Cristina de Middel's best shot

Jambo, from the series The Afronauts by Cristina de Middel (www.lademiddel.com/)

In my last post I mentioned Cristina de Middel's 'fictive' photography. Lo and behold, just a few days later she has featured in the Guardian series asking leading photographers for their best shot. And the picture above, from The Afronauts, is the image she picked.

The interview accompanying the photograph is well worth a read because it explains her thinking behind the series. Here she is, depicting the ill-fated Zambian space programme by shooting images in Spain, using a Brazilian model and sometimes incorporating old photos taken in the US and Italy.

But her motivation was to confront prejudice - Africans couldn't possibly consider going to the moon, could they? Well, yes they could. And she wanted to highlight the 'beautiful' attitude of the space programme's leader, Edward Makuka Nkoloso, who 'tried and believed it was possible'.


I have wrestled with this strand of documentary photography for a while, even writing a college essay on the subject. I started out feeling some antipathy towards it because I felt truth was at stake. These are not depictions of actual scenes from history, but a re-staging of what photographers believed to have been the case. De Middel herself actually admits in the Guardian: 'There is very little documentation from this moment in Zambian history, so I had to figure out my own way to tell the story.'

But on the other hand, de Middel is attempting to tell a story no one would ever have known about. And, as she says, she is showing that there is far more to Africa than 'war and suffering'. In a sense, the fine detail is not what matters; communicating the simple fact that Zambia planned to go to the moon gives a refreshing new perspective on an African country. And it makes us westerners rethink our prejudices. I'm sure that can only be a good thing.