Nearly all the photographs were taken in this century, and most of the photographers were born in the final quarter of the last century. These are photographs in the present tense or close to it. The youngest photographer here, Fatima Zohra Serri, was born in 1995. Her “We Run This Mother” — yes, the title derives from Beyoncé — manages to simultaneously touch upon sexuality, globalism, feminism, and Muslim fundamentalism, doing so with deadpan wit.
Serri is Morrocan. Oupa Nkosi, who’s South African, is at the other end of the continent from her and, as a documentarian, works in a different tradition. Part of the variety in “Africa Rising” isn’t just a matter of the photographers’ nationalities. It’s also owing to approach, technique, emotion, genre. Presentation emphasizes this diversity. The pictures aren’t mounted uniformly. Although many are framed, some are not; ditto for matting. “Africa Rising” offers no party line, whether visual, aesthetic, or thematic.
Nkosi has three photographs in the exhibition. “Soweto Express” shows a quartet of Black professionals during their morning commute. They’re up to the minute and on the go. “Sikuvile Sugar Plantation” could belong to another century. (Urban and rural is another element in the show’s diversity.) The backlit “ANC Flags” is from a 2016 African National Congress campaign event.
While many of the photographs in the show are clearly political, the politics tends to be personal, abstract, and/or ideological. Few address politics and political events specifically. “ANC Flags” is one. Another is Etinosa Yvonne’s “Hajara Abubakar,” about the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram. A collaged portrait of Abubakar fills half the frame. The other half consists of a letter detailing her story. It’s a striking, even unsettling, image.
Like Yvonne, Timipre Willis Amah is Nigerian. Also like her, he works in black-and-white. His photographs of the Third Mainland Bridge and National Theatre, both in Lagos, and a gas plant, are sweeping and majestic. The gas plant photo hangs by George Osodi’s “Gas Flare,” which blazingly subverts the idea of a petrochemical plant’s majesty, though not as much as his “Delta Black Gold,” a close-up view of a hand covered in oil. Osodi is also Nigerian.
A number of the photographs draw on African artistic traditions. That includes photography. The work of Fatoumata Diabaté recalls that of her celebrated Malian predecessors Seydou Keïta and Malik Sidibé. Her studio portrait of a Senegalese cyclist is a thing of bicycle beauty. Diabaté’s other photograph here, of a group of children wearing animal masks, evinces both African visual tradition and the photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
Logo Oluwamuyiwa, who’s Nigerian, pays homage to John Baldessari with his use of superimposed patches of color to obscure a subject’s face. That obscuration might be seen as a different sort of mask. Gideon Mendel’s image of a woman carrying an emaciated man bears a startling resemblance to W. Eugene Smith’s famous Minamata photograph of a mother bathing her mercury-poisoned daughter. Yet a viewer needs no awareness of that similarity, or even of the circumstances of the Mendel image (the woman is the mother of the man, who’s dying of AIDS) to find it profoundly moving. Mendel is South African.
Most of the photographs in “Africa Rising” are in color. Girma Berta uses it to bravura effect in “Moving Shadows II, VII.” Berta, who’s Ethiopian, places the image of a horse-drawn cart against a saturated blue background. Artifice and realism collide to eye-catching effect. In a sense, Jehad Nga, who was born in Libya, does the reverse in his “Untitled #7837 Kenya.” The saturated background is black, because of shadows, and from that absence of color the red and green clothes worn by the two figures in the foreground vividly emerge.
The oldest photographer in the show is Lalla Essaydi, born in 1956. She’s also probably the best known and has a local connection (Essaydi has an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University). “In my art,” she has said, “I wish to present myself through multiple lenses — as artist, as Moroccan, as traditionalist, as Liberal, as Muslim. In short, I invite reviewers to resist stereotypes.” With those final half-dozen words, she could be speaking both for everyone in “Africa Rising” and the show itself.
AFRICA RISING: 21st-Century African Photography
At Fitchburg Art Museum, 185 Elm St., Fitchburg, through Feb. 23. 978-345-4207, fitchburgartmuseum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.
