Wim De Schamphelaere’s ‘Village Portraits’, often made out of more than 700 different shots, are printed on meters wide photographs and displayed at galleries in Europe. The photographer prides himself on returning to the (African) villages where he took those portraits — and where the first reaction usually is “to cut them up and divide the different parts among the ones portrayed”. … The images are striking: quite beautiful, quite poor, quite “villager/other”. But if the purpose of making images of the other is to create intimate links of familiarity, and share with them one’s own ways of seeing self and other, why display the images in the west? … To display them — with all the connotations of poverty, the hovel-quality, and the dirtyness that those of us who live outside of that existence (such as a gallery-goer in Europe) will undoubtedly assign — simply reifies that otherness and difference. (Read the full post by Neelika Jayawardane on AIAC here)

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