archival pigment print on German etching paper

Artwork date: 2013
Edition: number 6 from an edition of 8
Exhibited: Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris, 'Archival Impulse & Poverty Pornography', 19 September to 11 November 2013, an example from the edition exhibited.; Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg, ‘Archival Impulse’, 29 August to 7 October 2013, an example from the edition exhibited.
Literature: Jackson, A & Mbembe, A. (2013). 'Archival Impulse & Poverty Pornography'. Paris: Baudoin Lebon, illustrated in colour on the front cover and on p. 28.

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image size: 112 x 112 cm; framed size: 141 x 141 x 2 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Cape Town.

Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK:

Born in the United States and based between Johannesburg, New York and Paris, artist Ayana Jackson explores the history of photographic representation and treatment of the black body, more specifically the black female body through various photographic approaches.

Dictatorship (Guerrilla) forms part of the Poverty Porn 2011-2013 series. The term ‘Poverty Porn’ describes the abundance of disturbing images of misery in developing countries. The artist’s aim, in drawing upon this category, is to create a conversation about photography’s treatment of the non-white body, to interrogate the photographic representation of impoverished bodies in the global south and question how this filters into current representations and racial stereotypes.

In the series Jackson restaged well-known photographic images of ‘Poverty Porn’, such as Eddie Adams’ iconic Saigon Execution from 1968, and the famous image of a starving child and hooded vulture by photojournalist Kevin Carter. In the work, Dictatorship (Guerrilla), the artist has drawn from a still from the 2002, Child Soldiers. Directed by Alan Lindsay the documentary consists of a series of intimate portraits of Ugandan, Burmese, Colombian and Sierra Leonian children who experienced the trauma of child soldiering.

Jackson chose to use nudes in the images to replicate the emotional tension created by images of ‘Poverty Pornography’. One is simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the images of suffering as one is attracted to and shamed by images of nudes. She furthermore uses her own body instead of the bodies of other women, as she believes that subjecting another woman’s body to this form of problematic representation would contradict and indeed undermine the intention of the series.

Jackson was a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow for Photography (NY), and the recipient of the 2018 Smithsonian Fellowship (Washington D.C). A solo exhibition of Ayana Jackson’s work, Black Waters and Ayana Jackson: Beyond the Deep and ‘the new NMAFA’ is scheduled to take place at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington in March 2023.

COLLECTIONS:

The artist is represented in numerous international collections, notably, The Studio Museum, New York; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle.