One of the aspects of my work over around 8 years for ‘About Photography‘ of which I’m most proud was the series of articles that made up the ‘World Photography‘ section. It was of course work that drew on previously published research by various scholars – one of whom, despite being clearly acknowledged for his work obviously felt I was trespassing on his private patch. But it also involved considerable research by me, both on the Internet and in published sources and brought photography in various countries around the world to the attention of a wider public.
There were some aspects that were particularly hard to find out much about, and African photography was one of these, though I did write a little about photography in Egypt and the Arab world in North Africa, about Drum magazine in South Africa and some South African photographers including David Goldblatt and Roger Ballen. And of course Seydou Keïta (see also) and Malick Sidibé from Mali, but there simply wasn’t the wealth of material that is now available – for example at sites like African Imagery – on line.
On the ‘A Photo Student‘ blog you can see that students on some MFA courses now get taught about Africa (and of course many other things – it’s a blog worth exploring, if it makes me feel that some UK courses are, from what I hear, not quite in the same league) along with some good illustrations and great links. James Pomerantz is a New York-based photographer who had gone back to school and is documenting the experience on the blog, where he has the freedom to do many things that I couldn’t do when working for a large company, particularly in terms of copyright, where I was unable to claim “fair use”.
One particular link that worries me is to a document I would have loved to have found a few years ago, An Outline History of Photography in Africa to ca. 1940 by David Killingray and Andrew Roberts, published in the journal History in Africa, Vol. 16, (1989), pp. 197-208, from the African Studies Association.
If you belong to an institution that subscribes to JSTOR you can access this free and legally, but otherwise you can only see the first page, which contains very little of interest unless you pay a $12 access fee. Unfortunately I think few public libraries subscribe to this service, although universities and a few schools and other institutions do. There is a link on ‘A Photo Student‘ to a full copy of the article, downloaded from JSTOR which I won’t repost here. Having written Writing for Free a while ago my thoughts over copyright are quite clear, although it is unreasonable that should you pay your $12 (or your institution a subscription) none of it will get to the authors of the article.
