Writer-editor, researcher, and collector-archivist Amy Sall's The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power provides an impressive overview of pan-African artistic expression through the work of 25 photographers and 25 filmmakers. Inspired by Columbia University courses Sall developed and taught in 2016, her gorgeous, significant compilation "serve[s] as skeleton keys for unlocking and demystifying elements of African history and culture distorted through a Western colonial paradigm and gaze." She balances a representative combination of photographs and film stills--in black-and-white and full-color--with biographical introductions to makers and creators. Acknowledging and celebrating their work is an undeniable act of reclamation: "Colonial photography and moving image were significant contributing factors to the dehumanizing of African people and the propagation of the colonial project." Through self-made portraiture and cinema, "African image-makers liberated themselves, their sitters, their viewers, their communities from the definition and categorizations imposed on them by the West." For further enlightenment, Sall also includes essays from historian Mamadou Diouf and scholars Zoé Samudzi and Yasmina Price, and intimate interviews with photographer Samuel Fosso and filmmaker Souleymane Cissé. --Terry Hong