The Women's Work Issue Women's Work. Pen and Brush. 2019 | Page 18

pen + brush x of note
exotic, tropical, colonial, and touristic. A simple
Google search for “Madagascar Photography”
reveals a dominant visual culture of beautiful yet
ubiquitous ‘picturing paradise’ images—wildlife,
baobab trees, and picturesque landscapes.
Largely prioritizing a tourist gaze, these images
frame the region as an archipelago of pleasure
islands meant for play and adventure.
Rajanoary takes on the charge of using
contemporary photography to counter the
ubiquitous ‘picturing paradise’ narratives of
the region, turning her lens on the nation’s
rich cultural identity and heritage and, most
importantly, on the Malagasy women who
embody its history. In her ongoing portraiture
series, Lamba , Rajaonary photographs a
community of intergenerational women regally
donned in the lamba, a traditional garment of
Malagasy society. Erin Haney poignantly notes
in her commentary that “Rajaonary arrays
the style, substance, power, and beauty in her
portraits of women from Madagascar. In doing
so, she imagines and accumulates a new set of
narratives, first for herself as a Malagasy woman,
and secondly for a larger purpose of representing
women from a part of the world that largely
remains under-the-radar.”
In forging an artistic practice and new ways of
seeing a place, Rajaonary is keenly aware of the
politics of representation. Her work, as one of a
handful of female Malagasy photographers, is to
shape the ways in which the image of Madagascar
is projected, interpreted, and negotiated in the
global world. In its quiet beauty, Lamba subtly
moves us away from satisfying global appetites
for the tropical and the exotic. Instead, in this
body of work, Rajaonary takes on a task of more
substance and action—to author the stories of
these women as the history of Madagascar has
rarely been written by women. Collectively, the
portraits of the women of Lamba serve to recast
the story of a place. In Rajanoary’s capable and
compassionate hands, Malagasy women are
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represented as truth tellers, history writers
and history makers, and the visionaries of
Madagascar’s future.
Ming Smith
In the black and white portraits Masque and
Womb, we see Ming Smith’s presence, and
equally those of her young sons, in the African/
Middle Eastern landscape of Cairo, Egypt. Taken
in the early 1990s on a family trip, the role
of these two works to situate Smith (and her
family) in a specific moment of global history—
as woman, as artist, as mother, as Black—is
incredibly significant. The 1990s were a pivotal
period in Egypt’s modern history, noted as a
decade of great social change as well as upheaval.
As the Pyramids of Giza loom in their majestic
glory in the background to center these images,
Smith shows up in the frame more like an
apparition defying space and time. In the hands
of Smith, it is an artistic gesture to signal that
Black Africans have always been part of ancient
Egyptian society. And, despite constant attempts
of erasure, they will be part of its present and its
future.
Throughout her oeuvre, whether traversing the
streets of Harlem, New York or those of Dakar,
Senegal, Ming Smith’s photographs prove that
she has continuously been in search of the
African Diaspora. (In Weeping Time , Smith takes
us to the American South, to a street scene in
Atlanta, Georgia.) The impact of Egypt on Smith
as manifested through Masque and Womb —
works that in her own words she often describes
as magical, mystical, and spiritual—places her in
a noteworthy company of artists, writers, poets,
and activists of the African Diaspora, such as
W.E.B. Dubois Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou, to
name a few, who have long been drawn to Egypt
and have been forever changed by it.
To immerse oneself in Smith’s images of Cairo
Women’s Work
15
conjures the artist and literary activist, the late
Maya Angelou, for whom this vibrant gateway
to the Nile was also a catalyst. In the poem “For
Us Who Dare Not Dare,” which was inspired by
her own time in Cairo in 1961 when she worked
as one of the few Black journalists in the Middle
East, we might imagine Angelou’s words,
excerpted below, as poetic captions to Smith’s
images. We might come to see Egypt, which often
figured into many of Angelou’s poems, embodied
as a site for these women-artists-activists to
dream, to create, to be free.
Be me a Pharaoh
Build me high pyramids of stone and
question
See me the Nile
at twilight . . .
Know me
Africa
—“For Us Who Dare Not Dare” (1986),
by Maya Angelou
Ming Smith’s photographs, and the work of all of
the women gathered here, Sama Alshaibi, María
Magdalena Campos-Pons, Suchitra Mattai, and
Miora Rajaonary, remind us that to bear witness,
to document, to be of service, to show up and be
present, to be counted in lands near and distant,
is women’s work.
Ming Smith, Masque, Cairo, Egypt, 1992. 35 mm black-
and-white photography, archival pigment print, 60 x 40
inches. Courtesy of the artist.
1 Artist statement submitted by Sama Alshaibi for the portraiture series, Carry Over (2018). Unpublished statement received in
correspondence with the artist.
2 Ibid.
3 Lisa D. Friedman, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything is Separated by Water , (Indianapolis Museum of Art in association
with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007), pg. 13.
4 Artist statement submitted by María Magdalena Campos-Pons for the project, “Intermittent Rivers,” convened by the the artist for
the 13th Havana Biennial in Matanzas, Cuba. Unpublished statement received in correspondence with the artist.
5 Quotations are from artist statements by Suchitra Mattai and correspondence with the curator.
6 Ibid.
7 Edwidge Danticat, “All Immigrants Are Artists,” The Atlantic , August 7, 2013.
8 Oliver Laurent, “Voices of African Photography: Finding the answer to the most personal question, ‘Who am I?’,” The Washington
Post, January 7, 2019.