adminbroader sphere. This year’s theme “4+20Possibilities” explores the idea of infinite possibilities given our definition of possibility being unspecified qualities of a promising nature or potential.
The Gwanza Month of Photography opened at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe July 11, exhibiting works from local and regional photographers. “Photography is an art form overlooked as a means of artistic expression, particularly in local context,” said Calvin Dondo, the director of Gwanza. The Executive Director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Doreen Sibanda, added: “It is a great pleasure to stage the 10th edition of Gwanza, which has over the years become the paragon for photography as artwork in Zimbabwe and the region.”
Since its inception, photography’s aim has been to represent reality, to retell and freeze the moments that pass one by. The bodies of work submitted this year according to the theme serve to be objective representations of the million possibilities that surround us in the world we live in, positive or negative possibilities.
Allan Sekula, a photographer and visual culture theorist, poignantly contends that while pictures are not objective representations of the lived world, the cultural belief in the truth value of photography leads most people to consider photographs “congruent with knowledge in general.”
For the artist’s purposes it is not so important to determine to what degree photographs are objective records, but rather to explore how this assumption can be used to critique the authority we invest in looking.
The issue at stake is how the images that are showing in this year’s Gwanza act as mirrors of the infinite possibilities that surround us. From fine art conceptual portrait photographs submitted by Nyary Dhliwayo; to photo-journalistic imagery that a group of the local journalist’s submitted with the likes of Annie Mpalume, Believe Nyakudjara, Watson Umfeli; to documentary photography from Nancy Mteki, Davina Jogi, George Sena from The Congo, Thomas Tsama from Zambia and with commercial imagery from Thabani Maphosa; all these images are mirrors of possibilities that after the show we would have experienced a whole new world. New ways of seeing and a better understanding of photography shall be the resultant world.
Gwanza’s aim is to shift the perspective of Zimbabwean communities to understand that photography is more than a shutter clicking but a probing means that over the years has changed societies as was the famous Hector Pieterson image.
“We want our viewers to learn that photography is an experience that the maker of the image and the viewer interact in, like the famous self-portraits by Samuel Fosso.” Dondo went on.
Online Reporter