Nigerian photographer J.A. Green to be focus of Art History talk

“The Social Life of Images: Nigerian Photographer J. A. Green (1873-1905)” is the title of this spring’s Art History Lecture, to be presented by Lisa Aronson, associate professor of art history.

Free and open to the public, the lecture is scheduled at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, April 23, in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. The Department of Art History is sponsoring the lecture.

As a professional photographer working in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria in the 1890s during the early stages of British colonialism, Nigerian native J. A. Green found himself straddling between and accommodating two worlds, one dominated by British colonial officials and merchants and the other by his own Ijo elite. Over time, these two patron groups used Green’s photos to promote their own political and social agendas. Aronson’s lecture examines the ever-evolving life of Green’s photos over space and time from the perspectives of these two patron groups.

Aronson teaches and writes mainly about African art and visual culture. Initially, her scholarship focused on two areas of exploration, African textiles and trade and issues of gender in African art.  More recently, her interests have turned to contemporary African art and African photography. In 2011 Aronson co-curated an exhibition of contemporary African art at the Tang with its former director, John Weber.

Titled Environment and Object in Recent African Art, the show examined recent African art according to two fluid and often intertwined aesthetic and conceptual frameworks:  the impact of the environment on contemporary African life, and the use of found objects and appropriated materials as a recurring presence in current African art. The catalog by the same title offers a range of perspectives by multiple authors on the subject of African art as it relates to the continent’s rich, and often contested, environment.  

Aronson’s most recent research focuses on the work of Jonathan Adagogo Green. Funding from a Getty Collaborative Research Grant and numerous Skidmore Faculty Development sources have enabled Aronson to locate and document hundreds of Green's photos in British and American archives, and to visit Nigeria twice during her 2012-2013 sabbatical to explore the meaning of his photographs from the local, Ijo perspective. The now completed multi-authored book on Green’s photographs that she and her colleague, Martha Anderson, have edited, and to which she contributes four chapters, is currently under review at Indiana University Press.