Alfredo Jaar at OFFSCREEN Paris 2024

Searching for Africa in LIFE compiles all 2,128 covers of LIFE Magazine published between 1936 and 1996. For the United States, LIFE was the first and most influential all-photographic news magazine. With over thirteen million weekly readers at its peak, its mission was to provide the country with a window into the world. When LIFE’s publisher, Henry Luce, launched the publication, his stated purpose was “To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events...” However, the scarcity of covers featuring African subjects throughout the magazine’s sixty-year circulation provides an opportunity to reevaluate this claim. Searching for Africa in LIFE reflects historical American attitudes about culture and race – attitudes that continue to reverberate today.

More precisely, Jaar points to the formation and distribution of knowledge around these issues. What emerges in Searching for Africa in LIFE is a failure to inform, a failure to represent. The diversity and complexities of a rich culture, in this case, the continent and peoples of Africa, are largely ignored and reduced to a handful of patronising, exoticising images. Searching for Africa in LIFE questions the currency of media constructions by calling attention to the power of material collections to reposition our gaze and to bring to light readings, and mis-readings, of our histories.