Langmead's witterings: Postcards from Zambia, book and exhibition

I had my first photo exhibition on Saturday, 23 February 2013 in support of my first photo book, Postcards from Zambia, in Lusaka. There were 43 photographs exhibited. A further 34 had not been printed by the exhibition deadline due to lack of desired printing materials, anywhere in southern Africa.

It was by invitation only and therefore potentially stratified by class, gender, race; except it wasn't. Attendees included Americans, Chinese, English, Zambians, and no 'others' at all, that are probably best described as senior middle class. There is a very big gap between saying and doing, as we all know, and there are real lessons from doing.

Publishing a book on its own, without an exhibition is undoubtedly somehow sterile, standoffish and elitist, and has no means of responding to feedback until the second edition, which may never happen. It presumes the photographer knows his audience and can select the photographs that his audience wants to see. Since the audience is self-selecting, presumably by the content, the second option simply does not exist. This was verified by the exhibition which demonstrated different people liked different photographs, actually unsurprisingly. I had fortunately planned to print all of the book's photographs after my sister had said she liked a (soft) picture that I had thought to exclude. (This does not change the fact that I selected the photographs for the book in the first place.)

The exhibition also showed up the weaknesses of Robert Frank's The Americans and John Szarkowski's The Photographer's Eye that Szarkowski subsequently but partially corrected in Looking at Photographs: the audience most definitely wants to know about the photographs, where, what they are about and the story behind them. Omitting such detail on the basis that the photograph can be interpreted by education, knowledge and experience is nonsense made worse by the absurdity of the concepts that are simply not understood by the viewing public, like the emotive post-colonial 'exotic' or 'other'. In the case of my exhibition, everyone knew nearly everything about the photographs: they had been there, knew the street. What they wanted was detail, not only about the photographs but also my personal views - my motivation and agenda if you like - and they really enjoyed receiving it, much more than I had expected. One line text on the page of the book is simply not enough and in future I will always include an explanatory paragraph.

The book is currently available at Planet Books in Arcades and from Amazon. The book signing is at Planet Books on 9th March 2013 from 1000 to 1200 hrs. Public exhibitions are planned at Alliance Francais and at the National Museum in Lusaka in the next month. The book's website is Postcards.