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Angèle Etoundi Essamba was born in 1962 in Douala ( Cameroon)
She went to Paris at the age of ten and received there her basic education.In 1982 she moved to Amsterdam where she got her photographic training at the Professional Dutch School of Photography.Since her first exhibition in 1985, many more have followed both solos and group shows in Europe, Africa and America, <\/p>\n
Through her excellence in photography Angèle Etoundi Essamba gained international recognition with her special and personal view on composition,contrast and design.
Her work combines these with an intimate sensitivity of race and her african heritage. We feel her pride, strength and Passion. <\/p>\n
Her work has been the subject of various publications,including catalogues and two photobooks. <\/p>\n
LA METAMORPHOSE DU SUBLIME<\/p>\n
…Les valeurs sacralisantes de la photo, rappelle Roland Barthes, sont la rarete’ de ce qui est montr\u00e9, le saisissement d’un instant fugitif, la prouesse technique et la trouvaille surprenante. La bonne photographie r\u00e9vèle plus qu’elle ne montre , elle suggère plus qu’elle ne propose une prise d\u00e9finitive du r\u00e9el.
La ligne artistique d’Angèle Etoundi Essamba accomplit, à coup sur, les fonctions de la photographie \u00e9nonc\u00e9es par Roland Barthes, c’est à dire « informer, repr\u00e9senter, surprendre, faire signifier, donner envie » Son Art , dot\u00e9 d’une force visuelle, consigne, avec po\u00e9sie, des fragments de corps qu’elle surprend, saisit en r\u00e9v\u00e9lant leur subtilit\u00e9 musicale. Loin d’un d\u00e9calque plat des corps, sa photo pure et nette instaure une rupture, restitue une pr\u00e9sence surprenante, myst\u00e9rieuse à la fois fugace et fragile par delà des conventions sur la femme noire. <\/p>\n
L’œuvre photographique de Angèle Etoundi Essamba, qui lit joliment intention de la m\u00e9tamorphose et sublimation du corps, t\u00e9moigne autant de l’ampleur de sa cr\u00e9ativit\u00e9 que de l’assomption de sa libert\u00e9 en tant qu’artiste et femme. Elle est à la fois sujet et objet porteur d’histoire, de sa propre histoire, car elle met à nu une femme d\u00e9sormais sujet de son corps, et par extension, de sa diff\u00e9rence ethnique, de son identit\u00e9 sexuelle et de ses possibles rôles sociaux… <\/p>\n
Landry-Wilfrid Miampika, Madrid 2004<\/p>\n
(Critique litt\u00e9raire et professeur associ\u00e9 de langue et litterature francaise) <\/p>\n
FRAMING BEAUTY<\/p>\n
…Angele Etoundi Essamba belongs to a generation of artists who consistently focus on the african self-image. You could regard it as a form of emancipation,the development of a personal view of physical beauty,free from all antropological,ethnographic,exotic and romantic blemishes from the colonial era. Like Charles Cordier in his day, Angele Etoundi Essamba wants to give African men and women back their own beauty, she is constantly divesting the beauty of the african body of misunderstandings. The skin is reinvested with its physical proximity, because the photographer has almost litteraly crawled into the skin of the image. Essamba’s photographs are always carefully composed. She proceed from an organised form ,a concept,a construction of the image which she has imagined.It may take the form of a specific attitude or gesture,or it may be an expression, however minimally expressed in pure form. <\/p>\n
These images are generally timeless. Beauty,they seem to be saying is primarily about stasis. Wether it is a photograph by Man Ray, Mapplethorpe or Etoundi Essamba, it is always encapsulates that one sublime moment in which the beauty of the human form is captured by an artist, the moment of classical balance, the perfect cut-out, that one moment of suspended animation prior to movement… <\/p>\n
Huub Mous, the Netherlands 2004<\/p>\n
(Art critic) <\/p>\n