Angèle Etoundi Essamba was born in 1962 in Douala ( Cameroon)
She went to Paris at the age of ten and received there her basic education.In 1982 she moved to Amsterdam where she got her photographic training at the Professional Dutch School of Photography.Since her first exhibition in 1985, many more have followed both solos and group shows in Europe, Africa and America,

Through her excellence in photography Angèle Etoundi Essamba gained international recognition with her special and personal view on composition,contrast and design.
Her work combines these with an intimate sensitivity of race and her african heritage. We feel her pride, strength and Passion.

Her work has been the subject of various publications,including catalogues and two photobooks.

LA METAMORPHOSE DU SUBLIME

…Les valeurs sacralisantes de la photo, rappelle Roland Barthes, sont la rarete’ de ce qui est montré, le saisissement d’un instant fugitif, la prouesse technique et la trouvaille surprenante. La bonne photographie révèle plus qu’elle ne montre , elle suggère plus qu’elle ne propose une prise définitive du réel.
La ligne artistique d’Angèle Etoundi Essamba accomplit, à coup sur, les fonctions de la photographie énoncées par Roland Barthes, c’est à dire « informer, représenter, surprendre, faire signifier, donner envie » Son Art , doté d’une force visuelle, consigne, avec poésie, des fragments de corps qu’elle surprend, saisit en révélant leur subtilité musicale. Loin d’un décalque plat des corps, sa photo pure et nette instaure une rupture, restitue une présence surprenante, mystérieuse à la fois fugace et fragile par delà des conventions sur la femme noire.

L’œuvre photographique de Angèle Etoundi Essamba, qui lit joliment intention de la métamorphose et sublimation du corps, témoigne autant de l’ampleur de sa créativité que de l’assomption de sa liberté en tant qu’artiste et femme. Elle est à la fois sujet et objet porteur d’histoire, de sa propre histoire, car elle met à nu une femme désormais sujet de son corps, et par extension, de sa différence ethnique, de son identité sexuelle et de ses possibles rôles sociaux...

Landry-Wilfrid Miampika, Madrid 2004

(Critique littéraire et professeur associé de langue et litterature francaise)

FRAMING BEAUTY

…Angele Etoundi Essamba belongs to a generation of artists who consistently focus on the african self-image. You could regard it as a form of emancipation,the development of a personal view of physical beauty,free from all antropological,ethnographic,exotic and romantic blemishes from the colonial era. Like Charles Cordier in his day, Angele Etoundi Essamba wants to give African men and women back their own beauty, she is constantly divesting the beauty of the african body of misunderstandings. The skin is reinvested with its physical proximity, because the photographer has almost litteraly crawled into the skin of the image. Essamba’s photographs are always carefully composed. She proceed from an organised form ,a concept,a construction of the image which she has imagined.It may take the form of a specific attitude or gesture,or it may be an expression, however minimally expressed in pure form.

These images are generally timeless. Beauty,they seem to be saying is primarily about stasis. Wether it is a photograph by Man Ray, Mapplethorpe or Etoundi Essamba, it is always encapsulates that one sublime moment in which the beauty of the human form is captured by an artist, the moment of classical balance, the perfect cut-out, that one moment of suspended animation prior to movement…

Huub Mous, the Netherlands 2004

(Art critic)

Website :  http://www.essamba-art.com