Svea Josephy

(Svea Josephy is a professor of photography at the Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town, South Africa. She is only teaching as a visiting lecturer this summer semester.) This course looks at African photographies and explores how the medium has documented, challenged, and reshaped African identities and fostered modes of resistance, refusal, fugitivity and freedoms. While the focus is Southern African photographies, the course makes reference to photographies from West, North and East Africa and the African diaspora. We will frame the photography within a colonial / apartheid past and make reference to liberation movements and struggles. In looking back we grapple with photography’s past as a tool of modernism and colonialism in order to understand how people and lands were collected, captured, dominated and framed by colonial photography. In looking to the present, we try to understand contemporary African photographies in this moment, and how they shape the future as we fantasize and imagine how things could be. This course will include a critical discussion of colonization and the rise of nationalism during the independence movements and will look at the post-independence decades, post coloniality and decoloniality. While this course is primarily a theory / art history course, space is made for a number of practical activities which are linked to what students will be learning in the theory aspect of the course. Through dialogue, debate, discussion and practice this course provides a forum for critical thinking on African photography and how photographers from Africa have told their stories. --- (Svea Josephy is a professor of photography at the Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town, South Africa. She is only teaching as a visiting lecturer this summer semester.) This course looks at African photographies and explores how the medium has documented, challenged, and reshaped African identities and fostered modes of resistance, refusal, fugitivity and freedoms. While the focus is Southern African photographies, the course makes reference to photographies from West, North and East Africa and the African diaspora. We will frame the photography within a colonial / apartheid past and make reference to liberation movements and struggles. In looking back we grapple with photography’s past as a tool of modernism and colonialism in order to understand how people and lands were collected, captured, dominated and framed by colonial photography. In looking to the present, we try to understand contemporary African photographies in this moment, and how they shape the future as we fantasize and imagine how things could be. This course will include a critical discussion of colonization and the rise of nationalism during the independence movements and will look at the post-independence decades, post coloniality and decoloniality. While this course is primarily a theory / art history course, space is made for a number of practical activities which are linked to what students will be learning in the theory aspect of the course. Through dialogue, debate, discussion and practice this course provides a forum for critical thinking on African photography and how photographers from Africa have told their stories.