Photography in Sudan
[note 2] The same university also holds several other archives of British colonial officers, including photographs from various cities and regions of Sudan, with an online catalogue.
[8] Following his travels to Upper Egypt, Eastern Sudan and Ethiopia in 1847–1848, French photographer and author of scientific and ethnographic publications Pierre Trémaux[9] published the second volume of his Voyage en Éthiopie, au Soudan Oriental et dans la Nigritie, dedicated to Sudan in 1862, including prints made from his photographs of people of Darfur, Sennar or the Nuba mountains.
[note 3] At the turn of 1884/85, the Italian-British photographer Felice Beato documented the unsuccessful Nile Expedition of the British Army that came to the aid of Charles George Gordon at Khartoum, who was besieged by Mahdist forces.
[note 4] Following the short-lived Mahdist State, the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan provided new opportunities for photographs of British military and civilian officials.
About 2500 of his images, mainly showing the life of the Azande, Moro, Ingessana, Nuer and Bongo peoples are in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, with many of them published online.
Thus, exotic images and descriptions of ethnic life in remote areas of southern Sudan became known to European audiences and were later followed by photo stories by George Rodger and Leni Riefenstahl.
"[20] As Rodger wrote several years later, "When we came to leave the Nuba Jebels (mountains), we took with us only memories of a people ... so much more hospitable, chivalrous and gracious than many of us who live in the 'Dark Continents' outside Africa.
[30] Commenting on the important change of representation in photographs of Africans in cities during the 1930s, the authors of the article An outline history of photography in Africa to ca.
[5] At the 6th African Photography Encounters held in Bamako in 2005, Sudan gained international recognition, when it was featured with a number of photographers active from 1935 to 2002.
Based on Riefenstahl's fascination with strong, healthy bodies and her 1930s propaganda films for the government of Nazi Germany, Sontag scrutinized the "fascist aesthetics" of these photo books in her essay 'Fascinating fascism'.
This kind of criticism of the foreigner's view and interpretation of archaic African lifestyles was further elaborated in her collection of essays On Photography, where Sontag argues that the proliferation of photographic images had begun to establish a "chronic voyeuristic relation" of the viewers to the subjects portrayed.
[42] Further, the German media critic Rainer Rother wrote "Riefenstahl viewed [the Nuba] as potential models and scanned the world before her eyes for spectacular images.
[48] Similar images form part of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado's work depicting archaic lifestyles in Eastern Africa.
[52] In 1993, a shocking picture of a child, lying lifeless on the ground, and observed by a vulture sitting nearby, was published worldwide as a reminder of the human catastrophe in southern Sudan.
[note 9] The following year, Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for this picture, which had raised concerns about the ethical behaviour of the photographer, who had not tried to help the child.
[note 11] An example of photography used to illustrate political participation in Sudan was the smartphone image of the Kandake of the Sudanese Revolution, of the student Alaa Salah, taken by amateur photographer Lana Haroun during the 2019 protests.
[62][63] In 2022, an image by Sudanese photographer Faiz Abubakr Mohamed of a woman protestor hurling a teargas canister back at riot police during pro-democracy protests in Sudan in 2021 was awarded with the first prize in the "Singles Category for Africa" of the World Press Photo contest.
[64] In 2022, Ammar Abdallah Osman won the First Place of the East African Photography Awards in the Human Singles category for his portrait Man with Nobody.
[65] Contemporary Sudanese photographers of the 2010s and beyond include professional photojournalists Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah, who has covered Sudan for Reuters for more than 15 years and is also known for his creative fine-art photography,[66] and Ashraf Shazly,[67] who works for AFP/Getty Images in Khartoum.
Other photographers, mainly active in non-commercial photojournalism, such as street photography or documenting cultural life through fashion or other lifestyles, are women photographers Salma Alnour,[68] Ola Alsheikh,[69] Suha Barakat, Eythar Gubara,[70] Metche Jaafar, Duha Mohammed[71] or Soleyma Osman, as well as their male colleagues Ahmad Abushakeema,[72] Mohamed Altoum,[73] Salih Basheer, Nagi Elhussain, Hisham Karouri, Ala Kheir,[74] Sharaf Mahzoub, Sari Omer, Atif Saad, Muhammad Salah,[75] or Wael Al Sanosi aka Wellyce.
[76] In 2021, the French book Soudan 2019, année zéro presented a detailed historical and sociological documentation and analysis of the weeks during the Sudanese revolution that preceded the deadly assault and destruction of the site that protestors had occupied in front of the headquarters of the Armed Forces in central Khartoum.
"Following the 2023 armed conflict in Sudan, Ala Kheir, Ola Alsheikh and other Sudanese photographers started the online project Postcards from Khartoum.
Amidst the destruction of their cities, thousands of people fleeing the fighting and shortages of food, water and electricity, they have been publishing their pictures and brief commentaries as "an insight to what is going on in their lives since the 16th of April 2023.
Gadalla Gubara (1920–2008), Sudan's internationally most well-known photographer and filmmaker, is shown working in his studio, and the street art of the 2019 Sudanese revolution is presented through more than 60 images.
