Located on the south shore of the Niger, across from some of Bamako's spiffiest architecture (including a luxury Kempinski Hotel, the city's only five-star retreat), the hulking Palais de la Culture accommodated work by a score of artists from throughout Africa. Two national groupings were of both esthetic and historic interest. One comprised often crowded wide-perspective scenes of French gentrification--horse races, first airplanes to land, early gas stations--in tiny Reunion, recorded during the island's golden age of the pith helmet (1930-50) by Paris-trained local photographer Andre Albany. The other, "Death in Benin," was a deeply 'affecting selection of 1960-75 postmortem images by seven photographers who, with eerie flash effects, memorialized black Catholics laid out in their simple houses according to long-standing local custom, sometimes alone, sometimes surrounded by daily accoutrements (eyeglasses, dogs, electric fans) and attended by surviving relatives and friends.