Brooklyn-based, French-Senegalese visual artist and photographer Delphine Diallo has been challenging stereotypical Westernized notions of what it means to be African, and in particular an African woman, for over a decade.
Delphine Diallo, of Senegalese heritage, was born in Paris in 1977. She graduated from the Académie Charpentier School of Visual Art in Paris in 1999, after which she pursued a music career before progressing to a cooperate Art Director role in Paris. She moved to New York in 2008, was mentored by acclaimed photographer and artist Peter Beard, and then, inspired to learn more about her heritage and develop her artistic eye, she returned to her father’s home city of Saint-Louis in Senegal. She has since moved back to New York, but her vision remains focused firmly on people of African descent, and, in particular, black women.
Diallo’s lens is entirely and purposely contrary to the ‘othering’ scope through which African women have traditionally been portrayed by Western artists. From painted portraits and landscapes from the height of colonialism, which portrayed African women alternately as depraved savages or as unusual-yet-desirable objects to be reluctantly conquered by the colonizers, to the voyeuristic, touristic photographs of the 19th and 20th centuries, which did not offer a much improved, more authentic view, black women have been portrayed through a distorted Western view for centuries.
“Photographs so far in history have a very limited interpretation of people of color,” says Diallo, “so I had this amazing passion and dream to embody a new mythology of women of color. Portraiture for me was the key to doing it.”
And a new mythology she did create. Diallo’s interest in anthropology, mythology, religion, science, and martial arts is apparent in her portraits, which combine these influences to exquisitely and powerfully portray her subjects in an avant-garde, otherworldly style that pays homage to their heritage without being caricatures of that heritage.
Source: Delphine Diallo
In her art, both through her portraiture and her collages, Diallo ‘changes the gaze’ to, in her own words, “Create a new narrative to empower black women and create new experiences for consciousness to expand.” This is a necessary expansion because, she says, “Women are in need of different kinds of narratives. For centuries, patriarchal society has transformed the black woman’s body into an object. I want to bring a new vision of black female archetypes: the explorer, the queen, the goddess, the innocent, the sage, the mother, the caregiver, the ruler, the lover, the spiritual warrior, the magician, the everywoman.”
Multi-dimensionality in the representation of African women, which has been sorely lacking for far too long. In addition to her art, Diallo is a successful commercial photographer, lending a much-needed diversity of view and lens to commercial photography.
Who is your favorite photographer from your home country?
by Illona Meyer
