R5.5 million Project to Ensure South Africa’s Story is Available in Pictures to World Publishing Markets

Africa Media Online (Pty) Ltd, is at the heart of an effort to ensure that when the world media turns their attention to the South Africa ahead of the 2010 Fifa World Cup, they can find the pictures to tell the nation’s story.

Africa Media Online is a digital trade route enabling Africans to tell Africa's story and retain ownership of that story. “Colonialism was set up to feed the industrial economy,” says David Larsen, Director of Africa Media Online. “The industrial economy needed raw materials to keep it growing. We now live in the information economy and what feeds the information economy is information, including the heritage of cultures around the world. This time around, we want to make sure that Africans retain ownership of their resources and own the trade route to markets around the world.”

The 2010 Fifa World Cup will generate tens of thousands of articles in print publications, web posts, and television clips in the local and international media, and almost all will need pictures to illustrate their stories.

Ricardo Rangel is one of the fathers of African photography. He, and others of his generation, have been an inspiration to later generations of African photographers. For decades Rangel ran the Centro Documentação e Formação Fotográfica (CDFF) in Maputo, Mozambique. The African Photo Entrepreneur Programme aims to build on the base that institutions like te CDFF provide for photographers. APEP provides advanced skills and market access for working photographers.PHOTO: David Larsen, 2004

Click here for more information about the programme
Click here to login if you have already registered

It aims to document the landscape of Zambia, especially its unknown, remote landscapes, in a distinct style.
    
The Project uses the panoramic format, which the photographer believes better replicates the way the human eye explores and takes in a scene.  The photographs are therefore presented just as they were viewed in-camera by the photographer’s eye – full frame, without selective cropping or enlargement.

By use of an unusual format in this way, the photographer aims to give the viewer some idea of the ‘feel’ of a landscape; and of the emotive power the natural landscape has over the human eye.

The results of the initial work in the Project were premiered in a major one-man exhibition in Lusaka, Zambia, supported and hosted by the French Government, and in Livingstone, Zambia. Over 2500 people visited these two exhibitions and many others have visited various smaller Project shows and collective art exhibitions and gallery shows at which the work has been shown.

The exhibitions have been met with an overwhelming response and considerable interest in limited edition, fine art prints of the photographs.

In recent and future Project work, the central theme of landscapes is supplemented with photography illustrating the peoples of remote Zambia: their life in, and their dependence on, the natural habitats depicted in the landscape photographs.

The Photographer believes that, in this fast changing era of development in Zambia, it is important to document and show the rich abundance of the country’s largely unknown or unappreciated natural resources; to increase awareness of them; and to ensure that they become valued to the extent that they will be conserved and utilized on a sustainable basis.  His travels in remote areas have shown him that the very way of life and the day-to-day survival of many rural populations in Zambia will depend on such environmental awareness and action.

Education is an important element of all exhibitions and of the Project, with guided visits by school and college students of all ages and backgrounds.

Since it’s launch in January 2006, the website has enjoyed some 40,000 to 50,000 ‘hits’ per month originating from all regions of the World.  Visitor contacts and feedback have shown that the website has already become an important international on-line resource for educational use and for the promotion of Zambia in the travel & tourism and the development & investment fields.

As well as plans to grow the website as the Project proceeds, it is proposed that it be developed for use by schools and other educational institutions.

The project continues as new work is added from all parts of Zambia.