Reviving the momentum of www.panAFRICAproject.org before COVID19, my team returned recently to Kenya, the fifteenth country in this overly ambitious project. Using the “universal language” of photography, the mission is to counter the negative, neocolonial misconceptions promulgated by western media. We document country by country, modern, contemporary Africa to provide a visual compendium for usage by institutions, companies, schools & research. Rather than the sensationalistic conflict, poverty, & pestilence narrative being taught by western culture, panAFRICAproject seeks to focus on the progress & advancements of “the REAL Africa”. Industry, medicine, politics, environment, culture, education, etc. have advanced to make Africa some of the fastest growing economies in the world. Technology, entrepreneurship, innovation are overcoming many of the historical obstacles with such dramatic movement that it provides exciting photographic evidence. Highlighting the parallel evolution in current as well as traditional customs requires access & unrelenting trust.
Lou Jones has maintained a commercial photography studio in Boston for many years. Much of the work is for advertising agencies, design studios & directly for Fortune 500 corporations. A large portion of the commissioned work is for publications & magazines, such as Time/Life, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic & Paris Match in 63 foreign countries & 48 or the fty USA states. Jones has covered thirteen Winter & Summer Olympic Games.
Lou Jones has served on the boards of directors for Photographic Resource Center & the American Society of Media Photographers. He has taught photography at several colleges & universities & continues to lecture about photojournalism & ne art photography.
When not traveling Jones exhibits at schools, museums & galleries around the world: Smithsonian Institution, deCordova Museum, Grin Museum of Photography, Cape Cod Museum of Art, Texas Tech University, Harvard University as well as libraries & institutions.
For his entire career, Jones has undertaken many personal long term projects, such as, Japan, tall ships, jazz, pregnancy & six years photographing men/women on fourteen death rows in the USA which resulted in two books & many exhibitions.
For the past few years, Lou Jones has been documenting all 54 countries in contemporary Africa country by country. We are trying to change the narrative from the stereotypical negative topics of poverty. pestilence & conict. http://www.panAFRICAproject.org We just returned from number sixteen & ve weeks in Mozambique. This series is a sampling of the work we have done to date.
