At 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair

The Cinematic eye of West African photographer Paul Kodjo: The Ivorian Miracle in the 1970’s

Saturday May 4, 2019, 6:30 – 7:30pm

Forum Room/1-54 at Industria, 775 Washington Street, New York City

Panelists:

Ananias Leki Dago (photographer and founder of Les Rencontres du Sud)

Antawan Byrd (art historian and assistant curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago).

Moderator:

Claude Grunitzky (media and culture entrepreneur, founder of TRACE and the media platform TRUE Africa).

During this panel, we will look at what makes Paul Kodjo’s photographic practice different from other West African studio photographers of the same period. Ananias Leki Dago has worked for the last ten years at preserving Kodjo’s photographic archive and will describe the artist’s journey, while Antawan Byrd will speak of Kodjo’s cinematic approach and aesthetic engagement with visual art and popular media, in particular the photo-novel. Claude Grunitzky will bring his own experience with popular media while highlighting this unique record of Abidjan being reshaped by social cultural changes and modernist design and architecture.

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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. 

Between the rehearsal dinner and the wedding of the son of a dear friend of mine whom I have known since he was a baby I drove into Philly just a short hour away from West Chester where we were staying .

My friend who knew of my interest in African art had told me there was an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum. I was a little annoyed with myself for not knowing this already. Either the word does not get around enough about African art shows or there was something I was not doing despite being on Instagram, Facebook, and blogging on African art. Ugh! Keeping up theses days is a challenge! Maybe I was too distracted by a house project that takes me to the Luberon in France, I told myself.

Enough with that! The exhibition “Creative Africa” was a bit of a misnomer but in any case it was exhilarating. It was clearly divided spatially in five sections – photography, fashion, textiles, architecture and traditional African art – which felt like mini exhibitions. Visually it was engrossing: the displays were fantastic and easy to navigate. I could immerse myself into the manifestations of each medium and come out with a better understanding and appreciation of each artistic expression and perspective.

Holland Cotter of the New York Times wrote a praising review, which I encourage you to read. I will mostly focus on images here.

Here are some of the photographic works from Three Photographers/Six cities that caught my attention:

Seydou Camara from Mali who has been photographing ancient Islamic texts in Timbuktu since 2009. A trading post for centuries Timbuktu is a center of Islamic scholarship. Since the town has been overtaken by extremist these books have risked destruction.

Ananias Leki Dago, Soweto, 2008, from his series Shebeen Blues

Ananias Leki Dago, Bamako, 2006 from his series Bamako Crosses

Akinbode Akinbiyi, Lagos, 2003-4 from his series Lagos: All Roads. He captures the chaotic energy of Lagos.

Vlisco: “Africa Fashion on a Global Stage” which showed the many Dutch wax prints designed and made by Vlisco for the African and Diaspora markets was a visual treat. Risking the ire of many who feel that these Dutch wax prints are not truly representative of the Creative Africa, or authentically African and a product of the colonial history of the continent this exhibition unabashedly embraces the complex and global aspect of the production of African fashion. I for one have no problem with this. To me this aesthetic is truly representative of contemporary African taste.  I am of the post postcolonial mind where one accepts the bad and good of ones history and looks towards the future knowing that things are never simple. After all  European cubism  could not have come without the influence of African aesthetics. Picasso is deeply indebted to African sculpture. I am a mutt myself, my father having come from Bulgaria that was for 400 years under the rule of the Ottomans. But I am also American and grew up in France.  As a result I am not so attached to the idea of cultural authenticity. You can read more about the complex history of Dutch Wax print here.

Designer Inge Van Lierop 2016

Designer  Manish Arora 2016

This pattern is known as Love Bomb and Dynamite. In Togo it is known as Wounded Heart.

Conceived and made outside of Africa these prints that are designed for the taste of the African consumer, and once in Africa are named by the local African women who find inspiration for the names in proverbs, current events, religion and material culture. Once named the prints acquire social meaning.

Designer Nico Verbart. Title of fabric ” Chaussures de Yayi, Boni.” after President Yayi Boni

The Architecture of Francis Kere: Building for Community.

I left the saturated colors of the wax fabric for another engrossing and all embracing installation and just as colorful made out of parachute cord material by the architect Francis Kéré .

Grounding his work on the idea of community and shared space the layout of this soft structure here was arrived through taking into account the architectural grid of Philadelphia and the organic development of a Burkina Faso village. True to Francis Kéré’s belief, which reflect local belief that survival depends on the strength and unity of the community the exhibition was the result of a collaboration between Kéré Architecture, the Museum team and the UPenn undergraduates.

Followed a room full of photographs, architectural maquetttes, and videos recording Francis Kéré’s work in Africa, and in particular the construction of the Lycée Schorge School in Koudougou, Burkina Faso which was done without the use of heavy machinery. The emphasis was on the communal aspect of all the work done.