Life and Afterlife In Benin

Overview

Photography plays a role in most of our lives - but rarely in our deaths. If you happened to live in the West African country of Benin * during the 1960s and 1970s, photography was quite literally a matter of life and death. It is a commonly held belief in many non-Western cultures that a person's soul lives on, as if trapped, within the photograph. In Benin, with its rich spiritual traditions of animism (voodoo was born here and is now Benin's official religion) - whereby fetishes or objects are regarded to embody powerful spirits - the photograph came to play a fascinating role in the rituals of death. This unique collection of portrait photography, painstakingly assembled and conserved by the West African art specialist Alex van Gelder, opens a new chapter in the history of African photography. Most people's knowledge of African photography is limited to the Bamako school of Mali, whose masters Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe were discovered at the beginning of the 1990s. But where Keita and Sidibe worked predominantly in the town, making images of a young urban population keen to establish the modernity of their lives, here in Benin, the photographers were very often ambulant, travelling by bicycle to far flung places to find their clients, and sometimes developing their exquisitely crafted photographs in makeshift darkrooms constructed in the bush. Marked by dark dramas and deep mysticisms, their portraits record a people caught between a pre-colonial past and a post-colonial future. For many of the people in the photographs it would be their first and last encounter with a photographer. Amongst the weddings and communions, the courting couples and proud parents, lie startling images of revenants and juju men; voodoo priests and priestesses; thieves and assassins; prostitutes and pimps - and most uniquely, an extraordinary sequence of 'apres-mort' or death bed portraits. *The West African country of Dahomey was colonised by the French in 1872, and gained its independence in 1960. Since 1975 it has been officially known as the People's Republic of Benin. It is bordered by Niger, Nigeria, Togo and Upper Volta.

Full Product Details

Author:   Okwui Enwezor ,  Urs Stahel ,  Alex van Gelder
Publisher:   Phaidon Press Ltd
Imprint:   Phaidon Press Ltd
Dimensions:   Width: 25.00cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 29.00cm
Weight:   1.207kg
ISBN:  

9780714845135

ISBN 10:   0714845132
Pages:   136
Publication Date:   15 June 2005
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available  
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you.

Table of Contents

Preface by Alex van Gelder * Introduced by Urs Stahel, director of Fotomuseum, Winterthur * 80 - 85 duotone plates * 4,000 word essay by Okwui Enwezor * Bibliographic and background information on each photographer compiled by Benoit Adjovi

Reviews

Author Information

Okwui Enwezor is a curator, critic and poet. He was born in Kalaba, Nigeria, a small city on the border with Cameroon. He moved to New York in 1983. Enwezor was Artistic Director of Documenta 11, in Kassel Germany in 2002. He has curated many important exhibitions such as The Short Century, Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994 which travelled to museums in Munich, Berlin, Chicago and New York, and In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the present, for the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1996. Currently he teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York. Photographers: Edouard Mehome (1934-2003, Porto-Novo), Christophe Mahoukpe (b. 1936, Dekamne), Leon Ayekoni (1944 -2004, b. and died in Ouidah), Benoit Adjovi (b. 1938, Ouidah), Joseph Mo se Agbodjelou (1912-2000, b. and died in Porto-Novo), Sebastien Mehinto (Pigeon (b. 1941, Ouidah), Camille Tchawlasso, Jean Dotonou (b. 1932, Porto-Novo), Boura ma Akodji (b. 1931)

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Countries Available

All regions