The photographs here were taken during six months in Africa driving on a road trip, eight and a half thousand miles across eighteen countries from Marrakech to Cape Town. I was there working for an Irish technology company shooting video for their marketing content, finishing April 24. The presentation is chronological & southerly, starting in Gatwick airport.
My approach was to produce an unscripted visual study, with scenes determined by the roads driven and time available, which was not dedicated to my photography and [so] often compromised. Six am starts and multiple different beds in a week were common. Sometimes there were bed bugs and middle of the night ‘disturbances’. And occasionally crisp white sheets, room service & frosty air conditioning. The discombobulating circumstances have inevitably caused the outputs to present a degree of chaos to viewers surrounding time and place and that the pictures variability can look like that of different photographers. The truth is that travelling fast and slow through great distances, I didn’t necessarily know literally or metaphorically what would happen next. And that I like the resulting scatter gun narrative, for its faithful resonance with what was going on behind the camera.
The intention was to produce pictorial ‘lyrical’ documentary, to try and capture the individual atmosphere of the mise en scènes as well as a photographic representation as would mitigate postcolonial / Eurocentric subjectivity. The pictures are sometimes raw, quite formal, candid or deadpan, telling stories about the land, patterns, structures, mood and people. The aim is to convey the powerful effects of the heat, light and time, while challenging stereotypes with localised glimpses that engaged me as an outsider with questions about, for example economics, race and identity.
There’s no hierarchy or boundary of subject matter. Themes include beauty, banality and occasional inchoate danger. The selection here is taken from a portfolio of three hundred offering layered complexity, sometimes well camouflaged behind an ambiguous aesthetic.
The writing is a response to the philosophical journey that resulted from Being There, in Africa on the road, not vicariously – watching TV, or reading another’s account, but ‘IRL’. Initially I was struck by the haptic visceral impact. A second wave of philosophical and epistemological discovery hit me later, at home, when considering what can, and what are perhaps the limits of what is reliable to say about Africa as a white European man, with a camera.
The idea of this book is to explore and provoke reflection upon how contemporary imagery in art, media and increasingly Ai combine to shape our perception of reality, and [to] question the contentious concept of photographic authenticity. Ideally, I want to provoke imagination about what lies beyond the viewfinder’s frame and reflection about Africa today, in the present, the now.
