7/25/2023 0 Comments Wham photo sense showThis idea of casting new light on Africa, instead of focusing on the continent’s wildlife, poverty or charity, is also at the core of Doyle Wham, says Carreira-Wham. I want to use it to capture African images that don’t exist on Google,” he says. It was a world I’d always looked at as a fantasy – and there I was, part of it.”Ī decade on, Stuurman has been credited with helping change the visual narrative of contemporary Africa (Beyoncé picked him to work on styling and costume design for her 2020 film Black Is King). “These figures I’d seen in the magazines were literally right in front of me. That brought him his big break, winning a competition with Elle magazine and a trip to London – his first time outside South Africa.Īt 19, he found himself on the front row of a Burberry show. After leaving school, he took an SLR camera on to the streets of Cape Town and snapped pictures of everyday people. He took shots of his friends, imitating poses they’d seen in glossy magazines at the local grocery store. (Stuurman’s family had little money, and his father died when he was still at high school.)īarack Obama on a visit to Kenya. Stuurman grew up in a small mining town five hours drive from Johannesburg, and started taking pictures when he was 14, not with a conventional camera but using a cheap mobile phone, he says. That’s why I think photography is such a powerful medium – it allows us to retell the story and show what looks like now – to cultivate a better understanding of what Africa is,” he says. “I feel like so much was stolen from Africa, and it’s about reclaiming that. Speaking to the Observer from his home in Johannesburg, Stuurman says the gallery is a much-needed platform for African artists. His bold, highly stylised images are of black men and women in poses that the artist says are about elevating and celebrating African people, and taking back the narrative so that Africans, like him, tell “the African story”, rather than having it imposed on them by others.ĭespite Stuurman’s immense success in his home country, with subjects including Barack Obama, Naomi Campbell and Beyoncé, the 29-year-old’s photography has never featured in a gallery in Britain. That talent begins with South Africa’s Trevor Stuurman, the first big solo show at Doyle Wham. “We’d been sending each other incredible African photographers back and forth for some time via social media, and we’d spent a lot of time going to exhibitions, but we didn’t see any of this exciting talent being shown.” “It sounds niche, but, for us, it wasn’t really like that,” she says. The founders started out offering pop-ups and one-off exhibitions of African photography – “not safari shots by random people, but African photographs by African people!” says Carreira-Wham. Self-portrait of Trevor Stuurman, the subject of the first big solo show at Doyle Wham gallery.
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