Allison Moore
email: allisonmmoore@yahoo.com
Abstract
In the West, African children are generally pictured suffering from famine or disease. Vulnerable before a photographer's lens, children have become the victimized face of Africa . Rather than focus on children as photographic subjects, then, this paper will focus on African children as photographers, empowered by the camera to subject their own surroundings to its visual frameworks.
In West Africa , associations that provide children with cameras have mushroomed in recent years. Their efforts have come to light mainly through exhibitions or publications. For example, internationally-shown Senegalese Sada Tangara began photographing as a young teenager with Man-keenen-ki in Dakar . The European-founded Oscura pinhole workshops, which opened in Bamako , Mali in the 1990s, participated in the 1998 Bamako Biennale, and Academy for Educational Development's Visual Griots, a Malian-American collaboration begun recently, showed works at Association Seydou Keï ta during the 2005 Biennale, as did Plan Mali . Editions de l'oeil published a chapbook of pictures taken by seven young Dogon photographers, who live in a culture where photographing can be particularly fraught with consequence.
My paper will discuss the dynamics of these associations with regard to intentionality and aesthetics, asking questions like: what are the intentions of these often outsider-insider collaborations? How are aesthetic choices made, and by whom? How do children's photographs, which can be quite compelling, differ from those of adults - if indeed they do? Should these organizations be seen as a form of social welfare, or do they carry aspects of cultural indoctrination? What is the ultimate agency provided to children through such initiatives?