10/09
2012
2012
I’m Glenna Gordon, an American photographer and journalist, presently commuting between West Africa and Brooklyn. Previously, I lived in Liberia. And before that, I lived in Uganda. I’ve traveled and worked in over a dozen countries in Africa.
This blog is named after a found object — a plastic lion that was in a crate of discarded items a friend and a few other artists had gathered. I sat on their roof in Nakasero, Kampala back in 2006, sorting through the crate. On that day, I was looking for something. “You are lost!” Ugandas say. But, on that day, I’d found this discarded kid’s toy, made in China on the cheap, that somehow ended up in East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint-chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this place: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.
I’m in Lagos for a bit, staying at the amazing African Artists Foundation, working on some exciting new projects and snapping away. More soon, but for now, I’m posting lots of photos on Instagram on my own account and also as part of the project EverydayAfrica.
Monrovia, October 2011
New post up on Guernica Daily about the always interesting Andrea Stultiens.
Amazing images from space, microscopes, and life slowed down.
The brilliant Teju Cole, blogging for the New Inquiry on about iconoclasism, the power of images and the destruction of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu:
Images are powerful. They can bring people into such a pitch of discomfort that violence ensues, and iconoclasm carries within itself two paradoxical traits: thoroughness and fury…. iconoclastic movements is that they are never about theology alone. They include politics, struggles for power, the effort to humiliate an enemy, and a demonstration of iconoclasts’ own neuroses. Behind iconoclastic bravado is a terror of magic, a belief in dead saints no less than that of iconophiles and, crucially, a historical anxiety that, in the Timbuktu case, is about presenting the bona fides of Ansar Dine to its Wahhabi models in Saudi Arabia and to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
That which doesn’t speak dumbfounds. After all, who can tell what such objects are thinking? Best to destroy the inscrutable, the ancient, if one is to truly usher in a pure new world. So, the invaders continue their work in Timbuktu with enthusiasm and good cheer, smashing pots, breaking bricks, rattling at the doors of the mosque. It takes a lot of work to silence silent objects. But already it is clear that not only the people watching from behind the gate are consumed with fear.
Great new work by Joe Penney from Mauritania.
Football’s Lost Boys — Nigerian footballers stuck in Istanbul
In a hypothetical universe where I had £5000 that I had to spend on one object, it would definitely be a print of Paula Scher’s amazing map.
In her TED talk, Scher talks about play and politics, solem work and serious work, growth, change, and the inevitable question of what’s next.
I took this photo in one morning in early 2009 on Randall St in Monrovia. I didn’t think much of it until sometime in late 2011, when it became one of my favorites. There’s something to be said about the passage of time, but I’m not quite sure what it is.
