The World Press Photo Foundation recently announced the participants selected for the 2018 Joop Swart Masterclass. It is the foundation's flagship education programme that "rewards the most talented emerging visual journalists and is designed to support and enhance diversity in visual journalism and storytelling".
This year, far more women were selected, and that alone must be commended in a field that routinely overlooks women. Although the immensely talented Leonard Pongo, who is Belgian, but of Congolese descent, was one of the selected photographers; African-born, Africa-based photographers - male or female - were notably absent.
Why is this lack of representation from African countries so important?
Gifted and experienced photographers from the continent continue to be marginalised. Lack of recognition by powerful organisations like World Press Photo (WPP) and Magnum means that photographers lose out on opportunities to enhance their technical ability and network with each other and commissioning editors.
It is important to note that photographers from African countries often do not even make it to the list of nominees for competitions, because the nominators themselves are based in localities that do not give them knowledge of the existence of these photographers.
By choosing who gets to be recognised, selected for training by respected photographers and photo editors, and networked into powerful media houses, such organisations have the power to direct who pictures and narrates our world. More importantly, they get to choose who photographs and narrates the experiences of those who the geopolitical west has seen as "other".
Inevitably, by leaving out photographers from African countries, and continuing to skew the selection process towards photographers who are from Europe and North America, the way the world pictures and imagines Africa and Africans will remain as they have historically been framed by the geopolitical west - as location of a special brand of savagery and darkness to which those in the west have no parallel experiencesor equivalent.
Last year, in an article for Al Jazeera English, titled The problem of photojournalism in Africa, I wrote a response to the New York Times' use of troubling photographs of African refugees and migrants, as well as the larger issues surrounding the way in which photojournalists pictured Africa and Africans in deeply problematic ways. In the article, I discussed how the main reason for photojournalists' depictions of Africans in caricatured ways was the reluctance by powerful news organisations based in the geo-political west to employ African and locally-based photographers.
In subsequent conversations, many photographers have said that African photographers, too, might feel pressured to produce certain stereotypical narratives; media houses expect and pay for caricatured, "easy-to-read" images.
Despite the pressure to get photographs that reflect simplistic notions of "tribal" conflict, savagery, disease and general darkness that reflect the geopolitical west's expectations for "Africa", a local photographer would almost certainly produce more nuanced narratives than a parachuted-in photographer who has little to no knowledge of a given situation.
World Press Photo was founded in 1955 by a group of Dutch photographers, who organised an international contest as a way of creating global recognition for excellence. Its annual competition and prize is seen as the pinnacle of achievement in photojournalism, with a worldwide exhibition programmegiving the winner the opportunity to show their work in 45 countries to an audience of some 4 million people, according to WPP. Most of these locations happen to be in Europe, and none are in Africa.
Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands is the patron of the organisation which is financed through sponsorship from the Dutch Postcode Lottery and Canon, as well as partnerships with other supporters and contributors, including the Associated Press, ING Bank, and WeTransfer.
The power of this patronage and income allows WPP's managing director Lars Boering and his 27 staff members to promote, according to its mission statement, "high-quality visual stories, we create and support the conditions that make possible the stories that matter."
But those powerful networks of patronage and income do not seem to have figured out a way of meeting their goals of "transparency" and "diversity" when it comes including photographers from Africa in its prestigious training programme.
Although just over 20 photographers from Africa were nominated within the pool of 219 total nominees, eight photographers made the nominee list from Egypt, and two from Morocco - areas of the continent that are networked with Arab geopolitics in far different ways from other parts of what is (problematically) called "Sub-Saharan" Africa.
Three of the nominees are from South Africa, two from Nigeria, and one photographer each from a scattering of other African countries. Of the three South Africans, only Nocebo Bucibois a black photographer; the other two are white.
In a country with South Africa's racial dynamics, which continues to offer far more opportunities to those who are white, it is (laughably) not uncommon to hear grumbling about black artists and photographers getting opportunities over those who are white in closed conversation circles.
Yet of the large young, talented black photographers who are making their way, the South African nominators only found one black person to nominate. Perhaps not many black photographers applied.
If that is the case, is it not part of the mandate of WPP's on-the-ground people and nominators to cultivate less-represented photographers' portfolios for presentation?
On Twitter and Facebook, photographers expressed their ire. It was obvious that despite good intentions, the cycle of exclusion continues, and the excuses continue. Andile Buka noted, wryly:
@WorldPressPhoto (Joop Swart Masterclass 2018) has no participants from our continent
