Teddy Mitchener - Series | AKKA Project - Contemporary African Art Gallery

Teddy Mitchener was born in Washington DC and currently lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya, where he became the head photographer at the House of Photography. Teddy is a self-taught photographer; he 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 full-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.

Teddy has now made his foray into the world of art exhibitions, creating conceptual art photography pieces that speak to the social cultural dynamism that he is witnessing in Africa today. His first exhibition was held in Dubai in February 2019, and in Venice in March 2019, both with AKKA Project. He has also staged two exhibitions in Nairobi, for McKinsey & Co and Alliance Francaise Cultural Centre, all in 2019 and will ke showcasing his artworks, again with AKKA Project, at the PhotoBasel in September 2020.