ART on View ART This fall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting an exhibition that foregrounds Africa’s rich and diverse art production focusing on photography. On view from August 31, 2015, through January 17, 2016, In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa chronicles one hundred years of portrait photography beginning with some of the earliest African pioneers, active in the 1870s, and concluding with more recent expressions from the 1970s. Through a selection of eighty portraits from the Met’s collection in the form of photographs, postcards, real-photo postcards, and original negatives, the exhibition seeks to expand our understanding of photographic portraiture, rendering the broad variety of these practices across West Africa, from Senegal to Cameroon, and from Mali to Gabon.1 Drawing upon original research by African photography 82 specialist Dr. Giulia Paoletti, In and Out of the Studio presents both professional and amateur photographers, some of whom are being exhibited for the fi rst time.2 Among these are renowned artists, such as Mali- In and Out of the Studio Photographic Portraits from West Africa By Yaëlle Biro and Giulia Paoletti FIG. 1 (right): Unknown Artist (Senegal), Portrait of a Woman, c. 1910. Gelatin silver print from glass negative, 1975. 16.5 x 11.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Susan Mullin Vogel, 2015. This is one of the few early twentieth-century glass negatives to have survived in Senegal to this day. While the identity of the photographer is unknown to us, this formal portrait of an elegant woman is probably the work of a professional. In a culture where the body had to be covered by clouds of crisp textiles, the face, hands, and feet were often the only visible body parts. The hands, in particular, play an active role in the composition. The gesture allows the sitter to display an extensive array of jewelry: a silver ring, fi ligreework bracelets on both wrists, two necklaces, earrings, and golden pendants decorating her coiffure, called nguuka. FIG. 2 (left): George A. G. and Albert George Lutterodt (Ghanaian, active from 1876), Five Men, c. 1880–85. Albumen silver print from glass negative. 15.2 x 1.5 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, Ross Family Fund Gift, 1999 (1999.184.1). In 1876, George A. G. Lutterodt (1850/5–c. 1904) opened his studio with his son, Albert George, in Accra. George and his two brothers went on to train many apprentices and studio owners as photographers. The original stamp visible on the back of this rare portrait reveals that it was taken early in their practice, c. 1880.3 The sophistication of the backdrop combined with the complexity of the mise-en-scène, with each of the four male attendants wearing different clothes and displaying specifi c hand gestures, point to the importance of the central sitter. ans Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, as well as earlier and lesser-known practitioners such as George Augustus Godfrey Lutterodt and Alex A. Acolatse, active in Ghana and Togo at the turn of the century. Often traveling within and across national borders, these photographers framed both urban and rural communities against their signature backdrops, outdoors in the open landscape and within intimate interiors. Versatile and promiscuous, photography allowed artists and patrons alike to express their articulation of what modernity looked like—a concept that was constantly reinvented (fi g. 1). Contrary to common assumptions, photography in Africa was not a monopoly of Europeans. When photography arrived on the continent in the 1840s, the technology was appropriated by local communities, which adapted it according to preexisting visual codes and traditions. By the 1880s, West African, Asian, European, and African American photographers had established temporary and permanent studios along the Atlantic coast catering to the local elite (fi gs. 2 and 3).
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