Gwendalu

Documentary and journalistic photography are often viewed as the most true-to-life forms of photography, with the created images serving as representations of reality itself. Yet a photograph never tells a purely objective story, even without any staging or editing. Every image tells a story through the photographer’s eyes, and this personal angle always infuses the image with a subtle subjective character. In The Afronauts, photographer Cristina de Middel plays with the promise of ‘truth’ suggested by the medium of photography. Based on historical fact, De Middel uses her imagination to recreate the cancelled space flight programme launched by Zambia in the 1960s. On the photograph Gwendalu, the viewer’s attention is drawn to a patch of white stone surrounded by a darker hillside, resembling part of a skull. This image could well be a faithful documentation of a natural phenomenon, but as a part of the series it nevertheless provokes the question whether it is truly so.