I’m so excited to launch this project with two extremely talented photographers. We’ve been working together on this for a while and I can’t wait to see the kind of response we get for our first call for entry.
Mambu Badu // Photography Collective
Mambu Badu is a new photography collective created in 2010 that seeks to find, expose, and nurture emerging Black/African-American female photographers.
“Mambu Badu” is an adaptation of the Swahili phrase “Mambo Bado”, which is loosely translated as “the best has yet to come.” At this moment, we dwell in an exciting space of possibility where we can grow as artists. We invite other Black/African American female photographers to join us in this journey. We approaching our art and this collective with a with a humble heart, a curious nature, and a persevering spirit.
// Founding Members
Allison McDaniel | Allison McDaniel was born in 1985 in Livingston, NJ. She currently lives and works in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area. She studied at Howard University and Savannah College of Art and Design, where she earned her BFA in Advertising Design.
She is a freelance graphic designer working in branding and identity, and photographer, working in digital and film formats. Additionally, she serves as Associate Editor of Recipes for Good Living, writing about children and healthy eating.
Kameelah Rasheed | Kameelah Rasheed was born in 1985 in East Palo Alto, CA (SF/Bay Area). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has lived in Cape Town, South Africa as an exchange student, Johannesburg, South Africa as an Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar, Washington, D.C. as a Harry S Truman Scholar, SF Bay Area, and Southern California. A storyteller, this self-taught artist works mainly with film and digital photography. Her documentary-based photography has been exhibited in Oakland and San Francisco, CA as well as Brooklyn, NY and Washington, D.C. Her photography has also been published in F-Stop Magazine and Make/Shift Magazine. Kameelah earned her B.A. in Public Policy from Pomona College and her Ed.M in Secondary Education from Stanford University. Kameelah is also a writer. Her writing has been published in The Nation (online), Pambazuka: Social Justice in Africa, WireTap Magazine, Illume Magazine, and Make/Shift Magazine. She currently writes for Change.org as well.
Danielle Scruggs | Danielle Scruggs was born in 1985 in Chicago, IL and currently lives and works in Washington, D.C. Scruggs’ photographs have been exhibited in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Baltimore, and appeared in The Washington Post, Stop Smiling magazine, F-Stop magazine, Preservation Chicago, and Literago. She earned her M.A. in Digital Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her B.A. in Journalism from Howard University. Danielle also serves as the Visual Arts editor of the grassroots publication Liberator Magazine and writes about all things photography for the Baltimore Sun‘s Charm City Current collective. She is currently serving as a 2010 fellow in the newly formed Public Media Corps.
The details for submitting to our first online exhibit, Memory // A Call for Photographs, can be found at our website, www.mambubadu.com. Please email questions, comments, and concerns to themambubadu@gmail.com.
Memory // A Call for Photographs
What is memory?
The fuel, the burden and force of revolts, movement and heritage.
It is somewhere between Sun Ra’s travels to Saturn, gospel call-and-response, motherships, funeral dirges, and insomnia.
A well-worn groove that bridges prophecies on the future and ruminations on the past to create personal mythologies. The wishful alchemy of autobiography, religious fantasy, and coerced forgetting.
They are unrecorded microhistories, the foundation of family and the far away look of nostalgia in someone’s eye…the intangible and tangible evidence of life and love.
The ever continuous series of “now this moment” and “now this one, too”; a re-remembered timeline of past/present realities.
Rituals of storytelling as well as the spiritual nature of keeping, recording, and creating time.
The collective forgetting and the collective remembering.
With film and and digital cameras, we are looking for works that explore the boundless concepts of memory, nostalgia, and transition. We seek works that explore the transient and temporal ambiguity that is born from a desire to be boundless and open to the change that comes with the possibility of moving through time, rather than with time. We seek works that reflect on what memory is, how we remember, what we remember, and the memories we wish to forget. Let your work explore the shape and visual sound of the ephemeral; the incarnate and manifesting nature of memory. No memory is off bounds, and all off bounds memories are welcomed.
Danielle Scruggs is a photographer and writer currently living and working in Washington, D.C., and Silver Spring, Md. Her work has been exhibited in Baltimore and Brooklyn and published by The Washington Post, Stop Smiling magazine, FILE magazine, and F-Stop Magazine. Scruggs holds an M.A. in Digital Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a B.A. in Journalism from Howard University. She is still very much in love with Charm City, albeit from a distance.