“I am an explorer of places and cultures,” says Nebraska native Betty Press. “Ever since I was young I wanted to travel, and fortunately I met a young man who also wanted to travel. We went off to Morocco and Tanzania, and afterwards, left on a two-year hitchhiking trip back to the USA via Africa, Europe and Asia. This was before I was a photographer, but I was already recording images in my mind.” Press worked as freelance photojournalist for the United Nations and various publications, living and traveling throughout East and West Africa from 1987 to 1995. She has returned multiple times in the years since, and also taught photography at Stetson University and the University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg). During this time she pursued long-term documentary projects that brought her into contact with people in her immediate community, including Young Rising: The African Urban Cultural Landscape and Finding Mississippi. She is currently stationed with her husband in Kenya on a year-long assignment.
Press is driven to find the poetic in the documentary photographic genre. Whether photographing throughout the African continent or the African diaspora in the Americas, Press makes well-balanced compositions of the rituals and day-to-day encounters that support deep community and cultural bonds.
Maasai Blessing Ceremony
The abundant appeal of Press’s work is found in its immediacy. Her aesthetic choices, particularly her use of the Polaroid transfer process, do not satisfy photojournalistic objectivity. Instead, Press renders a unique viewpoint and attention to small details—a goat standing atop a wall outside a cyber consultancy, a beautiful yet inscrutable woman seated at a shop window. The delicacy of these scenes is echoed by the frayed emulsion at the edges of the intimately sized 3x4 and 4x5 Polaroid transfers.
In the field, Press photographs with slide film known for its vivid colors. Later, in her studio she exposes the slides onto peel-apart Polaroid film before transferring the negative onto watercolor paper. She notes in our email exchange a love of the “painterly quality, the muted colors, the messy imagery” that comes with the unpredictability of the transfer process. The discontinuation of the film makes these objects precious records of life in Africa in the late 1980s and 90s.
When first viewing Betty Press’s photographs of communities in Africa, I was curious as to why she wouldn’t portray the context that, at least in part, shapes her tenure there. Very little of the churning socio-political upheaval that has roiled many of the countries Press visits is evident in her work. I find myself looking for the evidence of trauma—the lingering effects and consequences of failed European colonialist projects on the continent, exploitation of natural resources by warlords and multi-national corporations, the looming dread of climate change and how it will affect life on the continent, the physical and psychological scars left by decades of civil war. This speaks to a collective, media-influenced expectation that imagery out of Africa satisfy a lurid, spectatorial need that is based on constructions of the Other. Perhaps, then, Press’s greatest accomplishment is producing potent, lyrical images that don't bend to that demand, and instead honor the communities that thrive despite these entrenched challenges.
Elephant Walk, Kenya
Press’s work conveys a sense of the known and the unknown. She presents comfort and familiarity with her subjects, children and elders primarily, in compositions such as “Two Girls, Massai Line,” and “Njemps Elder Smiling.” The physical and psychological ease in their expressions suggests a rapport shared with Press, and the photographer’s career-long commitment to deeply understanding the communities into which she is invited.
Her imagery also capture the physical and cultural distance that her viewers inherently experience: a solitary figure in Sierra Leone caught in a contemplative moment, majestic elephants moving in a stately line, an elephant calf running through the brush. Press understandably, wisely, maintains a distance from her subjects. Rather than meeting a consumer demand for zoomed-in, high definition images popularized by National Geographic and other publications, Press’s holds back. In doing so, her “messy,” dream-like Polaroid transfers undermine popular photographic “knowing” of a place as vast and complex as the African continent.
This article first appeared in Issue 14, The Explorers Issue.