There is an old belief that the camera steal souls through pictures. Even the language around it speaks to this – images are either “taken” or “captured”. From a colonial standpoint, photography captured images of people and places considered “other” and warped them through a Eurocentric lens. The Tate Modern’s breathtaking exhibition, A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography, counters the camera as an imperial device and instead brings to the fore the eclectic approaches to photography of 36 photographers from across the continent, and across several generations.
Split into three sections across seven rooms, the exhibition is a stunning meander through today’s perspectives on African history, culture and identity. The moodily lit rooms of Identity and Tradition feel like an aesthetic wink at the ways portraiture is traditionally presented in the west. True, there are portraits of kings and queens courtesy of George Osodi’s Nigerian Monarchs (2012-22), but these are placed alongside the sweeping large-scale textile of Zohra Opoku’s Queens and Kings (2017). Royalty is recontextualised as an ancient symbol of communal structures and practices.
