Photo Book Pick of the Day: Events of the Social, Portraiture and Collective Agency

Events of the Social:
Portraiture and Collective Agency

African Photography from The Walther Collection

This delightful photo-essay catalog focuses on themes of gender, race, class and social change across three generations of African photography.

Events of the Social is a comprehensive investigation into photographic works by artists from the African continent and its diaspora. Taking the politics of the “colonial gaze” as its starting point, the book looks at the diverse complexity of the nineteenth-century archive through a selection of vintage portraits, cartes de visite, postcards and album pages.

Three generations of African artists from the 1940s till now then chart the changing features of African societies through portraiture, exploring notions of the self, gender, sexuality, race, social status and politics. The book also examines landscape and the built environment, showing how architecture and spatial planning convey social order and ideology while reflecting experiences of migration, colonialism, war and industrialization.

Another group of artists, born after the mid-1970s, explores issues of social identity, lineage, questions of belonging and personal experiences. Artists featured include Sammy Baloji, Jodi Bieber, Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, David Goldblatt, Seydou Keïta, Zanele Muholi, Malick Sidibé and Mikhael Subotzky.

Co-published with The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm / New York

(Reviewer’s note: contains some nude images)

Events of the Social: Portraiture and Collective Agency African Photography from The Walther Collection

• Edited with text by Elvira Dyangani Ose
• Book Design: Gabrielle Guy
• 200 pages, 232 images
• 6.75 x 9 in. / 17 x 23 cm
• Softcover
• US$ 45.00 / € 30.00
• ISBN 978-3-96999-087-2