Tag: best photography forums

Last fall, Jeanne Mercier, a French critic and curator based in Portugal, traveled to London to launch a new book. Her destination was the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, then commencing its fifth edition in the city of its founding, and the subject was Being a Photographer in Africa: The Ten Years of Afrique in Visu. Lavishly illustrated and packed with essays and interviews, the book draws on a significant history accumulated by the website Afrique in Visu, which has become an indispensable resource for followers of African photography. It also chronicles the emergence of a medium that, in the last two decades, has become contemporary Africa’s foremost art form.

Mercier created the site—whose name melds French with Latin and loosely translates as “Africa as we see it”—with her husband, the photographer Baptiste de Ville d’Avray, in Mali in 2006. As its editor-in-chief ever since, she has played a role in lending visibility and coherence to the continent’s flourishing, if often disconnected, photo communities. Mercier’s enduring work made her an ideal partner for Othman Lazraq, part of a new wave of African collectors who have