African Photo Magazine Issue #8

Teddy Mitchener is the
head photographer at House of
Fotography, based in Nairobi Kenya.
A Washington DC native, Teddy is
a self-taught photographer, having
picked up his first camera in 1992
under the tutelage of his father, Willie
Brown. A fully fledged professional
photographer, Teddy earns his living
in Kenya primarily as a commercial
photographer in the advertising
industry and on private commissions.
For Teddy, photography is simply
one of the many mediums he uses
to express his creativity. A graduate
of The Duke Ellington School of the
Arts, Teddy credits the institution with
broadening the limits of his creativity
and instilling in him the love of other
art forms such as plaster and stone
sculpting, wood work, pencil drawing
and painting. The merging of these
mediums is what now informs Teddy’s
personal projects and inspires his
creative photography concepts.
“I picked up photography initially as a
means to an end, to capture imagery
that I wanted to sculpt, draw or paint,
then along the way I found that my
love for photography was deepening.
It was however not until I relocated
to Nairobi in 2009 that I became a
fully-fledged photographer. Today,
Teddy specializes in Commercial
and Corporate photography and is a
certified CANON trainer for the Africa
region.
Teddy’s desire to elevate his craft and
that of fellow photographers within
the region has seen him found and
publish, in April 2015, a one-of-a-kind
magazine called African Photo
Magazine. This magazine seeks to
showcase the ideological difference
between photography produced in
Africa and photography produced
in the rest of the world, which has
resulted in photography being
produced that does not represent
the authenticity of the African, the
aspirations of the African, the hope
of the African, the soul of the African,
in all its beautiful black, brown and
white shades. This magazine seeks to
elevate the African photographer, the
African voice and the African Image.
Alice in Africa is Teddy Mitchener’s
creative take of the iconic fable Alice
in Wonderland. “I always wondered
what it would look like told from an
African perspective. Africans need to
be able to see themselves with eyes
of wonder and not through the eyes
of other cultures that relegate them
to poverty, war and disease. There is
a lot of wonder, and beauty all around
us but we just need to be willing to see
it.” In crafting the series, Teddy also
wanted to be able to stitch together
a narrative that would tell the story
from start to finish, without the need
for words. This concept was done in
partnership with classical fashion
designer Galina Tatarinova and the
Fairmont Mt Kenya Safari Club.
Model Credits: Ethane Kiernan,
Valerie Awuor, Lucianah Nyawira,
Evelyne Apondi, the Mitchener boys,
and Galina’s little girl.
https://www.teddymitchener.com
Alice in Africa
24 africanphotomagazine ISSUE 8 December 2018 25