Angelina Jolie receives humanitarian award from Academy

Graffiti are seen on the walls of a building under construction in the Lebanese capital Beirut on November 15, 2013.—AFP photos

Photographer Cristina De Middel’s trip to Nigeria has been profitable. Not only did she exhibit her acclaimed series “The Afronauts” but also was inspired for her next project. Tucked

away in her suitcase as she left the country’s commercial capital Lagos for Paris last week was a copy of Nigerian author Amos Tutuola’s 1954 novel “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”. “It’s about a child who has to flee his village because of war and goes into this magical place called ‘the bush’, a mystical place in Yoruba mythology where all the ghosts and spirits live,” the 38-year-old Spanish photographer told AFP.

“I realized straight away that (the slum neighborhood of ) Makoko could be a great metaphor for ‘the bush’—a magical place with laws that we don’t understand and shouldn’t be.” During her time in the teeming megacity, De Middel paid a visit to sprawling Makoko, much of which rises up on bamboo stilts out of the oily Lagos lagoon and is home to hundreds of thousands of people. As if by magic, her project took shape.

Spooks and ghoulsOver four days, De Middel’s imagined ghosts and spirits came alive

with the help of local volunteers, market-bought costumes and cheap Halloween accessories brought from London. In one image, a “ghost” made from an old curtain rises up hauntingly amid the ramshackle, tin-roofed huts and in another seemingly hangs from a sagging wash-ing line. A third frame shows plastic joke shop spiders, beetles and flies “crawling” over the face of a young man while a mirrored land-scape captures the ethereal quality of Makoko through burning wood smoke and a leaden sky.

De Middel was in Nigeria for the fourth edition of Lagos Photo, the annual festival that increasingly attracts some of the biggest names

in world photography. This year her celebrated “The Afronauts” was shown alongside new works by Cameroon’s Samuel Fosso, known for taking chameleon-like photos of himself dressed as a range of figures from black African and American life. The former newspaper pho-tographer is finding her own voice in the art world, blurring the lines between fact and fiction with the aim of taking people out of their comfort zone.

“The Afronauts” was born as she surfed the Internet one day and stumbled across an article on an improbable space program mounted by Zambia in 1964. “I realized straight away that it was an incredible story that allowed me to play a lot with the photos and give a differ-ent point of view about Africa” beyond the old stereotypes of war and famine, she explained. A storyboard was quickly drawn up of a fantasy adventure in space.

Worldwide acclaimDe Middel was not put off by her lack of knowledge of either Africa

or space and instead drew on her own catalogue of cliches, from el-ephants, African material and the arid climate to the first steps on the moon and spacecraft. The result was a self-published book featuring photographs of African astronauts in colorful space suits, compiled with letters and articles from the time. One thousand copies of the book were quickly snapped up, helped by the backing of leading Brit-ish photographer and collector Martin Parr, who was won over by the project.—AFP

‘The Afronauts’ creator sees ghosts and magic in Lagos

Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel poses in front of some pictures of her series of photographs, The Afronauts, presented during the Lagos Photo Festival.—AFP photos

A 76-foot Norway spruce is joining thousands of other Connecticut commuters as it heads to work

in midtown Manhattan. For the second time in six years, the city of Shelton is sending a Christmas tree to New York City’s Rockefeller Center for the annual holiday display. Workers were cutting the tree down Thursday and sending it by tractor-trailer to New York City, 70 miles away.

Mayor Mark Lauretti says furnishing Rockefeller Center with a tree is a big deal for Shelton, which calls itself “the best affordable suburb in Connecticut.” The tree-lighting ceremony is scheduled for Dec 4. The tree will remain on display until Jan 7. Rockefeller Center has displayed Christmas trees since 1931.--AP

Conn sending Christmas tree to Rockefeller Center

This Nov 28, 2012 file

photo shows the 80-foot-

tall Rocke-feller Center

Christmas during the

80th annual lighting

ceremony in New York.—

AP photos

38MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2013