Maeve Day 15

We spent the first half-hour or so of Saturday catching up on blog posts. Visitors started arriving in droves around 11 AM, though the majority of them seemed to miss "Look Again" as they have to walk past it to purchase their tickets. I didn't get an interview until noon, but it was my 19th interview. Dani interviewed someone around the same time, and we were both pretty excited to have reached the goal of 30 interviews in such a short span of time (until Monique told us to get more, which we were happy to do, of course).
The Ananias Léki Dago talk started at 1 PM and lasted a little over an hour. We sat on a bench in the exhibit as the event had been sold out and the chairs were supposed to be reserved for the paying visitors. As a photographer, I loved Léki's discussion of his process for approaching people and making them more comfortable around the camera. It's interesting to me how photography is a lot like participant observation--he said that giving the subject the feeling that you're on the same page is what gets you access, and that his ultimate goal in photographing situations like the shebeens is to disappear while documenting. The curator asked him a clumsily phrased question about the difference between photographing in America and Africa, but he spun it and discussed the differences between the Western art scene/artist's experience and the African art scene/artist's experience. He refused to homogenize Africa, but pointed out that Western artists are born into a society that has an established art scene, while he has to fulfill the roles of photographer, organizer, developer, promoter, curator, and everything else. For African artists outside of Nigeria and South Africa, they must set up their entire art worlds and markets for themselves from scratch. He briefly touched on the difficulties of using technologies that weren't designed for African climates, which intrigued me as well. I thought it was very interesting that being left-handed had had a huge impact on his life (as he put it, "that seriously fucked me up!").
Around 2, I got lunch with my family in the main building and then returned to the exhibit. I only managed to get three more interviews that afternoon--it's really strange how few people were going into the exhibit, even as the Perelman was more crowded than I've ever seen it! It seemed that many of the visitors had come to see the photography specifically, though, so that may have played a role. I even had to point the exhibit out to my family, who knew I was working on that specific part of Creative Africa (though I hadn't really told them much more, as Dani planned to interview my parents).