The world often looks at Africa shamefaced, but how does Africa look at itself? Photography is widely used by contemporary African artists to communicate their visions, exploring the continent’s commonplace realities and, most crucially, challenging the misrepresentations and stereotypes about it held by the rest of the world.

The latest incarnation of Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie was a good place to find out more about the variety of different approaches currently shaping an African visual identity. Held in the city of Bamako, Mali, this biennial has now firmly established itself as one of the continent’s major artistic meeting points after six very successful outings. It sets out to survey contemporary African photography and showcase its most significant exponents to an outside world that still remains largely ignorant of the continent’s cultural and artistic offerings – fortunately for those of us unable to make the long journey, a large section of the latest edition recently travelled to Barcelona’s Centre de Cultura Contemporània.

Placing the artists’ origins aside, to speak of an ‘African photography’ is as problematic and meaningless as considering ‘European art’ as a unified, distinct force. The diversity of cultures and multiplicity of perspectives within both categories would flaw any attempt to work out a common denominator for the photographs on display at a dedicated survey. In Africa’s case, the slave trade and modern migration are reflected in a particularly widespread Diaspora – meaning today the whole world is present in Africa, as much as it is present in the whole world, a mutually creative confluence that cultivates different hybrid forms of photography practice.

The variety of visions and the array of styles and subjects is undoubtedly the strength of Bamako 2005. Jane Alexander’s digital photomontages are slightly disturbing images that make us confront the animal within us whilst at the same time musing on the fragility of the unfinished process of humanisation. They are also a conceptually ironic twist on the animalisation of Africa, an effect stemming from the portrayal of the continent in nature shows that present it as being devoid of humans and perpetuate the myth of Africa as an uncivilized place. On the adjacent wall of the gallery is an example of a more classical use of the camera. Pascal Marthine Tayou takes close-up pictures of paint peeling away from walls to reveal previously unseen details, colours, textures or fissures, which he then enlarges into prints of mammoth proportions. The minute and the monumental are at play here in the photographer’s romantic abstraction of beauty inscribed in the humblest places.

Focusing on the macro instead, Rana El Nemr’s photographs of her native city, Cairo, a megalopolis with more than 15 million inhabitants, stand in drastic contrast to Tayou’s almost microscopic studies. Her candid snapshots of commuters on the city’s subway address the topic of over-urbanization and record the rich and diverse human fabric that make up the urban environment. With Flaming Heads, Nigerian photographer James Iroha Uchechukwu gives us the violently poetic image of two cows’ heads alight on a bonfire. Engulfed by flames, the creature is fixed in a transitional state, between this world and the next. It is a condensation not of fire, but of time. Equally lyrical are Helga Kohl’s pictures from Kolmanskop, an artistic study of a ghost town situated in the southern Namib Desert about 10 km inland from Lüderitz, one of Namibia’s most intriguing relics of the past. Once a former diamond settlement it now lies disintegrating left to the mercy of blasting winds and encroaching sands of the Sperrgebiet. The solitude in the depicted spaces is remarkably palpable. All that remains are the hollow shells of buildings, gradually crumbling and falling apart, whilst their interiors become magically flooded by the shifting sand dunes that enter through where the doors and windows used to be. These haunting images leave the viewer simultaneously uplifted and saddened by their evocatively disappearing beauty.

Crossing over from the work of artists who make pictures of things to those who make pictures about things, a series by Mikhael Subotzky presented a behind-the-scenes look at South Africa’s penitentiary system. Socially committed and beautifully combining colour, composition, light and panorama, his images bring a new dimension to documentary photography. The overall impression conveys a powerful and in-depth story but each individual picture making up the series could easily stand alone too. Subotzky eschews clichéd images of ‘prisoners behind bars’, instead relaying the narratives of those living on the inside, sharing their stories and calling for change. It would be a futile exercise to look for a clear strand suggesting an ‘African reality’ in all the above mentioned artists’ work. If anything, what they all have in common is their strong personal subjectivities, used to create a prism of realities that the outsider’s eye, bombarded and dulled by images, tends to simplify and ignore.

Bamako’05 also took a retrospective look at some great African photographers, with three monographic exhibitions devoted, respectively to the late John Mauluka [Zimbabwe, 1932-2003], the veteran Ranjith Kally [South Africa, 1925] as well as Malick Sidibé [Mali 1936]. These photographers’ work is very much in the documentary vein, portraying the Africa’s transformation and its people’s joys and sorrows over the last century. The pictures provide a visual history of the period when South Africa was fighting for freedom, a time when ‘the winds of independence blew over Africa and the future looked full of promise’*. John Maulaka’s Independence Day is a galvanising, once seen never forgotten image of fat-bottomed women dancing in the street to celebrate a sudden change symbolising a newfound political prosperity. It gives us a glimpse into a promising time, one full of joy, solidarity and, above all, hope – despite that hope’s failure to be fulfilled even to this day.

The country of honour this year was Algeria, and their national exhibition presented a stunning selection of photographs which abstain from delving into the country’s recent violent history, instead depicting life-affirming moments in the midst of such turbulent times. A woman applies her make-up, her face reflected in the handheld mirror as she looks back at us half grinning, half grimacing; a man hoists up his hands in prayer, the camera seeking out a shot of his face in a frenzy of ecstasy, while faceless people walk under advertising hoardings that evoke westernised standards of beauty and materialism. Elsewhere, a giant blow-up Pepsi bottle hovers above the head of a man in his modest surroundings. The context for these images is often the tension between tradition and modernisation, between denial and acceptance, expressing the exhibition’s take on the socio-political situation that has been tearing apart this North African country.

* Dagara Dakin, curator of Bamako ’05, form the exhibition catalogue.