History, Identity, Imagination

An exhibition of contemporary African photography is on at the Tate Modern in London. This writer left not with a sense of a completed narrative, but with a feeling of energized possibility, and the rush of discovering fresh, reconfigured horizons.

- By Alastair Hagger

How to find the common in the uncommon, the unifying oneness in a disparate whole? Can Africa’s thousands of cultures and languages ever be distilled into a comprehensible photographic representation of an entire continent’s creative impulse? This is the challenge courageously and pugnaciously accepted by the exhibition A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography running through to January 2024 at the Tate Modern gallery in London.

“African photography is recognizable, to those aware of the history of studio portraiture, or of the way Africa is portrayed in documentary photography,” says the exhibition’s curator, Osei Bonsu. “But I was interested in all of the ways in which artists, particularly over the last 10 to 15 years, had completely blown open the perception of what African photography might be; ways that challenged and confounded many of those assumptions about the relationship between photography and the continent. So it was less about this idea of an overarching survey, as this slightly amorphous and impossible-to-define area of activity, and more about locating multiple perspectives that would come together to illuminate some of the key topics and ideas that these artists are engaged with.”