FOTODOKS
Festival for contemporary
documentary photography
FOTODOKS
Festival for contemporary documentary photography

Calvin Hein

Sugarbread, 2022
Dead Fishes and Praying Mantis, 2024
in collaboration with Kay Kwabia

Although photography had already begun to spread out from West and Central Africa in the mid-nineteenth century to cover the entire continent, it was primarily European photographers who shaped images of an imaginary ‘Africa’ in line with Western notions. With greater reach and reception than their African counterparts, photos taken by Europeans incorporated and perpetuated exoticising perspectives and colonial imagery. In this sense, the works of the Ghanaian German photographer Calvin Hein are understood not only as an intimate exploration of his own transnational identity but also as an individual act of self-empowerment and representation. Hein uses photography as a means of negotiating belonging, society of origin and homeland( s) within the context of the Ga community, revealing a subjective, hybrid overlapping of internal perspective and diasporic control which reflects the complex and diverse interwoven identities of a world that is almost completely globalised.

 

Website:

https://calvinhein.de/

Calvin Hein

Sugarbread, 2022
Dead Fishes and Praying Mantis, 2024
in collaboration with Kay Kwabia

Although photography had already begun to spread out from West and Central Africa in the mid-nineteenth century to cover the entire continent, it was primarily European photographers who shaped images of an imaginary ‘Africa’ in line with Western notions. With greater reach and reception than their African counterparts, photos taken by Europeans incorporated and perpetuated exoticising perspectives and colonial imagery. In this sense, the works of the Ghanaian German photographer Calvin Hein are understood not only as an intimate exploration of his own transnational identity but also as an individual act of self-empowerment and representation. Hein uses photography as a means of negotiating belonging, society of origin and homeland( s) within the context of the Ga community, revealing a subjective, hybrid overlapping of internal perspective and diasporic control which reflects the complex and diverse interwoven identities of a world that is almost completely globalised.

 

Website:

https://calvinhein.de/