text and photos from Kickstarter campaign, all rights reserved.
Priya Ramrakha was a Kenyan photojournalist and one of the most prolific photographers of Africa’s independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s.
He rose to international fame as one of the first African photographers published in Time magazine and Life magazine. After he was killed on assignment in Biafra, Nigeria in 1968, Priya Ramrakha’s photographic legacy seemed to evaporate. Four decades later in Nairobi, Kenya, we found his prints and negatives, covered in dust and all but forgotten. We then spent over ten years compiling his archive of more than 100,000 images from around the globe. In his short life he worked intensely, documenting the hopes and the chaos of independence movements in Zanzibar, Congo, Yemen and Nigeria. He portrayed suppressed stories such as the anti-colonial Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, and freedom fighters Tom Mboya and Jomo Kenyatta. In the United States, he captured civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X in action, and portrayed pan-African luminary Miriam Makeba.
Sensitive and nuanced, the majority of his work went unpublished. Today, seen for the first time, they offer new narratives, disrupting and reimagining what we thought we knew about struggle, solidarity and connections within Africa and beyond.
Priya Ramrakha is the first book to present photographs from his recovered archive c.1950-1968. Edited by Shravan Vidyarthi and Erin Haney with a foreword by Paul Theroux and essays and interviews with Morley Safer, Sana Aiyar, Erin Haney, John Edwin Mason, Drew Thompson and Shravan Vidyarthi. Photo Archive Editing by Erica McDonald. Design Consultant Francesca Richer. Hardcover volume, 200 pages, (approx 9×11 in; 229×303 mm) it will be published in Germany by Kehrer Verlag (Heidelberg) in October 2018.
Visit the Kickstarter campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2098875616/priya-ramrakha-a-photo-book-from-a-forgotten-archi?ref=discovery&term=priya
