Top hat and tales

By Olivia Weinberg

The Walther Collection Project Space in New York sits smugly in a heap of arty spaces in a former factory in Chelsea. The premise: "to help foster an international dialogue about global contemporary photography." Here’s how. "Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive" is a new programme examining African photography from the late 19th and early 20th century. It starts in New York, finishes at the Collection's HQ in Neu-Ulm, Germany (in 2014) and comes in three chunky parts, with about 200 images on show, including portraits, postcards, albums, cartes de visite and books.

Part one shows two key works. "The Black Photo Album/Look at Me: 1890-1950" by Santu Mofokeng (1997), is a lengthy collection of family portraits of black South Africans, presented as a slideshow. The images, which were commissioned, were mostly taken at the end of the 19th century, well before apartheid. Women stand convincingly in full dresses, puffed sleeves and frilly collars; men proudly wear top hats and handkerchiefs. The pictures are formal, almost painterly (above: "Masupha, a Basuto chief", by Gribble, late 19th century), echoing Victorian portraiture—stiff, reserved, intense. Mofokeng has spent years piecing together the stories behind the subjects, and adds semi-explanatory text and unanswered questions: "What was the occasion?" "Are these images evidence of mental colonisation?"