Joana Choumali – Untitled from Emotions A Nu series (2013)

Choumali is an Ivorian image maker who focuses primarily on work featuring African woman.

Her focus is primarily vibrant, super-saturated color (and she’s really fabulous as using the intersections between non-complimentary colors to flatter her subjects.

She also works occasionally in monochrome–and her work here is rather audacious.

I’m not really a fan of studio work. And although that’s what Choumali does more or less exclusively and while I do consider her color work both incisive and bold, it is her monochrome stuff I can’t shake.

Part of it is that I will always be a fan of complication. By that I mean studio photography allows for more control. You can set up in advance, orchestrate the lights, get everything just so and then you can invite the subject and focus on interaction as opposed to juggling 18 other things at once.

Unfortunately, this tends to mean that studio work is pristine and allows for the setting to be decontextualized in favor of allow a laser sharp focus on the subject. Choumali pushes things–ambitiously–in quite a different direction.

Here the almost Pollock-esque speckled backdrop both separates the subject from the backdrop (enhanced with some perhaps less than as subtle as you’d really hope for dodging along the subject’s back and hips. It contributes a solidity to this woman that the shadow her body cases flattens back out.

The solidity is counter balanced expertly by an ephemerality that is echoed in the pose is the subject kneeling or rising? Is her pose contrite or self-accepting and joyful?

I speak virtually on the daily with photographers who are interested in shining a light on the notion of vulnerability with their work. Choumali does exactly that magnificently.