History of Photography Special Issue on African Photography
Call for Papers History of Photography invites essays for a special issue on African Photography that evaluates the history of the photographic image in Africa and its contemporary manifestations. In recent years, African photography has gained great international visibility, with major exhibitions (In/Sight, Snap Judgments), international awards to contemporary African photographers (Malick Sidibe received the Golden Lion at the 2007 Venice Biennale), and increased focus on African photography in academic and critical literature. In addition, new research on photo archives in Africa is revealing a wealth of historical and documentary source materials on photography from regions where little information on the subject was assumed to be available. The documentary and analytical value of these emergent archives pose crucial challenges to the accepted narratives of the history of photography that locates its significant moments mainly within Western developments. Consideration of the African corpus may necessitate a need to reconceptualize the idea of photography, the scope of photography’s histories, and critical inscription of contemporary African photography. History of Photography therefore seeks papers that examine the history of photography in Africa, the role of photographic images in the public narratives of Africa within a changing global ecology, and the impact of globalization on photography’s inscription of global Africa. We welcome papers that define and analyze African histories of the photographic image, the geocultural location of African photography, and those focusing on how African photography formulates new visions of Africa in all its heterogeneity and multiplicity as pictures, but also as world views that interrogate historical certitudes of the truth of the photographic mark. We also welcome papers that evaluate the reception of contemporary African photography amongst photographer and photographed subjects in primary areas of cultural production and also within global context. Papers should range from 3500 to 5000 words and may include up to ten black and white images. Completed manuscripts, following History of Photography, style must be submitted no later than 1 September 2008.
Guest Editor:
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie Associate Professor of Art History University of California Santa Barbara USA ogbechie@arthistory.ucsb.edu
Co-Guest Editor: John Peffer Adjunct Professor Case Western Reserve University USA
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