For the first time in the last 14 years a year has elapsed since I have set foot on the African continent. Health issues got in the way of my travels, however my engagement with African art has not waned. Indeed during the past year I have been discovering the 1970’s photographic work of Paul Kodjo from Abidjan,  in the Ivory Coast. I am about to fly out to Abidjan to meet the artist who is now in his 80’s. I will be there when he signs the photographs that I have bought and discover the city!

The first time I saw Kodjo’s black and white photographs I found them immediately compelling. 

Working within the tradition of African traditional studio photography but pushing its boundaries, Kodjo photographed his subjects outside of the studio in staged modern domestic indoors and in the streets of Abidjan,  creating a unique record of Abidjan during  the years  of the economic boom of the early post-independence years. While blurring the lines between the real and the imaginary Kodjo used a cinematic approach and introduced movement and dramatic tensions drawing the viewer into his subjects lives: their relationships and emotions. These carefully crafted scenes  echo the shifting social and familial dynamics against the backdrop of  renewal of the urban landscape shaped by modernist design and architecture. But they also speak to the city dweller’s aspirations.

I first responded to the emotional aspect which I feel is lacking in some of contemporary photography which is more focused on the surface aesthetic and loved the sets and his talent as a portraitist.

Then as I learned about his practice which also includes photojournalism, fashion and event photography, and the condition under which these images had been brought recently to the public I was hooked! 

So hooked that I will now be showing Paul Kodjo’s works  from my collection at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York city, May 2-5, 2019. I have now turned into a curator ( with the help of curator Lydie Diakhate). The exhibition will be complemented by a panel on Saturday May 4th on Kodjo’s work. The panelists are Ananias Lèki Dago (photographer from Abidjan and Founder of Les Rencontres du Sud) ) and Antawan Byrd (art historian and assistant curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago) . The moderator is Claude Grunitzky (Founder of TRACE magazine  and TRUE Africa) .   

It was through Ananias Lèki Dago, photographer and founder of Les Rencontres du Sud ( a photographic platform in Ivory Coast in support of Ivoirian photography) , that I first came across Paul Kodjo’s work. In 2008 Paul Kodjo had asked Ananias to take on his photographic archive. It was a mixed blessing.  It was an honor, as Kodjo had been one of the  preeminent photographers of the 1970’s in Abidjan, but a huge challenge as the negatives were in very bad conditions due to terrible climatic conditions, and economic and political instability. 

“ On the day [I] returned to Abidjan, I saw a boy carrying a large trunk on his head walking towards me. When he reached me, he put his burden down at my feet. It was Paul who had sent him. I still remember the shivers that went down my spine  when he opened the trunk and I saw the roaches, spiders, and other insects, all too alive, scuttle away from their hiding places. I put my hand on the pile of negatives and old prints damaged by humidity. ….In the end, I agreed to be responsible for taking care of Paul Kodjo’s archive.” 

Ananias took the archive to Paris where the negatives were then shielded from the negative effects of the humidity but it took a few years before he had the time and the money to be able to fully start the preservation process with the help of the printer, Toros. By 2018 Ananias was able to show portions of the archive to the Musèe du Quai Branly in Paris who bought a selection.  The photographs are not vintage but contemporary prints made from this archive. As a result a few show signs of this history, others look totally pristine. As an art historian by training I liked those traces of history.  There is so much artistic work that has vanished in Africa and the history of its artistic production is still in the making. 

Ananias send me a whole lot of information.  I discovered that Kodjo was one of the few at the time that had sought formal training in photography: He had followed a correspondence course with the New York Institute of Photography when he was quite young and then continued his formal training in photography and cinematography in Paris in the late sixties.  

He was the first in the Ivory Coast and possibly (?) in West Africa  to turn to popular media for the production and dissemination of his photographic production. He adopted the roman-photo or photo-novel,  which was published in the national periodical Ivoire Dimanche with broad popular exposure. 

I did research of my own spending hours at Northwestern Herkovits library and the New York Schomburg library where I found  copies of the periodical Ivoire Dimanche which include Paul Kodjo’s roman-photos (photo-novels). Not only did I read the roman-photos but also read many articles that spoke of marriage ( infidelity, monogamy, polygamy,)  shifting aspirations, women and men at work which are all subjects raised in Kodjo’s roman-photos. 

Paul Kodjo worked in photography, in cinema; he also was an actor ( there is a wonderful picture of him playing the role of a woman in a play)  and a musician.  

Kodjo embraced contemporaneity in a way that artists do today in terms of culture, technology, and media. He deserves his rightful place in the pantheon of West African photographers.