African Sojourn

A Photographer’s Intimate Portrait

Native curiosity, a modicum of restlessness and wind-blown fate. Meet Cary Sullivan. A photographer and music producer with an expansive world view, Sullivan started life in Pacific Palisades and lives in the house where she was raised, now in an extended family, with her mother, Mary, husband Rocky Dawuni and their daughter, Safiyah. While Sullivan’s life may appear to be parochial and comfortably predictable”she even sends her daughter to the elementary school down the street’she retains the interest in the world around her that she displayed as a child, which she explored through the lens of a camera. ‘I remember a neighbor taught me to use a pinhole camera,’ Sullivan recalls, explaining the simplicity of a lightproof box with a single hole in one side. ‘I even started working in a darkroom as a child, and, at PaliHi, I took as many photography classes as I could.’ It was at Palisades High School where Sullivan deviated from the expected and ‘begged’ to finish her studies at nearby Temescal Canyon High School. ‘I was a good student, all As and Bs, but I really wanted to go into an environment where I could work at my own pace,’ she says. ‘I like to work this way. I don’t need to be overseen. Just give me a project so I can put my mark on it.’ With the support of her teacher, Sullivan was able to expand her experiments in photography, shooting documentary material and the quiet changes in the natural world. She even won first prize in an LAUSD contest with a nature scene she shot in Temescal Canyon. By the time she arrived at UC Santa Cruz, Sullivan had already completed a number of undergraduate requirements at Santa Monica College and set her focus on a cultural anthropology major. This worked well with her photography because, as she says, ‘black-and-white, color, digital or film, I was always interested more in the image, not how you take it.’ In the early 1990s, serendipity rearranged Sullivan’s life when she applied for the Education Abroad Program. Her first choice was Kenya, as she had studied Swahili for a year and a half. However, the program only accepts one person for the top spot and she was told that she was first runner-up. So that threw her plans for Kenya into limbo. ‘But I began to hear from friends who had been to Ghana that it was an incredible country, and that convinced me to apply,’ Sullivan says. With her decision, Sullivan found herself on the exact opposite of the continent’Kenya is in East Africa and Ghana in West Africa, just a few degrees north of the equator. And despite English being the official language, Sullivan studied twi, one of the three mutually intelligible dialects of the Akan language spoken by about 15 million people. ‘The first thing I noticed was the friendliness of the people,’ Sullivan recollects. ‘There is an openness and acceptance. Ghana was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence, so most of the young people didn’t grow up with racism. There is economic disparity, but no racial disparity.’ The former British protectorate became a parliamentary democracy in 1957, and today is considered one of the more stable governments in Africa. Sullivan arrived after the rainy season and admits the year was ‘quite trying. I was in school, I was 21, I was a vegan, studying the language, finishing my coursework”which culminated in a huge exam at the end.’ While at the university in Accra, she met a fellow student, Rocky Dawuni, who would become her companion, musical inspiration and, eventually, her husband. The son of a military man, Dawuni grew up in Accra with his eight brothers and sisters and followed his older brother to the university, the second in the family to attend. ‘He had formed his first band and was playing around campus and doing shows in the city,’ Sullivan says. The couple returned to Los Angeles, where Cary ventured into the film industry. She worked as a camera assistant until a broken arm blocked that track’she could no longer carry the heavy 35-mm film canisters. In 1996, Cary and Rocky returned to Ghana for a year, where Cary worked at the first independent TV station, freed from government control.   The couple lived bi-continentally for a time, but ‘that became strenuous,’ Cary says. ‘I was working in the music business. We launched Aquarian records, based in Ghana and Los Angeles, which holds the right to all of Rocky’s records, and oversees the licensing for TV.’ With a growing understanding and deepened knowledge of the eclectic culture of Ghana, Sullivan began to coordinate festivals in Africa and Los Angeles, and to produce progressive radio, including five years on ‘Chocolate City’ on KCRW with Garth Trinidad, a progressive mix of jazz, nu-soul, funk, hip-hop and world rhythms. She now curates the Caf’ Z free music series at the Skirball Cultural Center, from May through October, and for the last eight years has produced Dawuni’s ‘Independence Splash,’ an exuberant celebration of the country’s independence day on March 6. Cary and Rocky draw attention to the music, whether in Ghana, where 40,000 fans celebrated the 50th anniversary of Ghanaian independence this past March, or Afro Funk’ at the Zanzibar in Santa Monica, the oasis for African music and culture, where ‘sessions are often spontaneous jams that can go on for 25 minutes and create a magical moment,’ Cary says. Sullivan all along has found a seamless alliance between the music and her photography. ‘I think Africa has historically and continues to be very misrepresented in the media, with pictures of bloated babies with flies in their eyes. I try to look at the whole picture, but definitely focus on the wonder of Africa and her people as well as the complex reality of a continent that is the cradle of civilization’3 ‘ times the size of the U.S. with over 1,000 languages and close to a billion people.’ Sullivan’s recent Ghana photographs are on view at the Electric Lodge, 1416 Electric Ave. (one block east of Abbot Kinney Boulevard) through November 5. The closing wine-and-hors d’oeuvres reception happens on Wednesday, October 29 from 7 to 9 p.m. Contact: 310-823-0710.