Salon #23-Photobooks from Africa with Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Brendan Embser and Oluremi Onabanjo.

20 November 2017: 10×10 Salon hosted by The Walther Collection with presentations on the contemporary photobook scene in Africa, with Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Brendan Wattenberg (Embser) and Oluremi Onabanjo.

Oluremi Onabanjo of The Walther Collection moderated a discussion between Brendan Wattenberg (Embser) of Aperture and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen of South Africa’s Fourthwall Books.

Bronwyn Law-Viljoen is Associate Professor and Head of Creative Writing at Wits University, co-founder and editor of Fourthwall Books, and former editor of Art South Africa magazine. She has doctorates from New York University and the University of the Witwatersrand. She has written on South African art and photography for various publications and has published several short stories. Her first novel, The Printmaker, was published in 2016 (Umuzi) and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Award. She is currently at work on her second novel. Read Brendan Wattenberg’s interview with Bronwyn Law-Viljoen from Aperture’s The Photobook Review #12 (Spring 2017).

Brendan Wattenberg (Embser) is the managing editor of Aperture magazine. Formerly the director of exhibitions at The Walther Collection in New York, he has contributed essays and interviews to NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Another Africa, Contemporary And, and Aperture’s PhotoBook Review and is the editor of the photobooks François-Xavier Gbré: The Past is a Foreign Country and Samuel Fosso: The Spectacle of the Body.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo is Director of Exhibitions and Collections for The Walther Collection Project Space in Chelsea, NY, a private institution dedicated to publishing, researching, collecting, and exhibiting photography and video art. She is co-curator of the 2017 exhibition Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography & Video Art, and co-editor of the accompanying publication (Steidl).* Onabanjo has contributed to publications for The Studio Museum in Harlem, The PhotoBook Review, Autograph ABP, 1:54 Contemporary Art Fair, and The Walther Collection. She holds a BA in African Studies from Columbia University, and an MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from Oxford University.

*Read Okwui Enwezor on the Recent Histories of African Photography.