Bottlestore, near Keembe, Zambia

Today, we are rarely conscious of photographs, but in those early times, the issue was: can the image be trusted to be an accurate copy of the subject and, if so, how can it be art? A question that was explored using notions of ‘precision or composition, clarity or idealism and Naturalism or Pictorialism’, culminating in what has been called ‘Victorian aesthetics’ (Bate, 28), an approach that still describes many photographs taken today. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

Agnese Eglina piano recital at Alliance Francaise de Lusaka, tonight 1930hrs

Tonight, the promenade concert at Alliance Francaise at 1930hrs is a solo piano recital by the internationally known Agnese Eglina, playing at least Bach, Debussy, Brahms, Garuta and Piazzolla. See you there.

Ngoma Dolce Music Academy's Youth Orchestra plays at Alliance Francaise de Lusaka

The Youth Orchestra and soloists from the Ngoma Dolce Music Academy performed last night at Alliance Francaise de Lusaka. And there was a fantastic rendition of Theo Bross' arrangement for the cello and piano of Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf', by Theo on the cello and Agnese Eglina on the piano with narration by Paul Kelly.

The brochure to the Ngoma Dolce Promenade Concerts, Lusaka

The brochure to the Ngoma Dolce promenade concerts at the Alliance Francaise of Lusaka, from 27th September to 5 October, 2013

Brenda Muntemba's 'In Retrospect' book launch, Lusaka

Brenda Muntemba's 'In Retrospect' book launch is here

Promenade concerts at Alliance Francaise in Lusaka

Charcoal: livelihoods or deforestation?

In this book, the motivation is to disrupt this cliché and show the subject not as a victim but as a dignified participant in his or her own increasingly successful economy and environment. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

Oboeist and drum set musician wanted in Zambia.

The great news is the Opera.Z's production of Damyna, Damyna, the opera, is now only two short of a light orchestra, an oboeist, with oboe, and a drum set musician, who can read Weinberg's drum set notation. Let us know, if you are in Zambia. Please Facebook Ngoma Dolce Music Academy.

Opera.Z singers and dancers measured for costumes

The Opera.Z singers and dancers were measured for their costumes by Charity Nyirongo, for Damyna, Damyna, the opera, the leading fashion designer in Lusaka.

A Mumbwa sidewalk, Zambia

A common criticism of documentary photography is that it ‘constructs a victim for its always privileged audience in terms of class, ethnicity, gender or other social category, […] and the dignity of the subject […] is not guaranteed by any particular viewer (Bate, 62). Just such a negative approach has misplaced aid and development for many years and now there is a need for a new photographic response. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

Charcoal outlets on public roads, Zambia

Although oppressive times may be becoming scarcer, albeit remaining in living memory, it is time for a change in outlook; there have been developments in the mechanics of photography: a transition from film to digital photography enabling the simple and instantaneous production of images for newspapers, magazines, poster-prints, slideshows and websites, mobile phones, social media or the photograph album; photography is more a media for the masses than ever before. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

Sundown in South Luangwa National Park

From Postcards from Zambia, a collection of photographs that reflects aspects of life and society in Zambia

Lusaka Highland Games

Photographs of the Highland Games in Lusaka can be seen and downloaded at http://peterlangmead.com/Proflight/Proflight%20Highland%20Games/

Cooking, Mkushi, Zambia

Such control was no more acute than during the states of emergency in South Africa between 1985 and 1990; yet, despite oppressive behaviour towards photographers by the South African government, there were opportunities for many photographers. One of those was Gideon Mendel, a South African photojournalist who now works from London documenting social issues, particularly in Africa, and who won the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography in 1996; Eugene Smith himself was a noted documentary photographer. In comparison with South Africa, Zambia has never had the stark subject matter that deep oppression incurs, but it has a need to record social change for posterity, which is a continuum that remains largely undocumented in the country’s museums. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

Opera.Z developments

Following the discovery of the orchestra pit at the Lusaka Playhouse, Cathrine is now hunting for instrumentalists for the small orchestra that will be playing for Damyna, Damyna the opera, at the Lusaka Playhouse in early December.

I am please to announce that Charity Nyirongo will be making the costumes for the opera, both singers and dancers, and will be measuring up on Sunday for the dancers and Monday morning for the singers. Further, she will also be providing clothes for PR interviews before the show.

Although not finalised, it is anticipated that the foyer, auditorium, lighting, stage lighting and back-stage of the Playhouse will be refurbished in time for the Premiere performance in December.

A problem shared, Mpika road, Zambia

So from the 1960s to 1980s, photography theory wrestled between semiotics and traditional realism: the latter insisting that there is no difference between signifier and signified, and the former highlighting the distinctions and subjectivity inherent in semiotics. There are advocates of both theories but ‘by the end of the 1980s, photography finally began to be absorbed into art institutions […] as a dominant modern art form’ (Bate, 29) and some governments ‘acknowledge how powerful photographic images can be’ (30) by controlling advertising images and muzzling the press. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

Proflight Misty

Photographs from Proflight's Fly5 function at Misty are here.

My latest book is now available on amazon.co.uk

My latest book, The Zambians, is now available at amazon.co.uk. It will be available in Zambia in a month's time.

Secondary transport - Landless Corner to Mumbwa road, unfinished.

Structuralism evolved into post-structuralism through the incorporation of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. There was much political disruption at this time and there were profound effects on a range of disciplines, including photography. Yet, despite this period of unrest, of all countries, Zambia was an example of a non-warring state and, despite the ‘grave handicaps of its colonial heritage’ (Roberts, 250), remained a free country. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

Government projects

Extended from linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857-1913) earlier work on semiotics, the image of a dog signifies ‘a dog’; it is the signifier that is ‘read’ as a dog. The actual dog was ‘signified’ but it does not exist any more Together they represent a sign. De Saussure importantly recognised that a sign is not necessarily the same in all languages. It is easy to see that this can be extended to creed, race or political disposition, or indeed, the ‘West’, ‘colonialist’, or ‘neo-imperialist’. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

Clearing a bit of forest for his farm, near Lusaka, Zambia

The world was in turmoil in the late 1960s; it was the apartheid era in South Africa, the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and of America’s war in Vietnam where war photographers Don McCullin and Larry Barrows made their names. There were civil rights movements about race and equality for women in the USA and, in France, students rioted. This was Structuralism, when society focused on structures and rules. For photography, it meant incorporating the concepts of semiotics, which became the foundation of ‘reading’ photographs. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia.

Roadside trade, Chisamba, Zambia

In the same year, the Photographer’s Eye was an influential photographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a collection of admired photographs curated by John Szarkowski, the museum’s director emeritus of the Department of Photography. A year earlier, in 1963, former Drum photographer Peter Magubane became the first black photographer in apartheid South Africa to exhibit his work, in Johannesburg, before being arrested and imprisoned for two years in 1969, and then banned from taking photographs for a further five years (Haney, 109). Drum is an important South African magazine that started in the 1950s, gathering professional African photographers and a readership of erudite Africans, often ANC members. Another ex-Drum photographer, Ernest Cole, eventually managed to publish House of Bondage (1967) in New York, which was the first published photographic account of apartheid in South Africa by a black South African. He died unhappily in exile in New York on the day of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison (111). ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

Ministry of Agriculture and LIvestock building, Choma, Zambia

Despite the Polaroid camera being sufficiently developed to take positive colour photographs in 1964, the world’s press recorded Kenneth Kaunda taking Zambia to independence in October that year in black and white. Although this is where the Zambian colonial project ended for Britian, it is where the globalisation project started, a positive feature of a changing world for some, the domination of the Third World by the First World for others (Ashcroft, 101). ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

Milk arriving at Choma Milk Cooperative, Zambia, 2008

Globalism, technology and social change ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

On Track, at the Railway Museum in Livingstone, Zambia

But this was a dark time for Zambia: the faltering Northern Rhodesia African National Congress revived under economic stress and falling employment; Kenneth Kaunda, Simon Kapwepwe and Sikota Wina had rebelled against a new constitution based on a minority vote for Northern Rhodesia and formed the Zambia African National Congress, which was banned in 1959 and Kaunda and others were jailed. They were later released in 1960. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

And this really does turnout to be quite a feast. Chatala School, Mkushi

The iconic photographic book The Americans was published in 1958. It is a compendium of street photography taken by Robert Frank across America, capturing the USA as it was in 1956-7. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia

Zambezi Sawmills Mulobezi Office, built c. 1920.

For the next two decades, the country’s development continued apace, and so did that of photography in Europe. In 1947, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David ‘Chim’ Seymour formed the Magnum cooperative, in Paris, which continues to be a leading photographic agency today. Many of the world’s leading photographers work or have worked there, including the social documentarian Sebastião Salgado and the war photographers James Nachtwey and Gilles Peress. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia