The elite hotels of Africa occupy a peculiar position: they are at once showcases of international corporate uniformity and sites of tension where cultures collide. In “Hotel Afrique,” Stuart Franklin, working with text by Mark Sealy, examines these spaces as interfaces between the tribal, religious, social, and cultural aspects of Africa and the standardized world of global business culture. The photographs attend to the ways these hotels concentrate contradictions—places where the unseen resources of many African countries, such as oil, diamonds, and minerals, are bartered away behind closed doors, and where design, cuisine, musak, and global TV echo ‘international’ standards.
Franklin’s approach does not settle for easy irony. The same establishments that function as enclaves of wealth are, for many local communities, viewed as symbols of achievement that contradict more usual representations of Africa: the dream venue for weddings, and the mark of having reached the pinnacle of success when one is invited to a business conference. For most hotel employees, wages higher than they could earn elsewhere bring reassurance, and their duties are carried out with pride and self-assurance. Franklin’s camera registers these competing meanings without reducing them to a single narrative.
Dewi Lewis Publishing issued the book in 2007 as a hardback of 48 pages, with 48 photographs and a 336 by 243 mm format. Franklin is a member of Magnum Photos and was its president in 2006. He began his photographic career in the early 1980s, has contributed to magazines worldwide, has exhibited widely, and has published four previous books. Sealy is a well-known writer and commentator on photography, and directs Autograph ABP, an international photographic arts agency addressing cultural identity and human rights. That pairing of a seasoned documentary photographer with a critic attuned to representation gives the project a doubled perspective—image and argument in productive tension.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in its subject as much as its authorship: a sustained look at a specific, under-examined social space. It is a compact, carefully produced volume that rewards close attention.
