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Saturday, September 28, 2013

Raoul J Granqvist Reveals the Real Story Behind Famous Chinua Achebe Photos

by Carolyn on Sep 27th, 2013

Following the passing of Chinua Achebe earlier this year, Raoul J Granqvist has looked back on the history of some of the most famous photos of Achebe, taken at his home in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1959. The photographs, by acclaimed American photojournalist Eliot Elisofon, show a young Achebe at his writing desk with copies of his book Things Fall Apart beside him.
Things Fall ApartThere Was A CountryNo Longer at EaseArrow of GodA Man of the PeopleGirls at WarAnthills of the SavannahThe Education of a British-Protected Child
In an article for Africa is a Country, Granqvist, emeritus professor of language studies at Umeå University in Sweden, provides context to the photos, which influences the viewing thereof. Granqvist reveals that Elisofon had been on assignment in Africa for LIFE Magazine for two purposes: to find images to accompany extracts from Joyce Cary, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Henry M Stanley, and Joseph Conrad’s work on the one hand; and to present photos of “The Hopeful Launching of a Proud and Free Nigeria” on the other.

It is ironic that, shortly before meeting Achebe, Elisofon had taken an image of an emaciated African man to go with an extract about a starving slave from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Elisofon even “theatrically wrapped a strip of white cloth around the anonymous and miserably looking Lega man’s neck”. It is well-known that Achebe rejected Conrad’s depictions of Africa.
The Achebe photos might portray “The Hopeful Launching of a Proud and Free Nigeria”, but there are only eight of them, while Elisofon took a hundred of Igbo dancers at a yam festival.
When the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe died this April, one of the photographs used repeatedly to illustrate stories or obituaries was a portrait taken of him in 1959 by the American photographer Eliot Elisofon.
It is useful to unpack the image, a conventional portrait of Achebe leaning on a desk with two copies of Things Fall Apart in front of him. A photograph, a snapshot, the filtering of the lost moment, is always more than the visual graphics and the intended ‘message’ it proffers to mediate.
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