Yaoundé PhotoFest
2025
Artistic Direction
Musée National du Cameroun
Yaoundé
Images © Sidoine Mbogni Yonta Sid
Under the theme “New Dreams, New Imaginaries”, Yaoundé PhotoFest aims to highlight the richness and diversity of the talent on the African continent, and particularly in Cameroon while offering a look towards the past that allows us to consider the dynamics that influence our lives and how we wish to preserve them, in order to imagine futures in which our diversities are embraced. The curatorial proposal encourages us to return to ourselves and ask: What are dreams made of? What is the recipe for those dreams we keep and yearn to fulfil?
We approach mage-making as a space for reconnection with that intimate and collective place where we keep our dreams—fulfilled and unfulfilled—a cared-for place that is always in relation to the possibility of looking back. A place that enjoys a temporality different from that which has been imposed upon us. The vast body of African wisdom reminds us that “If you do not know where you are going, at least you should know where you come from.” To allow ourselves to dream new horizons and imaginaries, we also need to know what our starting point is, what ground we stand on, and how fertile it is.
We know that photography arrived in Africa closely connected to the colonial context, which used the medium as a tool of control and for constructing an "otherness" linked to exotic and paternalistic stereotypes, resulting in a distorted image of the continent and its people. However, by the mid-twentieth century, some African photographers transformed photography and the use that had been made of it, to imagine new encounters, resilience, and a practice that reclaims our own identities.
As Mariama Bâ said in Une si longue lettre (1979): “Eternal questions of our eternal debates. We were all in agreement that it would take a lot of cracking to establish modernity within traditions.” Paradigm shifts do not come as easily as they are announced, and often those “in-between” spaces are precisely where frictions arise. But at the same time, these spaces anticipate the depth of the questions that are set to change and hold the very keys to what is to come.
Today, we must understand photography not as a weapon that contributes to normative and often binary constructions of our narratives, but as an offering to better understand the processes and issues that run through us, as well as the future we wish to imagine. It is time to ask ourselves: Who is photographing? Who is in front of the lens? How many images do we take and what is the purpose they serve? What kinds of stories do we tell, and how do we accompany the universe that emerges from our visual production?