From the Editor

From the Editor Photography and its allied forms of lens-based image making, such as film and video, have become, as Elizabeth Janus eloquently suggested, "key to some of the most radical artistic advances, partly because it forced artists to ask profound questions about the roots of representation and partly because it changed the way we think about and look at the world around us."1 Yet, any serious discussion of photography—and by extension film and video—within the African context must take into consideration both the history of this medium and the particular aesthetics it has come to represent. It must also take into consideration the revolutionary transformations photography has undergone as a genre, especially during the last forty years. Though photography today assumes an important role in contemporary art practice, this has not always been the case. Through much of its history, the status of photography within the history of art has often been precarious , if not inconspicuous. Yet, as the conventions and aesthetics of painting and other forms of what art history defines as "high art" changed, so did ideas concerning photography. Photography has been highly influential in the most revolutionary transformation in the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the transition from pictorialism to idea-based image making . With the dissolution of boundaries between the different media, the photographic medium has come to define our understanding of artistic expression. We now know very well that the disruptive techniques of the Dadaists, the strategies of Pop artists, and Walter Benjamin's critique of originality in art helped pave the road to the conceptualism which has dominated contemporary art practices since the 1960s. With the rise of postmodernism, photography—still or moving—has provided artists with profound possibilities for experimenting and the greatest means of appropriating reality and critiquing traditional artistic conventions and practices. Taking into consideration factors of race and gender, and the impact of feminist discourses of the last three decades, photography, as part of the print tradition , has always been and will continue to be a richer and more diverse tradition that encompasses what Ruth Weisberg called, "the personal, intimate gesture and the popular, the commercial, and the political."2 The question one may ask is: How do African and African diaspora artists fair in these developments? What happens when they turn the camera on their own culture, or when they shift the focus to cultures other than their own? Some of these questions might not have been asked if the medium of photography was originally African. Yet two considerations come to mind in answering these questions. One is that the complexity and diversity of the African and the African diasporic experiences defy any monolithic assumptions concerning African or African diasporic identities, cultures , and art practice. The history of photographic practices in Africa and its diaspora are no exception. Second, the connection between the development of modern media and the advent of European colonialism in Africa is undisputed. Appropriation of Africa's visual world through the invention of the camera went hand in hand with the appropriation of Africa's wealth. This was the past that confronted African photographers in the wake of colonialism, as they faced the challenge of transcending the images created by decades of colonial rule. And they met this challenge head-on. Since then, African and African Diaspora artists have responded to these challenges by creating a new visual language for the representation of modern African and African diasporic experiences. We learned from landmark exhibitions and publications such as Revue Noire's African Photography, Okwui's Enwezor's In/Sight and The Short Century, Manthia Diawara's African Cinema: Politics and Culture and Black American Cinema, and Viola Shafik's Popular Egyptian Cinema; Gender, Class and Nation and Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, that the history of photography and film in Africa or its Diaspora is not monolithic.In places such as Egypt, Tunisia, and South Africa, the camera was put to use in the late nineteenth century, a few years after its invention in Europe and North America, while it took another half a century for the camera to attain similar currency in other parts of...