The African Gaze // Photography, Cinema and Power

An accessible and popular introduction to African photography and film from the mid-twentieth century to the present day Drawing from archival imagery and documents, interviews with the photographers and filmmakers (in some cases family members and/ or close associates), and with contributions from writers, scholars, and curators, The African Gaze is a mapping of and an introduction to the postcolonial African moving and still image. In The African Gaze, based on the university course of the same title, author Amy Sall looks at ways in which artistic expression in photography and cinema engendered discourses concerning identity, power, and self-determination. Colonial photography deprived Africans of agency, rendered them voiceless, and classified them as subaltern. In colonial photography, African people were subjected to a physical positioning and gaze which took away their autonomy and allowed western viewers to perceive them as primitive. African photographers and filmmakers f