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 14 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.