MUCH HAS CHANGED (1932-2013)

Between 1932 and the mid-1960s the chemist Paul Julien (1901-2001) made a number of trips to sub-Saharan Africa. He had an intense interest in anthropology, and an insatiable appetite for travel. Julien, in conventional daily life a chemistry instructor, measured people, took blood samples, wrote up his travels, photographed and filmed. He was a tourist, explorer and researcher, all rolled up in one. He lectured about his adventures, including on the radio for the Dutch broadcaster KRO, and published four books with accounts of his trips. In The Netherlands alone they ran through multiple editions, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

Since 2001 Andrea Stultiens has also been travelling to Africa regularly. The initial culture shock led to her setting up and carrying out projects. To date this has resulted in three publications, a number of exhibitions, and the historic photo platform History In Progress Uganda. Her projects always concern the relation we have to the other, and the ways that photography can – or can not – visualize them.

Archive materials – texts, photos, official documents – play an important role in all of Stultiens’s projects. For The Sequel Stultiens took the work pf Paul Julien and her own photography in Africa as her starting point. Stultiens places Julien’s work, which sometimes seems to testify to colonial arrogance and prejudices, and other times to doubts about the significance of his own perceptions, in an historical perspective. She sought contact with historians in a number of the countries where Julien worked, and on the basis of their comments she herself photographed Nigeria, Uganda and Liberia. The result is work in which we become conscious of our gaze as an outsider and are challenged to reflect on it, while because of this approach the photos sometimes give away something that slips past us in a superficial examination. This presentation is the beginning of a larger research project involving the value of Paul Julien’s work for today’s Africa, and for the non-African viewer.