Photographer Kerry Stuart Coppin addressed the audience during his exhibition opening at Duke University. (Photo: Sheena Johnson/Echo Staff Photographer)

When asked to envision the countries and people of Africa, sadly, many North Americans have been conditioned to describe a safari landscape with poverty stricken tribal citizens wrapped in traditional clothes.

Photographer Kerry Stuart Coppin uses a mixture of fine art photography and social documentation to erase those negative, one-dimensional stereotypes. Coppin’s work, which he called a “highlight” in his career, will be displayed in an exhibit titled “Materia Oscura / Dark Matter: Photographs of Urban Africa and the Diaspora” at Duke University.

His goal is a reconstruction of “the public vision and perception of the black world,” challenging the eurocentric standards of beauty and the African American self-image.

“I’m not interested in creating nostalgia,” said Coppin. “My images simply force you to reevaluate your perceptions of Africa.”

The exhibition opened with a reception and will remain free to the public until Jan. 10, 2004.

The “Dark Matter” collection features over 70 photographs of various people, communities and settings throughout the African Diaspora.

His focus is on the country of Senegal in West Africa, the islands of Barbados and Cuba in the Caribbean, and the city of Miami, Florida, where Coppin currently resides.

Coppin has attempted to use his photos as “visual information” and turn them into a genre that “explores personal and group identity and the search for roots.”

His art then becomes research into several elements of globalization. Coppin’s aim is to shine a light on the “common bond and similarity in our experiences.”

In an effort to keep time and space in his photos ambiguous, Coppin develops all his images in black and white film.

The photos capture “the possibilities to come, and the changes that have already overtaken us,” says Coppin. “I like to play off the image of whether or not it’s contemporary or older.”

As a photographer in foreign countries that are more natural to his origin than North America and hold sentimental value, Coppin has felt a sense of duality and slight remoteness between himself and the people he portrays.

While travelling, Coppin maintains a teacher/student relationship of interaction and exchange between himself and the local artists in Africa and the Caribbean.

But Coppin noted there is a lack of art appreciation and “immediate economic gratification” for the photographers indigenous to the land in comparison to North American photographers.

Through this, Coppin capitalizes off the countries by taking photos with a foreign eye and context as frames of references for the images.

Several photos were taken in countries where Coppin doesn’t speak the natural language or ‘mother tongue’ and he has used the images as a mean of linguistics.

“You have to look for metaphors in the photographs,” hints Coppin. “[There is a] grain of truth hidden in the images,” that are said to give a “healthy appreciation” of the roots of who we are as African-Americans.

The ‘Materia Oscura/Dark Matter’ exhibit is located at the Center for Documentary Studies at 1317 Pettigrew St. in Durham, NC.