In ‘Double Exposures’, multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator Ethel-Ruth Tawe responds to Africa in the Photobook, a platform and collection initiated by photographer and (photo)historian Ben Krewinkel. The platform is concerned with changing visual representation of Africa as expressed through the medium of the photobook. The artist and collector investigate the tensions which lie within the folds of pages, the afterlives of images, their captions, and contexts, paying particular attention to books from the 1880s to 1990s. From the early use of propaganda in a troubling colonial archive, to postcolonial technologies of self-expression and double consciousness, these works ask questions with care about the lens from which photobooks are read today, bending their chronological timeline to extrapolate and reframe. The exhibition unfolds as a prelude to a contributor essay in Krewinkel’s forthcoming book, and was first presented at the recently-concluded 2023 PhotoIreland Festival in Dublin.

Born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Tawe uses collage, pigments, words, installation, still and moving image to explore memory and identity in Africa and its diaspora. She was a recipient of the Magnum Foundation 2022 Counter Histories grant for her project ‘Image Frequency Modulation’ and earlier this year also exhibited at ‘Afterimages’ with Rele Gallery Lagos. Here, she gives Nataal her walkthrough of ‘Double Exposures’ at PhotoIreland Festival.

OPACITY (2023)

Interactive Display, Photographic Reprints

A counter-study on confrontational practices of visibility in colonial photobooks. Using 48 replicated plates in their original sequence from a portfolio book on people of the Malange and Lunda region of Angola, this work illustrates common elements of compelled photography and propaganda of the time. The author ironically presents his ‘photo study’ as fact, with “no pretension of an ethnographic study”, which this work refutes and redacts. The exposed plates with turned-backs are read as unintended signals of refusal and misidentification.

Guests are invited to have a haptic encounter, interact and touch (lift the transparent sheets), to reveal the images beneath, but only after posing the new pertinent questions they are now masked with.

DOUBLE EXPOSURES (I, II, II)

Digital Collage

The three Double Exposure collages, which frame the entry point of this exhibition, are a juxtaposition of image-making practices across time and space in Africa. In photography, a double exposure is the superimposition of two or more exposures (visual data) to create a single image. Bringing these images in close proximity highlights the frictions, optical illusions, and unintended continuums that exist in the process of postcolonial self-determination.

TYPING… (2023)

Single Channel Video

“Typing…” is a quiet/silent film on embodied gestures of refusal. The moving-image animates an ethnographic still-portrait approach, to reveal signals of negation in the discomforting positions African sitters were often subjected to. It sits in contrast to the word ‘typing…’, a written text and ellipsis alluding to the waiting of a message that never arrives, and the pseudoscientific attempt to catalog African people into rigid ‘types’ for the purpose of dehumanisation. Early ethnographic photobooks functioned algorithmically, with a set of rules for surveillance and seriality in the colonial machine, muting the interior lives of the many depicted. What are the afterlives of these algorithms today, in the age of artificial intelligence?

CON[TEXT] (2023)

Triptych, Photographic Reprints

Con[text] dissects the anatomy and evolution of African photobooks within the framework of a hyperpresent subject: beautification. The triptych displays distinct and shifting perspectives on a timeline, from the height of colonial conquest, independence era, and into a contemporary conversation. It calls for increased attention to the text (the context) of photobooks and their knowledge producers.

TIME-SPIRAL: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Data visualisation of four key eras in the history of photobooks, examining their circulation and evolution through the bending of a timeline. A selection of exemplary book titles per era is provided as an introduction to typical practices of the time. This bibliography is a work-in-progress and can be delved into via the AITP online portal.

All works and words courtesy of the artist. Thanks to Yaa Addae.