Train Your Gaze: A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Portrait Photography (Required Reading Range) by Angier Roswell

Author:Angier, Roswell [Angier, Roswell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474239165
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

Fig. 7.10 Untitled , 1950–55 Seydou Keïta

Fig. 7.11 Travel and See , 1999 Philip Kwame Apagya

In “Travel and See” (fig. 7.11 ), a young woman is about to board an airplane. There is no attempt to conceal the artifice in the photograph. The cartoon-like backdrop is clearly a painting, the ripples of its surface clearly perceptible. The bare wall of the photographer’s studio is visible above the top edge of the painted cloth, the edge of a brown curtain juts into the left-hand side of the scene. There is no real attempt to make the trompe l’oeil effect of the setting convincing. There is an element of genial self-mockery. The intentionally crude production values of the photograph take the edge off the depiction of a culture that has a history of want and deprivation. The photographer knows that he is representing fantasies, and he seems to want us to know that he is not entirely convinced by them.

Apagya’s work is a good-natured variation on an African tradition of studio portraiture, exemplified by Seydou Keïta, in which the resolutely solemn pride of the sitter can be taken as a subtle sign of resistance to colonial subjugation. One might read the casual gesture of goodbye in fig. 7.11 as a sign of liberation from that burden of resistance. Freed of the indignity of colonization, Apagya’s subjects no longer have a compelling reason to be solemn for the camera. The subject of figure 7.11 has become an indigenous version of the dapper European tourist, who was frequently represented in carte de visite portraits posed against a painted backdrop depicting an exotic foreign locale. Apagya has grafted this method of simulated location photography onto a new set of cultural circumstances.

In his work, the solemnity of a direct confrontation between photographer and subject has evaporated, and has been replaced by a more casual sort of encounter. There is no staring here, no clinical examination. The subject is no longer tightly contained by the environment or by a strictly frontal pose. The formal portrait has given way to a vernacular encounter. But there is nonetheless a sense of ceremony at the center of Apagya’s portrait work. As in August Sander’s images, Apagya’s subjects perform a role, the role of the newly minted African tourist and consumer. Unlike Sander’s people, they perform their role with obvious gusto.

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