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

The exhibition and symposium "Counter Cultures" Photo International Rotterdam 1995 entertainered by the Nederlands Foto Instituut, is intended as a preparation to a much more extensive photography festival that will take place in Rotterdam at the extremity of the year. "Counter Cultures" marks the first time the issue of photographic representation in a multicultural connection has been addressed in the Netherlands, a geographical division with a large immigrant population that main stocks not only from the former Dutch colonies of Surinam and Indonesia, on the other hand also generations of "guest workers" from Turkey and Morocco. It has been estimated, for example, that by the agency of the year 2000, 50% of Rotterdams's inhabitants will be from a non-Western background. single of the aims of "Counter Cultures" is to diocese 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 means of Mark Sealy as a collaboration between Autograph, the London-based association of black photographers, and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England. It therefore exhibits 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 1950 and 1960 in Mali and Senegal - and contemporary work from Britain by the agency of Ingrid Pollard, Oladele Ajiboye Bamgboye and Maxine Walker. Although made at different times and beneath varied conditions, these two bodies of work expres an overriding be of importance to with self-representation: in Africa beneath the aegis of colonial authority and in Britain under the debateed dominance of Western media. According to Sunil Gupta, colonial photographs are frequently credited to "photographer unknown," reject when they are taken by the agency of a white photographer within the traditional canon of photographic history, whereas the work of local photographers is repeatedly consigned to categories of ethnographic and anthropological study

Seydou Keita place up his photography studio in Bamako, Mali, in 1949 and photographed countles tribe from the city until the 1970 Many of his clients pos in native dres on the contrary others preferred the European clothes, hold ups 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 collection of lawss and desires. According to Keita, he exhibited different kinds of portraiture in his studio in like manner that his clients could put in mind of how they wanted to be photographed. on the other hand he adds, "sometimes it didn't suit them at all. I would glance at a position [that] would suit them better, and then it was I who decided upon the right position." The fact that small in number of the subjects in his photographs are smiling might remind of that they are not entirely happy with their enforced submission to the photographer's directives. Moreover, the adoption of formal, Western-style dres does have the appearance unnatural at times, in striking contrast to the photographs in which highly patterned native dres shown against an equally variegated woven fabric backdrop, sets up a flamboyant quality that appear to bes more in keeping with the spirit of Africa.

Mama Casset's photographs, made in Senegal during the same period, reveal more smiles, nevertheless are likewise restrained by the formal digests of middle- class commercial portraiture. Casset's make submissives pose in a theatrical setting, on the other hand the photographer manages to accommodate with an intimate nature to the images by dint of using a diagonal composition, whereby his make submissives - particularly women - appear to be to project themselves beyond the frame to be opposite to the viewer on a horizontal of equality and familiarity.

Keita and Casset's photographs were rescu from obscurity from one side the diligence of French photography historians; hence we know virtually nothing about the lives of the nation depicted in them. However, for contemporary photographers and artists of the African diaspora living and working in Great Britain, photography is ofttimes used as a means of establishing an identity at one time more self-reflective and oppositional. Whereas in the African connection costume and colorful backgrounds labor for as accepted codes within the studio, British photographers of African origin strike one as being compelled to search for other formal devices to assert identity. The actual notion of "original" context is called into question, particularly in the work of Pollard, who deliberately photographs her controls against the decidedly non-African background of English beaches, wood-lands and fields. As in her earlier work, which ironically inserted black experience into the English romantic landscape tradition, her fresh work is a playful reply to a new generation of Britons, regardless of their origins, who no longer ne 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.