IT IS NOT UNUSUAL to be moved by the ocean, stirred by frothy swells of salt water rolling onto the sand and withdrawing in perpetuity. Still, I did not expect to tear up looking at a photograph of the ocean on the second floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art on a rainy Wednesday afternoon. Made with a medium-format camera and exhibited as an unframed, black-and-white inkjet print tacked down with paperclips, the image belongs to “Sea Never Dry,” an ongoing project begun by master photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi in 1982. The series is a sweeping record of “Bar Beach,” an iconic stretch of coast in Lagos. Bar Beach was once the place to be: to play, to rest, to pray, to invoke spirits, to buy, sell, wander, wonder. During the dark decades of Nigeria’s military dictatorship, it became a place to die. From the early 1970s to the late ’80s, thousands of people gathered to watch thieves and failed coup-makers get shot down by firing squad against the extraordinary expanse of the Atlantic.
Akinbiyi zooms in on the ordinary. In one picture, Bar Beach, Victoria Island, Lagos, 2006, two friends—twin sisters?—dressed identically, their backs to Akinbiyi’s camera, hold each other— one’s arm draped across the other’s waist, the other across her shoulder—as they stare out at the water. The other people in the frame hold space almost perfectly, in a rhythm and alignment that seems rehearsed. The ocean rises like a wall ahead. In another photograph, from 2010, a woman carries a sekere. She may have just finished making music or dancing. We do not know. She is dressed in porcelain-white robes—the garb of the Celestial Church of Christ, which famously held prayer and worship sessions on Bar Beach. We can see her feet and prints in the sand. Foaming waves rush to her feet, but do not quite reach them.
Bar Beach is walled off now, the sand-filled site of a still-speculative city on water, Eko Atlantic, whose dedication ceremony was attended by former US president Bill Clinton in 2013. Akinbiyi’s series is now a document of what has been lost to this exclusive commercial and residential waterfront development, an elegy to one of the few public spaces that at one time belonged to all Lagosians. Yet if the images of “Sea Never Dry” are documents, they also feel like drafts, full of air and ongoingness. At times, the photographer’s angles make it seem as though he must have been floating.
Akinbiyi’s work is undoubtedly the jewel of “New Photography 2023,” the twenty-seventh such presentation organized by MoMA. This edition was curated by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, who explains that the exhibition is meant to showcase artists who are “embracing a documentary tradition only to let it go.” In many ways, Onabanjo’s show departs from the traditions of MoMA’s recurring contemporary photo survey, introduced in 1985 by John Szarkowski, the legendary longtime steward of the museum’s photography department. First, there’s a geographical focus: The seven artists participating in this iteration—Akinbiyi, Kelani Abass, Logo Oluwamuyiwa, Amanda Iheme, Karl Ohiri, Yagazie Emezi, and Abraham Oghobase—are from Nigeria, making work rooted in one city, Lagos. They are all showing at MoMA for the first time, and comprise the first ever group of living African photographers the museum has exhibited. The show also kicks the series’ recent habit of offering an “ocean of images,” to quote the title of the 2015 edition, which included nineteen artists. Onabanjo instead opted to “have a smaller number of artists and care for those artists in an expansive way.”’
“New Photography 2023” is less in dialogue with previous shows at its host institution—whose collection suffered until recently from a dearth of work by African photographers—than it is with two exhibitions by the late Okwui Enwezor: “In/Sight: African Photographers” at the Guggenheim, in 1996, and “Snap Judgments” at the ICP, in 2006. Those surveys, however groundbreaking, were products of their time, corrective in spirit and mission. They offered the Western viewer a new way to “look at Africa” beyond disaster and poverty porn. They interrogated identity and postcolonial memory through the eyes of dozens of artists who spanned the continent.
“New Photography 2023”—its arrival already prepared by the trailblazing work of Enwezor and other African curators such Koyo Kouoh, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Simon Njami, and the late Bisi Silva—has no such burdens. It does not concern itself with redressing geopolitical prejudices or combating stereotypes. Still, contemplating the title, I couldn’t help but ask, new to whom? 1-54, a New York fair that has shown work by artists of African descent since 2013, is still covered in the American press as if it were novel, trendy, or aspiring to a loftier perch in the hierarchy of the art world. (Consider two nearly identical New York Times headlines about the fair, one from 2018, “Touria El Glaoui Brings Contemporary African Art to the World,” and one from this year, “The 1-54 Art Fair Brings Africa and Its Diaspora into the Global Mainstream.”) To quote Toni Morrison, speaking in a 1998 interview: “It’s inconceivable that where I already am, is the mainstream.” But I digress.
Oluwamuyiwa leaches Lagos of its explosive color, its ceaseless noise and motion. The megacity of some twenty million people; of six-hour traffic jams; of roadside vendors hawking furniture and dogs; of conductors ushering people into rickety yellow-and-black buses; of apocalyptic preachers with megaphones—on this Lagos, the photographer imposes a bracing geometric order and quietude. Yet his Lagos is not without surprises. In one incredible image, Oil Wonders II, 2018, Oluwamuyiwa bends reality. We see two silhouettes emerging from a galactic oil slick—or that’s what our brain tells us at first. Looking closer (and mentally flipping the image), we realize that the figures are the reflections of a pair who seem to defy gravity, cropped out save for feet at the bottom of the frame, seemingly rooted in a ceiling of sand.
Where Oluwamuyiwa abstracts the quotidian present, Amanda Iheme directs our gaze toward the past. In Nigeria’s rotting colonial monuments and architecture, she finds a potent metaphor for the dereliction that has reliably characterized a succession of Nigerian governments. In Casa de Fernandez—Death—14, 2015, Iheme photographs a mansion built in 1846 and originally inhabited by an Afro-Brazilian slaver. After the slave trade was abolished, the building passed into the hands of a Yoruba man named Ọláìyá, under whose ownership the building became a lively community hub encompassing a post office, a bar, and residencies; more recently, vendors opened stalls in its downstairs area. Despite having been anointed a national monument in 1956, the building was demolished in 2016 with the state’s blessing; a fraught but spirited symbol of survival was wrenched from Lagos in a matter of hours.
A more direct view of Nigeria’s colonial history is offered in Abraham Oghobase’s “Constructed Realities,” a series that brings together archival images from colonial-era Nigeria and excerpts from The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922) by Frederick Lugard, the first colonial governor-general of Nigeria when the country was under British rule. The texts, boasting of British might and innovation, lay bare the administrative machinery and paternalistic ideology of European imperialism. Oghobase calls our attention to the entwinement of nineteenth-century coloniality and the camera. In one image, we see Ọba Ọvonramwen, the King of Benin, on his way to exile in 1897 (after his palace had been sacked and the contested Benin Bronzes of today, pillaged). Lugard’s text is superimposed over the king, whose legs are in chains, and he is flanked by sentinels. In another work in the series, we see the Oba again, only this time the chains are gone.
For a survey of contemporary imagemaking, “New Photography 2023” is remarkably attuned to materiality, filled with objects that draw out the contingencies of the past as well as the future. Kelani Abass constructs new images from hundreds of discarded portraits of the Abeokuta community, who in Nigeria’s early years as an independent country flocked to his father’s print shop to commemorate benchmarks like anniversaries and funerals. These pictures mark time, but also possibility, a moment when people, at long last, had the freedom to determine their identities free from colonial imposition. For “Archive of Becoming,” an ongoing series begun in 2015, Karl Ohiri develops film negatives abandoned by Lagosian portrait studios, rendered obsolete themselves by the rise of digital media. Ohiri’s insistence on the mattering of these cast-off photographs, which date from the 1970s onward, entails a collaboration with ruin, as years of chemical deterioration lend these exuberantly attired, tenderly posed sitters an aura of otherworldliness.
This mattering of African lives finds new meaning in the show’s most explicitly political work, Yagazie Emezi’s images from #EndSARS, a series of mass protests against police brutality that brought Nigeria to a standstill in the fall of 2020, five months after the murder of George Floyd. (SARS stands for “Special Anti-Robbery Squad,” the Nigerian Police unit infamous for its extrajudicial killings, extortion, assault, and harassment of young Nigerians.)
The movement ended tragically on October 20, 2020, when the Nigerian military killed several unarmed dissenters at two protest sites. (Amnesty International estimates there were “at least twelve” fatalities.) Emezi’s images have the quality of fire: They crackle in the eye when you stare too long, richly contrasted to better project the grief and outrage of the protesters who demanded that the police stop killing them. Onabanjo told me that, in relaying the stakes of photography in Nigeria today, it would have been irresponsible not to include these pictures of #EndSARS, and I agree. But I am not convinced these are the strongest works to show, even if the decision to save them for last—as the incendiary culmination of a sequence of poetic, careful deliberations—was a striking one on Onabanjo’s part. The curator said that the series is personal and not photojournalism, while in fact the reverse feels true. Emezi’s photographs bear silent witness but lack an authorial point of view. Their evidentiary authority seems at cross-purposes with the exhibition’s mandate to “challenge the notion of the photograph as document.”
One of the strongest images from Akinbiyi’s “Sea Never Dry” dramatizes the tensions between evidence and imagination at play in “New Photography 2023.” The picture is an anomaly in the series: It is not a lonely figure we see, but a dense throng of beachgoers—perhaps it was a public holiday—who gather behind the gently lapping surf, shedding their clothes, setting up umbrellas, advertising their wares. It was Bar Beach in 2001, at capacity and in its finest form, a playground for any and all. When making his composition, at once chaotic and scrupulously delineated, Akinbiyi chose to tether our gaze to that of another: a young man in profile, dressed in a white robe. He stares toward the ocean; we follow his sight line until it breaks off, beyond the edge of the frame.
“New Photography 2023” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through September 16.
