Photography of Sudan


Photography of Sudan refers to both historical as well as to contemporary photographs taken in the cultural history of today's Republic of the Sudan. This includes its former territory of present-day South Sudan, as well as what was once Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and some of the oldest photographs from the 1880s, taken during the Turkish-Egyptian rule. As in other countries, the growing importance of photography for mass media like newspapers, as well as for amateur photographers has led to a wider photographic documentation and use of photographs in Sudan during the 20th century and beyond. In the 21st century, photography in Sudan has undergone important changes, mainly due to digital photography and distribution through social media and the Internet.
After the earliest periods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for which only foreign photographers have been credited with photographs or films of life in Sudan, indigenous photographers like Gadalla Gubara or Rashid Mahdi added their own visions to the photographic inventory of the country from the 1940s onwards. In 2017, the Sudan Historical Photography Archive in Khartoum started to build a visual inventory of everyday life from Sudan's independence in 1956 until the early 1980s. - As documented in the comprehensive exhibition at the Sharjah Art Foundation on "The Making of the Modern Art Movement in Sudan", this period also includes Gubara and Mahdi as photographic artists during the country's prolific period for Modern Art.
Since the end of World War II, professional photographers travelling the world, such as British photojournalist George Rodger, German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl or photographer Sebastião Salgado from Brazil have created photographic stories of rural ethnic groups in southern Sudan that became famous in the history of photography of Sudan. More recently, developments in tourism, global demand for photography in mass media and the digital media of the 21st century have allowed an increasing number of Sudanese and foreign photographers to closely observe and record life in Sudan.

Colonial period - from pictures of 'natives' to real people

Earliest photographs, taken by foreigners

The earliest existing photographs from Sudan were taken from the 1870s onwards by British, Austrian, French or other foreign photographers and serve as documents of life in Africa or the colonial enterprise. Among other archives, the Digital Collections of the New York Public Library present a number of such early photographs taken in the Sudan. An archive of several thousand photographs, mainly taken by British officials and visitors during the years from 1899 and up to the 1950s, is kept at the Sudan Archive at Durham University in the UK. The same university also holds several other archives of British colonial officers, including photographs from various cities and regions of Sudan, with an online catalogue.
In the 1880s, the Austrian explorer and photographer Richard Buchta published several books in German about his travels along the Nile, including a large number of photographs of ethnic people in southern Sudan. At the turn of 1884/85, the Italian-British photographer Felice Beato documented the unsuccessful Nile Expedition of the British Army that came to the aid of Major-General Charles George Gordon at Khartoum, who was besieged by Mahdist forces. After the short-lived Mahdist State, the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan provided new opportunities for photographs of British military or other officials. At that time, the early technology of photography was extremely difficult and expensive to use, as large format cameras and glass plates were used.
In 1912–1913, new photographic technology in Sudan was even used for aerial photography in archaeology, when British entrepreneur and amateur archaeologist Sir Henry Wellcome applied his automatic kite trolley aerial camera device during excavations at Jebel Moya, documented by several other photographs on this archaeological campaign.
s, unknown photographer, between 1890 and 1923
A critical appreciation of these early non-Sudanese photographers and their clients' interest in exotic images of Sudan is expressed in the following quote by the Danish researcher Elsa Yvanez:

The first Sudanese photographers

As far as has been documented, one of the first professional Sudanese photographers and film cameramen, was Gadalla Gubara, a pioneer of cinema in Sudan and Africa at large. During and after WWII, he filmed and photographed many current events, one of them being the raising of the Sudanese flag on the Day of Independence. Another early Sudanese photographer was the self-taught photographer Rashid Mahdi. The French photographer, who himself created photo stories in Sudan, called Rashid Mahdi "certainly the most sophisticated and one of the major African photographers of the XXth century." On his webpage, which claims to present a collection of about 12.000 digitized images from 1890 until now, Iverné has published many photographs by Rashid Mahdi, both from Mahdi's own collection as well as from the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. - In their article An Outline History of Photography in Africa to ca. 1940, authors David Killingray and Andrew Roberts have noted an important change of representation in photographs of Africans in cities during the 1930s, calling them pictures of people, not 'natives'.

George Roger and his photo stories of the Nuba and Latuka

A professional Western photojournalist, interested in traditional lifestyles in Africa was George Rodger, a founding member of Magnum Photos. His photographs made in 1948 and 1949 of the indigenous people of the Nuba mountains, in the Sudanese province of Kordofan, and the Latuka and other tribes of southern Sudan, have been called by the editor of the book Nuba and Latuka. The Colour Photographs, "some of the most historically important and influential images taken in sub-Saharan Africa during the twentieth century". As Rodger wrote several years later, "When we came to leave the Nuba Jebels, we took with us only memories of a people... so much more hospitable, chivalrous and gracious than many of us who live in the 'Dark Continents' outside Africa." In 1951, Rodger published his photo essay in the widely read magazine National Geographic. His pictures later prompted controversial German photographer and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to travel to the Nuba mountains for her own photo stories on the Nuba people.

Post-independence (1956-2010)

Sudan Historical Photography Archive – documenting social changes

In a recent attempt to collect and publish historical photographs, the Sudan Historical Photography Archive at the History Department of the University of Khartoum started in 2017 to build a library of images on Sudanese history since the middle of the 20th century. According to the archive's webpage, "this library includes images and books that display all parts of Sudanese history from the 1950s and 60s, including the beginnings of Khartoum University, religious activities of Sudanese Sufi orders, prominent politicians, musicians, athletes, and daily life." These photographs are accessible both in the department as well as online.

The Golden Years of photography (1950s – 1980s)

The years before Sudan's independence in 1956 and up to the 1980s have been described as a prolific period for cultural life in Sudan, "including literature, music, and theatre to visual and performing arts." Many Sudanese photographers of this important era are presented in English with a short biography and pictures on the French website Elnour, such as Abbas Habib Allah, Ahmed Omar Addow, Djoua, Fouad Hamza Tibin, Mohamed Yahia Issa, Madani A A Gahory, Mohamed Abdarassul, Amin Rashid, Mohamed Adam Anagha, Omar Yahia Barram, Osman Hamid Khalifa, Richard Lokiden Wani or Shogui. Photographs by Gadallah Gubara and Rashid Mahdi have also been included in the comprehensive exhibition at the Sharjah Art Foundation on "The Making of the Modern Art Movement in Sudan" in 2017.
At the 6th African Photography Encounters in 2005 in Bamako, Mali, Sudan was featured with a wide range of photographs, dating from 1935 to 2002, - albeit as a “forgotten country” until this recognition.

Riefenstahl's photo books on the Nuba peoples

Based on several travels to the Nuba mountains in the 60s and 70s, when she was over 60 years of age, German photographer Leni Riefenstahl's photo books, comprising a total of 126 colour images of Nuba people in traditional settings, were published in 1974 as Die Nuba and Die Nuba von Kau. For some of her photographs and film scenes, Riefenstahl relied on Sudanese cameraman Gadalla Gubara, who accompanied her to the Nuba mountains. Both photo books became international bestsellers and attracted much attention to the archaic lifestyle of these tribes in difficult accessible regions of Sudan. Perhaps the most well-known critical reaction to Riefenstahl's photography of the Nuba came from the American intellectual, Susan Sontag. Based on Riefenstahl's earlier fascination with strong, healthy human bodies and her propaganda films for the government of Nazi Germany during the 20s and 30s, Sontag scrutinized the "fascist aesthetics" of these photo books in her widely read essay "Fascinating Fascism". Writing in the New York Review of Books in 1975, she stated: "The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets". This kind of criticism of the foreigner's view and interpretation of archaic African lifestyles was joined by her collection of essays On Photography, where Sontag argues that the proliferation of photographic images had begun to establish a "chronic voyeuristic relation" of the public.

Travel photography and [photojournalism]

With the rise of colour photography, so-called coffee table books and illustrated magazines specialising on lavish photo essays and international tourism, various styles of documentary photography evolved, including photo stories about Sudan's historic heritage, such as the Nubian pyramids. The wide interest in and social repercussions of travel photography do not only apply to professional photographers, but increasingly to tourists and their private, amateur photography. The increase in numbers of tourists, taking photos rather than really observing or interacting with their travel destinations, has also raised criticism of unethical behaviour of photographers, especially with respect to taking photographs in non-Western countries, and of creating "exotic visions" of foreign cultures. Sudan being one of the less visited, but more "exotic" destinations, is no exception to this.
After having visually documented the culture of the Dinka people in South Sudan since the 1970s, American photographers Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher have earned renown for their aesthetically crafted images of the Dinka's ancient ways of cattle raising. Their photo essay is extensively presented online on Google's website Arts & Culture, providing viewers all over the world with an artistic impression of South Sudan. Similar photos of the Dinka and their cattle are also part of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado's well known images of archaic lifestyles in Eastern Africa.
As many people in some regions of Sudan have been suffering from forced displacement, civil war or human trafficking, this also is regularly covered by photo journalists and published for the rest of the world. The departments for public relations of the big UN agencies like UNMIS, the United Nations Mission in Sudan for Peacekeeping, WHO or UNICEF, usually employ professional photographers from abroad for their photo reports. In some cases, however, Sudanese self-trained photographers like Sari Omer have also been employed for this kind of documentary photography, using their cultural knowledge of the populations concerned.
In 1993, a shocking picture of a child, lying lifeless on the ground, and observed by a vulture sitting nearby, was published worldwide as a reminder of the human catastrophy in southern Sudan. The photographer Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist, became known for this harrowing picture, called "The vulture and the little girl". According to questions about this assignment, Carter later said that he was shocked by the situation he had just photographed, and had chased the vulture away. The following year, Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for this picture, which had raised the concerns of many people about the ethical behaviour of the photographer and the publishers.

The 2010s and beyond

Digital photography: a new generation

Even though there are no institutions for teaching photography in Sudan, the new technical possibilities of digital photography, image editing and using the Internet for learning and sharing of photographs have made it possible for a growing number of Sudanese to train themselves in photography. As in other countries, the spread of affordable mobile phones and Internet tariffs have led mostly younger Sudanese to start experimenting with digital cameras or mobile photography and to share their pictures or videos on social media.
In 2009, an informal group of aspiring photographers created the "Sudanese Photographers Group" on Facebook. The idea for this group was to have an easily accessible, virtual place for all interested photographers to meet and share ideas. In 2012, they decided to focus seriously on the art of photography and found a partner for setting up workshops in the German cultural centre in Khartoum. These workshops were conducted by invited professional photographers from Germany, South Africa and other African countries and repeated for several years, with assignments and meetings of the photographers in between the workshops. Out of these efforts for continued training, several photo exhibitions called Mugran Photo Week were organized. Since then, some of the largely self-taught photographers have been invited to international exhibitions like the African Photography Encounters in Bamako, and some of the photographers have received grants to study abroad. One example for this are the Centers of Learning for Photography in Africa , a growing network of independent photography training structures that have included photographers like Ala Kheir and others from Sudan, as well as photographers from other African countries.

Commercial challenges and political expression

An important limiting factor for professional photographers in Sudan is the low demand for commercial photography. Noteworthy companies using professional photographs of Sudanese settings are DAL Group, Sudan's largest company, that especially promotes Sudanese food products and local traditions, as well as major internet providers like MTN, or Zain. Despite such constraints, there are nowadays many Sudanese freelance photographers experimenting with all kinds of photography, ranging from street photography to fine-art photography or even experimental photography.
After the changes in public life due to the Sudanese revolution of 2018/19, new chances for artistic expression, public action or citizens's involvement in society are opening up. The importance of photographs for expressions of political participation became evident by the iconic picture of Sudanese student Alaa Salah, who gained world-wide media attention through a picture of her taken during protests in 2019 by amateur photographer Lana Haroun on her smartphone.
Another example is a photograph by Japanese photographer Yasuyoshi Chiba of Agence France-Presse, showing a young man in Khartoum reciting protest poetry, while demonstrators chant slogans calling for civilian rule, was selected as World Press Photo of the Year 2020.

Contemporary photographers

Some of the notable contemporary Sudanese photographers of today include the professional photojournalists Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah, who has covered Sudan for Reuters multimedia news for more than 15 years and also is known for his imaginary fine-art photography, and Ashraf Shazly, who works for AFP/Getty Images in Khartoum.
Other notable photographers, mainly active in non-commercial photojournalism, like street photography or documenting cultural life through fashion or other lifestyles, are Ala Kheir, Mohamed Altoum, Hisham Karouri, Sharaf Mahzoub, Nagi Elhussain, Sari Omer, Atif Saad, Muhammad Salah, Wael Al Sanosi aka Wellyce, or Ahmad Abushakeema and the female photographers Ola Alsheikh, Salma Alnour, Soleyma Osman, Duha Mohamed, or Eythar Gubara.
Most of them are members of the Sudanese Photographers Group, and have been part of Sudan's upcoming generation of photographers since the 2010s.