Life & Afterlife In Benin Photography In The Service Of Ethnographoi Realism

Photography plays a role in most of our lives - but rarely in our deaths. If you happened to live in the West African country of Benin during the 1960s and 1970s, photography was quite literally a matter of life and death. It is a commonly held belief in many non-Western cultures that a person's soul lives on, as if trapped, within the photograph. In Benin, with its rich spiritual traditions of animism (voodoo was born here and is now Benin's official religion) - whereby fetishes or objects are regarded to embody powerful spirits - the photograph came to play a fascinating role in the rituals of death. This unique collection of portrait photography records a people caught between a pre-colonial past and a post-colonial future. For many of the people in the photographs it would be their first and last encounter with a photographer. Amongst the weddings and communions, the courting couples and proud parents, lie startling images of revenants and juju men; voodoo priests and priestesses; thieves and assassins; prostitutes and pimps and most uniquely, an extraordinary sequence of 'apres-mort' or death bed portraits.