Through a Slideshow Darkly

Kenya Mon 11-10-2010

Through a Slideshow Darkly
By Frank Whalley | EastAfrican.co.ke

If you arrange your family photos as a slideshow on your home computer, you will be on familiar ground when visiting the latest exhibition at the old Provincial Commissioner’s office, now renamed the Nairobi Gallery.

Illegal fire arms are put on fire at Uhuru gardens, Nairobi Kenya | Image by Antony Kaminju

The pictures are shown not in rows on the wall but as a series of projected images — slide shows — with each artist exhibiting around 12 photographs in their own area, and each picture in the loop being on screen for around 10 seconds … which, when you come to think of it, is about the time you spend looking at any picture in an exhibition in any case.

But if like me, you tend to take in a show with a first sweep and then go back for a more considered look, then it’s still simple enough: You wait in front of a screen for that picture to come around so you can take a second look.

Called Mwangalio Tofauti (loosely, A new perspective) and produced jointly by the Goethe-Institut and the National Museums of Kenya, the show is on until November 12 and it is well worth a visit.

The signature artist, the one whose work is used on the flyers, is the fashion photographer Barbara Minishi who shows portraits of people wearing the recycled C-Stunners eyewear of Cyrus Kabiru.

He features as one of the models, too, as does the painter Michael Soi, but most effective as photographs, I think, are those of a Japanese girl whose serene white face, floating like a spectre on a black background, proves to be the perfect foil for the heavy and convoluted specs.

The installation artist Miriam Syowia Kyambi devotes her space to close-ups of textiles —something to do with the cultural fabric of Kenyan society — while Sam Hopkins provides an intimate look at some of the dead insects found floating in his parents’ swimming pool.

On one level we have seen something similar on the Nat Geo channel (the unexpected beauty of ill-considered trifles when seen highly magnified) and on another level, a dry comment on the inequalities of a society in which some people have little water to drink, while others have enough to swim in.

Another photographer adept at catching small things and making them significant is Wambui Mwangi.

Her selection includes a focus on women’s hands — holding rice, clutching a bag of beans, stirring the cooking pot — that speaks volumes about nurturing and care. Or was I just feeling a little peckish before lunch?

Four of the photographers are shown in pairs, allowing viewers to compare their different approaches to common themes.

Sharing one room are Jim Chuchu and James Muriuki. Both add power to their photographs by working (like Barbara Minishi) in black and white.

And both are fascinated by the abstract patterns that can be created from architecture and street furniture.

For Jim Chuchu with his Concrete Crystals, it is the outlines of the buildings and their parts that form shapes as complex as snowflakes or as simple as a star. For James Muriuki it is the criss-cross of telegraph wires and the crazy angles of the poles supporting them that fascinates his meticulous eye.

Architecture is the trigger too for the filmmaker Jacob Barua, who in his series Light and Form offers exactly what it says on the tin: Elements of buildings in which the interplay of light and shadow defines his subjects in new and exciting ways.

The most notable pairing, however, is that of Antony Kaminju and Boniface Mwangi. Both work at the coalface of photojournalism.

Antony Kaminju, who was the Nation group picture editor for some five years — from 2000-2005 — before moving to South Africa, shows the lives of hip, urban blacks in the Soweto Township in a series called Black Diamonds.That‘s the name given to the post-apartheid youths with a good bank balance to spend on entertainment.

They meet on Sunday afternoons to eat nyama choma, to show off their cars and to compete in an informal fashion parade. The smiles glitter, the clothes are freshly ironed, the shades are by D&G, and Kaminju’s pictures reflect their wellbeing and contentment.

Boniface Mwangi, CNN Africa Photojournalist of the Year for 2008, plies a darker trade. He is at the seedier end of social documentary with his keening views of Nairobi nightlife.

Here is the girl in a micro skirt strutting beneath a street lamp, here the collapsing interior of a miraa den, and here a dancer giving the camera a defiant grin; half her teeth missing. Someone is dragged towards us, presumably under arrest.

These are compelling photographs — the more so because they speak directly to us of people and events we read about, and sometimes of those we know. It is happening in a street near us, every damn night.

It is in this room that the exhibition finally gained its power: The fulcrum on which whimsy, fantasy and decoration were outweighed by something far more meaty … real people living out their lives.

By seeing them, we see ourselves. And by seeing ourselves we become more aware of our responsibilities — and our rights.

Posted By: Diana Achieng

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Your Comments

David Blumenkrantz: It's great to hear about these types of home-grown exhibitions of African photography. My only complaint is that you don't show enough examples of the work you are writing about!

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