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167 For many Americans, Africa exists in contradictory imaginings. In Africa we keep both the spare purity of Hemingway’s Kilimanjaro and the sordid horror of Conrad’s dark river. This huge and mysterious continent offers the glamour and romance of Isak Dinesen and the tragedy of our ancestors shipped away, weeping and in chains. Our visual knowledge of this unknown place is as clear, conflicting and untrue as our literary heritage. Africa is starving AIDS orphans and noble Maasai warriors, mass Tutsi graves and giraffes in full gallop on the sun-kissed veldt. It is a place limned for most of us by photojournalism and National Geographic. How, in the face of these dominating myths that make our Africas, does someone from America go there and learn anything, let alone take a picture that is true? Betty Press first went to Africa in 1987. An accomplished photographer , associated with a major international newspaper The Christian Science Monitor for eight years, she made the pictures her job required, but found others, too, and it is these images that she has chosen to collect in this volume. Here we find a very personal Africa which does not contest the widely shared stereotypes so much as simply disregard them. Betty Press is a respectful and engaged observer who is drawn to simple subjects. In a remarkable melding of content and the medium of its expression, Press’ images of Africa are timeless, immediate and personally authentic. Photographers who produce within the demanding limitations of classic silver gelatin printing have a small vocabulary to work with compared to the options that the varieties of color work allow. For Press, it is a sure, albeit counterintuitive move to render the colorful cultures she observes in a cool monochrome abstraction that is the antithesis of the travelogue or the tourist brochure. Black and white relies on impeccable print quality, contrast and composition to capture a viewer’s attention. Especially in black and white photographs, the critical element is often the quintessentially photographic one of the frame. In any photograph, these edges are what freeze a moment and separate one glance from the continuum of all the possible others. For Press, the frame simultaneously establishes meaning and defines an aesthetic. In one image, a mass of backs, shoulders, jewelry and costume pushes against the frame, manifesting abundance, vitality and joy. In another, the emphatic graphic of a native kanga wrap is reinforced by its repetition on two sets of shoulders and their movement across the frame. In another, a woman seated on the ground, nursing a baby and engrossed in a book, is centered precisely within the photographic rectangle, an icon for the facing proverb lauding education for women. Annetta Miller has chosen African proverbs to accompany, expand and ground the pictures. They contribute an African voice to this American’s vision. They demonstrate and exemplify the synthesis of cultures that these gentle pictures represent, and of a photographer who found her own Africa by letting Africa find her. Alison Nordström Curator of Photographs, George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film Afterword 168 ...

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