Encountering culture - photo exhibit at the Nederlands Foto Institut, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

The exhibition and symposium "Counter Cultures," Photo International Rotterdam 1995, hosted by the Nederlands Foto Instituut, is intended as a prelude to a much more extensive photography festival that will take place in Rotterdam at the end of the year. "Counter Cultures" marks the first time the issue of photographic representation in a multicultural context has been addressed in the Netherlands, a country with a large immigrant population that stems not only from the former Dutch colonies of Surinam and Indonesia, but also generations of "guest workers" from Turkey and Morocco. It has been estimated, for example, that by the year 2000, 50% of Rotterdams's inhabitants will be from a non-Western background. One of the aims of "Counter Cultures" is to see what lessons can be learned from other countries in which efforts have already been made within photographic communities regarding cultural identity and difference.

The exhibition was curated by Mark Sealy as a collaboration between Autograph, the London-based association of black photographers, and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England. It therefore represents a specifically British response to the issue of black cultural representation, particularly in relation to the genre of portraiture. The exhibition combines historical work from Africa - studio portraits made during the 1950s and 1960s in Mali and Senegal - and contemporary work from Britain by Ingrid Pollard, Oladele Ajiboye Bamgboye and Maxine Walker. Although made at different times and under varied conditions, these two bodies of work express an overriding concern with self-representation: in Africa under the aegis of colonial rule, and in Britain under the contested dominance of Western media. According to Sunil Gupta, colonial photographs are often credited to "photographer unknown," except when they are taken by a white photographer within the traditional canon of photographic history, whereas the work of local photographers is often consigned to categories of ethnographic and anthropological study.

Seydou Keita set up his photography studio in Bamako, Mali, in 1949 and photographed countless people from the city until the 1970s. Many of his clients posed in native dress, but others preferred the European clothes, props and accessories that Keita made available. The studio thus became a space where the "self" could be positioned in an ambiguous realm between public and private. Establishing self-identity became a question of negotiating codes and desires. According to Keita, he exhibited different kinds of portraiture in his studio so that his clients could suggest how they wanted to be photographed. But, he adds, "sometimes it didn't suit them at all. I would suggest a position [that] would suit them better, and then it was I who decided on the right position." The fact that few of the subjects in his photographs are smiling might suggest that they are not entirely happy with their enforced submission to the photographer's directives. Moreover, the adoption of formal, Western-style dress does seem unnatural at times, in striking contrast to the photographs in which highly patterned native dress, shown against an equally variegated cloth backdrop, sets up a flamboyant quality that seems more in keeping with the spirit of Africa.

Mama Casset's photographs, made in Senegal during the same period, reveal more smiles, yet are likewise restrained by the formal codes of middle- class commercial portraiture. Casset's subjects pose in a theatrical setting, but the photographer manages to lend an intimate nature to the images by using a diagonal composition, whereby his subjects - particularly women - seem to project themselves beyond the frame to confront the viewer on a level of equality and familiarity.

Keita and Casset's photographs were rescued from obscurity through the diligence of French photography historians; hence we know virtually nothing about the lives of the people depicted in them. However, for contemporary photographers and artists of the African diaspora living and working in Great Britain, photography is often used as a means of establishing an identity at once more self-reflective and oppositional. Whereas in the African context costume and colorful backgrounds serve as accepted codes within the studio, British photographers of African origin seem compelled to search for other formal devices to assert identity. The very notion of "original" context is called into question, particularly in the work of Pollard, who deliberately photographs her subjects against the decidedly non-African background of English beaches, woods and fields. As in her earlier work, which ironically inserted black experience into the English romantic landscape tradition, her new work is a playful response to a new generation of Britons, regardless of their origins, who no longer need to be reminded of their "roots." Pollard's series of almost life-sized black and white photographs of children of various ethnic origins dispenses with backgrounds altogether.

Walker's self-portraits explore the construction of the self, or rather of a plurality of selves, through the use of wigs, clothes and make-up. While seeming to adopt the quadruple format of the photo-booth portrait, conventionally employed for official documents such as identity cards and passports, Walker also alludes to the performative aspects of photo-booth photography in which subjects act as though in front of a mirror, trying out different identities and poses. Walker clearly sees the British black woman's identity as being no longer singular, but a hybrid.

By contrast, the Nigerian-born Bamgboye seems more concerned with the dilemma of a stereotyped black male sexuality and the extent to which this border can be crossed. Some of Bamgboye's photographs employ multiple exposure to record the traces of his fleeting body in a domestic setting; in others he combines signs of the feminine, represented by pieces of colored gauze, with sexualized images of his own body. Two videotapes shown during the symposium but not included in the exhibition deal with the artist's relationships with white women. These personal "video diaries" include intimate conversations between Bamgboye and his white, Scottish girlfriend, poignantly suggesting that racial and gender divisions are still very evident in Britain, chasms as difficult to cross as those separating immigrant Africans from their homeland. Bamgboye's video document of his return to Nigeria in 1994, screened at the exhibition, reveals the ambiguity he felt as he was caught between a sense of attachment and loss.

As Jan Nederveen Pieterse, the author of White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (1992), points out, the notion of "crossing boundaries" is currently being exploited by the advertising industry, particularly in a "borderless" Europe. Whether libidinal consumerism and a global economy will really erase ethnic and gender differences remains to be seen. New hybrid cultures that seem to be emerging, particularly in Britain, may well be the result of what Gupta terms "disrupted borders," but so far they have yet to appear in the rest of Europe. Black artists and photographers in the Netherlands have achieved nothing like the visibility enjoyed by their colleagues in Britain (they were invisible at the Foto Instituut symposium). There is no Dutch equivalent to Autograph, or the lively debates that characterize British cultural studies. The Dutch agenda on multiculturalism is largely dominated by white paternalism, not to mention a "repressive tolerance" for which Holland is famous. Immigrants (and lately, asylum-seekers) have generally been subjected to a policy of diffusion and assimilation, thereby preventing the establishment of difference upon which the affirmation of a distinct cultural identity depends. A culture cannot be called "counter" if there is nothing to define it against. Perhaps by next year's Photo International, Rotterdam will begin to address this problem.

MICHAEL GIBBS is an artist and critic living in Amsterdam. He is a contributing editor of Perspektief.

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