When I was young, Africa and its people were represented to me through two distinct sets of images. The first, delivered by National Geographic and other anthropological sources, were the cliched photographs of tribesmen gripping spears in their hands and bare-breasted woman balancing baskets on their heads. The second sort of pictures I saw, these from Oxfam and other international aid organizations, were of dirty and undernourished children, abdomens distended from malnutrition, a terrible pleading in their young eyes. These images, taken by and for Westerners, fixed themselves so firmly in my memory that they remain there to this day.
I don't believe I ever saw a collection of photographs taken by and for Africans until this past weekend, when I visited the exhibition "Joy of Life -- Two Photographers from Africa: J. D'Okhai Ojeikere and Malick Sidibe." The show comprises some 60 silver-gelatin prints and is now showing at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art.
These elder West African photographers are roughly the same age: Ojeikere was born in 1930 in Nigeria, and Sidibe was born in 1935 in French Sudan, now Mali. The pictures shown here are all black and white, taken in the 1960s and '70s. Both men still live and work in their home countries. There, the similarity ends.