All lots
Paul Kodjo (né en 1939, Côte d'Ivoire/Ghana)
Extrait du roman photo "Perdue et retrouvée", 1973
Tirage argentique
Edition 5/8 + 3 EA
50 × 60 cm
Exposition
Paris, Galerie In Camera, Paul Kodjo et Ananias Léki Dago, 17 septembre - 24 octobre 2020
Paul Kodjo: Film Noir
Paul Kodjo was born in 1939 to an Ivorian father and a Ghanaian mother. Educated in Abidjan and Paris, he becomes a correspondent in France for the daily newspaper Fraternité Matin, then founds his own agency upon his return to Abidjan in 1970. As a holder of a press card, he follows President Félix Houphouët-Boigny on his official trips in a country riding prosperous years thanks to the cocoa boom, but also internationally. He attends social dinners and dance parties.
Like Malick Sidibé, who documents life in Bamako, Philippe Koudjina Ayi in Niamey or Jean Depara in Kinshasa, Paul Kodjo immortalizes a youth that seizes all the advantages of an independence conquered only recently. But the great originality of Paul Kodjo’s approach comes from his cinematographic eye - he studied at the Independent Conservatory of French Cinema - which he expresses with refinement in a series of photographs that he takes for photo novels published in the weekly Ivoire Dimanche.
Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux
We present here three photographs from Paul Kodjo’s singular work on photo novels, including two never-seen-before prints. Paul Kodjo’s mastery of light is that of a great artist. A composition worthy of a Scorsese, an atmosphere reminiscent of Hitchcock’s film noir set him apart, he who in parallel to his work as a photographer, pursued the writing of various film scripts, hoping to one day bring them to the screen. Unlike other masters of photography on the continent, Paul Kodjo is a creator, more than a reporter. He stages and dramatizes in order to convince. He does not seek commissions, but longs to immerse the viewer in a story to which he/she aspires, without knowing it yet. The scene of interior we see from the photo novel Perdue et retrouvée (1973), shows something rare in photography from this period: the domestic setting of a wealthy couple in Abidjan in the 1970s. We are invited to enter the intimacy of the two protagonists, we imagine a Citizen Kane. The man and woman look at each other in a suspended moment, evocative before the time, of the Kitchen table series of a Carrie Mae Weems. For through fiction, Paul Kodjo tells us perhaps more than his peers, about African society and the inner world of African men and women after independence. Paul Kodjo’s characters speak. They have a name, a path, make choices, and draw the consequences. And this perhaps, is where lies the revolutionary nature of this work: the self-determination in the construction of a narrative where the African subject is now raised in the first person, and revealed in his/her infinite nuances.
