please note this post is not by Jay Clapp Photography but from the photography news at the guardian for your viewing pleasure please feel free to use the share buttons at the bottom.
Photographers love Lagos’s floating slum for its colour, canoes and poverty. But local teenagers are displaying a different side
In an exhibition on American photography in 1978, MoMA curator John Szarkowski made a distinction between photographs that offer a window to the world and photographs that reflect (mirror) the intention of its maker. An exhibition of photographs by teenagers from Makoko, a poor neighbourhood in Lagos, adds their windows to the houses built on water.
Makoko is extremely photogenic thanks to two of its features – that it is partially built on water and, that most of its residents are poor. Think women wearing colourful clothes on canoes. Think naked children floating around in plastic tubs, smiling at the camera. Last year, Makoko made world news when local authorities gave orders to clear part of the waters occupied by houses on stilts.
Most photographers visit Makoko once or twice. They take their pictures and publish them for an audience elsewhere for viewers to see this exotic place. Living conditions look so poor that it is not strange to be glad not to be there yourself. At the same time it is beautiful enough to want to see it. The people photographed usually do not see the photos taken, let alone the publications that feature them.
The Silent Majority project works very differently. Started in 2010 by Adolphus Opara and Olusola Otori, the project gives children the opportunity to express themselves and develop their creative skills. The pair are both Lagosians. Otori trained as a painter and Opara is a documentary photographer.
For the exhibition, Otori and Opara ran workshops for teenagers in Makoko twice a week for six-months, teaching an awareness of formal aspects of image making and the basics of photography. From the initial 15 students, five made it to the end. Works by four of them – Anthony Monday, Afose Suleiman, Mary Awajinumi, and Peter Onge – are now on show in their own neighborhood.
The Silent Majority project is not novel, it is not the only initiative where children were given cameras and asked to capture images of their lives. It has happened, for example, in Nairobi when American photographer Lana Wong did ‘The Shootback Project‘, in Calcutta where British artist Zana Briski carried out the ‘Kids with Cameras‘ initiative, and in Brazil where British photographer Julien Germain worked with street children. I am from the Netherlands and have worked with children in the Netherlands and Uganda and arranged an exchange with photographs between them. It seems both sides get something out of this.
In Makoko, the photographs were hung on Friday 1 March. Preparations had been made, meetings with local chiefs held. Despite all this, further official permission was needed from those chiefs before the photos could be stapled to the houses. Once that permission was granted the images went up in no time. They looked spectacular, Monday and Suleyman, two of the photographers, seemed to be very proud. So was I, as someone who got involved only very recently with what Otori and Opara had been working on for years. At the same time questions popped up in my head.
Whose houses were these photos printed on canvases stapled to? Did the people living in them like the images? Were they happy with the two logos that their house all of a sudden displayed (of the Goethe Institute in Lagos, who made the exhibition possible and of The Silent Majority Project). Would they have selected another photo if they could have had a say in it? Was the way that these prints were entering their environment enriching it? And if not, was the very sympathetic cause behind it enough to justify it?
I do not have answers to these questions. My own (outsider’s) experience has taught me that it is impossible to take all issues connected to them into consideration and still make things happen. This exhibition once again demonstrates how complicated it is to show photographs that are of a documentary nature in a public context. This has to do not only with what the images show, but it is also with the ownership of public space. In this case the photographs were made by young people in their own community. The images were shown in their neighborhood, but to whom? Who was the imagined audience of what they documented?
A much larger group of outsiders came to Makoko recently for the opening of the exhibition. After seeing a short (work in progress) documentary by Joel Benson, they boarded boats to tour the show. Watching the visitors return to the mainland I think I saw some evidence of culture shock. Not just on the faces of the non-African visitors, but also on those of the Lagosians who had not visited this part of their hometown before. Or was it just a projection of my own feelings and experiences?
Andrea Stultiens was an advisor/curator to support The Silent Majority project
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/28/nigeria-makoko-photgraph-exhibition Thanks for reading Jay
via WordPress http://jayclappphotography.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/makoko-exhibition-opens-a-window-on-a-nigerian-world/
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