NOW
Twenty-six years into the twenty-first century, everyone, everywhere, around the world can be a competent photographer. Making images for the fun of it, and much more.
They consider themselves to be image makers, if only through the use of a smartphone, and new digital technology.
Apart from the world becoming more visually literate, the ability to generate visual content, evaluate and interpret images are enhanced.
The world is dominated by visual media. Both still and moving images, are essential features in the rapid speed of daily visual communication.
ART
From the early beginnings of European cultural traditions, Art was made and shown through the rarefied air of painting and sculpture.
Invented in the 19th century, and developed as a tool for documentation and later reportage. Photographers lacked imagination and personal touch.
The challenge for artists working with photography, was to change and improve the traditional definitions of art. After decades of heated debates, through artistic innovation, aesthetic creativity, and institutional validation. Photography was eventually accepted as a medium of the Fine Arts.
NEW LENS MEDIA ART
In the broadest terms, contemporary views are: anything can be art. Ok! What are the criteria and rules, to determine great art?
Heated debates are once again raging, among the gatekeepers, and higher echelons of the visual art world. The debates are about work generated through a photographic image, software, computer, and new digital technology.
The process begins with a photograph, utilising a computer, the techniques of collage, cut and paste, elements are placed in a new context. To create a world of fantasy, illusions, and magic moments. In the end the image is no longer a longer a photograph. It is now – New Lens Media Art.
PHOTOGRAPHERS OF AFRICAN ORIGIN
SEYDOU KEITA
In the early 1990s, the archives of Seydou Kieta photographs became public. Over 10,000 negatives were found.
The personal curator of collector Jean Pigozzi acquired 921 negatives. He began making prints, and promoting Seydou Keita’s in the highest echelons of the Fine Arts world.
Self taught and intuitively working, Seydou was at the time reinventing portrait photography with extreme precision finesse.
He applied great effort to show the beauty of his subjects. He revealed the individuals aspirations, and character of the modern African, intimate and hidden.
Now revealed through props, posing of hands and arms, arrange composition of subjects. Offering the viewer intimate insights into the psyche, and aspirations of the communities in Bamako City, Mali, during the 1950s.
In practice, many artists are able to see, what the general public overlooks, and may remain out of sight forever.
Until an artist with an original unique vision and focus, brings the overlooked object into view. Making known, with its true values, insights, and meanings on display. Touring the global circuits of the Art World, the once hidden image acquire the status of heritage and legacy.
LEILA ALAOUI
Leila Alaoui was a Moroccan-French photographer and video artist. Her work explores cultural identity and diversity in the Mediterranean.
Her works are exhibited widely, and collected by various museums.
Alaoui was born in Paris to a Moroccan father and a French mother, and grew up in Marrakesh, Morocco.
During her childhood and adolescence, she was regularly exposed to tragic stories of migrants drowning at sea while undertaking hazardous journeys, which she interpreted as stories of social injustice.