de Menil Gallery kicks off 2023–24 season with panAFRICAproject

Groton School’s de Menil Gallery kicked off its 2023–24 season with an opening reception for Boston photographer Lou Jones’ panAFRICAproject on October 2.

De Menil Gallery Interim Director Blake Fitch hailed Mr. Jones as “way more than a documentary photographer,” pointing to his work in advertising, editorial, and fine art photography, and as an educator. Based out of his studio in Boston, he has photographed for Fortune 500 corporations and small local businesses including Federal Express, Nike, and the Barr Foundation; completed assignments for magazines and publishers all over the world such as Time, Life, National Geographic, and Paris Match; and published multiple books.

At the reception, Mr. Jones explained that, while he has taken on big projects in the past—he’s shot on assignment in sixty-three different countries, including thirteen Olympic games and a series spotlighting men and women on death row in prisons across America—his panAFRICAproject was the most ambitious of his career. 

Mr. Jones conceived panAFRICAproject after reading news coverage that said the African Union was going to censor Western access to news as a way to shake free of the lingering influence and impact of colonialism. 

“Growing up in America, the word ‘censorship’ was like a four-letter word,” he said. “I thought, that’s not a way to deal with your problems. And then I realized they were right. I realized that neo-colonialism and the way they treat Africa and the terrible new way of subjugating Africa by only reporting bad stories was really a very insidious way to deal with keeping them under control.”

Eventually, Mr. Jones also realized that he could shine light on the real Africa most don’t see by using what he called “the most powerful tool in the world: photography.”

“It’s the universal language,” he explained. “I don’t need a Rosetta Stone. I don’t need a translator. I can show pictures and somebody from Mars can see what’s happening.”

So he pointed his camera toward the continent and is trying to photograph every country in Africa.

“We just got back a few weeks ago from Mozambique,” said Mr. Jones, “and we photographed everything. We photographed industry and hospitals and agriculture. We went into homes and the villages of the different populations, in order to give a more rounded portrait of each of the fifty-four countries in Africa, because each one of them is so different.”

That five-week trip to Mozambique marked Mr. Jones’ sixteenth country visited out of fifty-four on the continent. The de Menil Gallery exhibit samples from a wide range of those trips, including photos from Burkina Faso, Egypt, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Lesotho, Morocco, Namibia, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia.

“We do a lot of research on each country before we go,” said Mr. Jones. “What we do is go and talk to people locally and let them tell the story that’s not told on the front page of the New York Times, that’s not told on the 11 o’clock news, that’s not conflict or poverty or pestilence. We try to let them tell us what very often are success stories. That’s what we’re trying to photograph.”

Lou Jones’ panAFRICAproject runs in the de Menil Gallery until November 12.