Award-winning Zimbabwean photographer Resta Nyamwanza is taking part in the final of the fourth PhotoAfrica contest underway at the eighth African Film Festival of Tarifa (FCAT) in Spain.
Nyamwanza is the only Zimbabwean in the competition and she squares up with 24 other photographers from African countries like South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal.
The winner of the contest will walk away with ₣1 500 while the first and second runners-up pocket ₣1 000 and ₣500 respectively.
The topic of this year’s PhotoAfrica contest is “Urban Space” and African cities will be seen through photographers’ eyes.
Nyamwanza regularly exhibits her work in Zimbabwe and gained international experience by participating in exhibitions in Sweden and Denmark.
In 2009, she won the Outstanding Two-Dimensional Work Award at the National Arts Merit Awards with her piece Two Buses and 1 000 people.
“She ‘thematises’ her work among themes like modern African cities and their dwellers,” FCAT international press officer Filip Hruby said.
He said the exhibition of altogether 27 large format photographs would be inaugurated and installed outdoors in Tarifa before and throughout the festival.
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After its closure, the exhibition will be travelling the whole year through Spanish and African cities.
“This year we registered a record number of 75 photographers from all over Africa who sent more than 400 photographs to the competition and from which we chose 27 final photographs to be inaugurated in Tarifa and on the following tour,” said PhotoAfrica coordinator Gaetano Gualdo He said while topics of previous editions were “Borders” in 2009 and “Independence” in 2010, this year’s topic, “Urban Space”, focused on a trend that has seen more and more Africans resettle from rural areas to cities.
The fourth PhotoAfrica participants include newcomers as well as experienced photographers, in some cases participants or even winners from previous editions.
Hruby said most entries (23) came from South Africa with 16 of them making it into the final.
This year FCAT would screen over 100 African films and it would bring together some of the most distinguished African filmmakers.
Hruby said the festival’s aim was to spread knowledge about African film production by exhibiting a representative wide variety of audiovisual African works every year:
“From the classics to more innovative and recent films, from documentaries to feature length fiction films, from South Africa to Morocco and from Senegal to Ethiopia,” he added.
