The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power, by Amy Sall. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2025. 288 pages.
IN AMY SALL’S FIRST BOOK, The African Gaze, it is immediately apparent that the author has a corrective mission on her mind: to establish the cultural sovereignty of Africans by prioritizing images of Africans made by Africans, reversing the damage (sociopolitical, psychological, and economic) wrought by colonial ethnography in its documentation of African subjects. In such depictions, as we now know, the role imposed on African sitters was to be the background against which destructive European stereotypes and assumptions could be projected. Yet as we see in Mountaga Dembélé’s portraits, featuring elegantly dressed and bejeweled sitters who wished to be captured at their most decadent, or Jean Depara’s depiction of 1960s Congo, featuring similarly dressed men on a dance floor in Kinshasa moving in step, the photographers and filmmakers surveyed in The African Gaze assert that they have something to say about themselves, how they self-identify, and how they want the world to see them. They acknowledge that yes, like the peoples of any other continent, Africans encounter problems, but they are not naturally disposed to or defined by societal ills; they have communities to build and care for, legacies to establish, celebrations to share, resistances to stage.
The African Gaze is a who’s who of some of the most important African photographers and filmmakers since the mid-twentieth century. Comprising biographical entries on twenty-five photographers and twenty-five filmmakers, accompanied by introductory essays by Mamadou Diouf, Zoé Samudzi, and Yasmina Price and a selection of interviews, the book is a natural progression of Sall’s trajectory as a writer, teacher, and self-taught archivist. In 2015, Sall founded SUNU Journal, an online platform devoted to African visual culture and its history; the following year, she developed a course on African imagemakers called “The African Gaze” as an adjunct professor at the New School. She belongs to a “new” generation of scholars, curators, and critics, including Emmanuel Iduma and M. Neelika Jayawardane, dedicated to highlighting African photographers and filmmakers and broadening public knowledge of their work, building on the legacies of historians and scholars—such as Okwui Enwezor, Aboubakar Sanogo, Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Lifongo Vetinde, and Manthia Diawara—who produced groundbreaking scholarship in this field.
In each biographical text, Sall situates the artist’s work in its social and political context, but also in relation to the broader histories of Africa’s photographic representation. Consider Nigerien auteur Oumarou Ganda’s first film, Cabascabo, 1968, based on his experience of returning home to Niger after fighting with the French army in Indochina. Sall tells us it can be read as a rebuttal to French director Jean Rouch’s 1958 ethnofictional film Moi, un noir, which focused on the experiences of young Nigerien migrant workers in Abidjan, Ivory Coast—among them Ganda, who, Sall writes, saw the film as “a distorted construction of his lived experience.”
Consider too the searing work of South African photographer Ernest Cole, who documented Black South Africans in the clutches of apartheid. According to Sall, he brings to these images an emotional truth made possible simply because he himself was experiencing the very things he was documenting. Cole depicts people in the townships in quotidian scenes of just existing, talking, or navigating the tightly guarded confines of the apartheid system: For instance, we see hundreds of them on a train, squished tightly together, without seats, an image Sall smartly selects for a center spread. Cole’s arresting images, collected in his 1967 book House of Bondage, are an indictment of apartheid but also a testament of South Africans carrying on, in their way, beyond even the limits apartheid had set for them. Sall reminds us it is important that we see this: a South African photographer capturing the conditions he was himself experiencing, through a lens that was not sensationalist or voyeuristic. She makes clear that despite recently trendy calls in the media for Africans to tell their own stories, we have been doing so all along.
The African Gaze alsoreminds the reader that the artists selected here, and many of their contemporaries, did not make works with the white-cube gallery or an art market—for which Sall shows a barely concealed disdain throughout the book—in mind. (Accordingly, Sall made a point of working directly with artists or their estates to source images for the book, ensuring that they, rather than any intermediaries, would receive licensing fees directly.) Sall explained to me that these photographs served a sacred function that is just as important, if not more so, than a market value set by galleries and auction houses thousands of miles away. The “souvenirs,” as Sall called them (as did Nigerien photographer Phillipe Koudjina, who named his Niamey studio Photo-Souvenir), created by portrait photographers like Rachidi Bissiriou, Mama Casset, and Augustt Azaglo Cornélius Yawo, were mementos, documentation of special moments or even perfectly ordinary days in the sitters’ lives that they wanted to immortalize. They had value because of what they meant to the sitters, who carried them in photo albums, wallets, and heirloom storage containers.
Sall makes clear that despite recently trendy calls in the media for Africans to tell their own stories, we have been doing so all along.
This conception of value stands in contrast to other attempts to recuperate African studio photography in terms of aesthetic merit alone. For example, Koudjina was the subject of a 2006 documentary by Dutch filmmakers Paul Cohen and Martijn van Haalen, Photo Souvenir, in which the directors suggest that Koudjina’s photographs have “artistic value” because of their similarity to worksbeing sold for vast sums in the art market (at a time he was struggling financially).
Yet the label Sall applies to such images, “vernacular photography”—a category introduced by the Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski in the ’60s and later codified by art historian and curator Geoffrey Batchen to encompass the various kinds of photographs created for purposes other than fine art—feels inadequate. “Vernacular photography” suggests something informal, amateur, even lesser. Even if Batchen’s intention in coining the term was to elevate this “other” photography within scholarly discourse, the effect is ultimately the opposite. Like many terms created in the West and exported to the rest of the world, it doesn’t fully capture the context in which these images were created, assuming a sharp divide between artistic and commercial or familial purposes. It seemed to me, given these artists’ transgressive vision, that an alternative framing was necessary, one that centered how Nigeriens (and other Africans) are reckoning with Koudjina’s work or how Ivorians are doing the same for their countryman Désiré Ecaré’s films.
Nevertheless, Sall does highlight relationships of influence and mentorship between African artists. For example, we learn of the monumental influence of Dembélé, a Malian photographer born in 1919 whose work preceded and informed the likes of the more famous Seydou Keïta, as well as other photographers who were his mentees. We can trace a culture of tutelage, a reminder that the art-world stars embraced by institutions and collectors did not emerge out of a cultural vacuum. We also are reminded why, given our context, Africans do not have the luxury of making art for art’s sake—why each work must, according to Souleymane Cissé, “leave great traces” of history, reflect back on society, and help people to see. As Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop writes of filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, these works possess an attitude that suggests “between-ourselves-we-can-very-well-tell-the truth”: bringing to bear an honesty about the struggles our societies face without demonizing or disparaging ourselves.
Historians may find much to complain about in Sall’s book: West African or Francophone artists are perhaps overrepresented, while East Africans are barely included. They may wonder about the scant inclusion of women, which Sall admits in her preface is a reflection of the difficulty in tracking down information on their lives and works rather than an absence of female imagemakers. Yet the book is better, actually, for its economy. It need not be an exhaustive encyclopedia, nor does Sall claim to be creating one. If anything, the title The African Gaze is an inconvenience, because there is no such thing. Sall herself acknowledges that the term is expedient, a way of broadly encapsulating the wealth of divergent photographic philosophies across the continent under a collective heading. Rather than giving a sense that photographs by Africans can be reduced to any one definition, the book captures the range of cultures, places, and perspectives it encompasses.
In his 2021 Art in America essay “Post-Continental,” Iduma proposes that it is time for the work of contemporary photographers from Africa to be presented and categorized not on the basis of geography alone, but rather in light of their contributions to the medium at large. Although it shouldn’t be the case, what Iduma envisions seems some way off. We will get there. Until then, maybe instead of “the African gaze,” we should think of a Yoruba gaze, a Bamako gaze, or even a Sembène gaze.
Ayodeji Rotinwa is a writer and critic who documents visual art and cultural production across West Africa.
