Okwui Enwezor refers to the American uncovering of Malian photographer Seydou Keita’s archive as “the foundational moment in which a new understanding of African visual culture was inscribed.” Prior to the images being seen in the West, the public perception of Africa in visual culture was built by ethnographic and colonial photographers, as well as safari photographers such as Leni Riefenstahl. There is something necessarily political about the studio photograph, and Kobena Mercer writes about the power of African photographers, who once apprenticed for Western photographers creating ethnographic images, making their own genre out of a medium that had thus far rendered them inferior. They used photography to “convey the expressive needs and imaginative choices the African

subjects made for themselves”.

When he makes this statement, Enwezor determines that Seydou Keita created a “unique visual language that remains unmatched by anything that came before or after.” It is a big statement, and one that perhaps focuses on the export of African photography rather than the commissioning and consumption of photography on the continent.

Photographs have always shown us the possibilities of our existence, whether performed or real. Just before and after independence, the studio became a site for self-definition. The simple act of commissioning a photograph, of saying to the photographer that you want to be captured in a certain way, and the photographer granting you your wish. In some ways that was magical. The request to be seen on your own terms, and the legacy of that.

That is not to say that the studio photograph is a static form, a fossil of self-definition of a specific era. Rather it is a genre that has lent itself to multiple evolutions. With technological innovation and the development of portable cameras, the need to stay in the studio became redundant, and similar to the Impressionist painters moving outside to paint en plein aire, photographers like Malick Sidibe or Cornelius Oyemade moved outside and would photograph parties, weddings, birthdays, funerals. J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere would photograph students at University College of Ibadan every Saturday. People got their own cameras, and would take pictures at family functions, parties, maybe just sitting at home. The photograph became a more informal document of memory, and the snapshot would begin to dominate visual culture .But the central tenets of the studio remained, both stylistically and thematically.

African studio photographs shown in the West have always been mediated by new contexts, new gazes, audiences with completely different experiences. The function of the image changes completely. But what did the photograph do for the subjects that commissioned them and the people in their immediate networks that saw the images? The people that created the visual culture rather than consumed it?

If, as Okwui Enwezor suggests we should, we take the uncovering of Malian photographer Seydou Keita’s archive as “the foundational moment in which a new understanding of African visual culture was inscribed.”, then the photograph remains an extremely important document through which we can look at the development of a visual language on the continent today.

So with Image Impressions, I am referring to this attempt that both photographers and painters have made and continue to make, to capture a specific point in time. To distil moments into something recognisable and sentimental and nostalgic and open-ended. I am also referring to the constantly evolving relationship between painting and photography, specifically on the continent, specifically in Nigeria.

When we are taught about the relationship between photography and painting, it is often through the lens of Impressionism. We read about the anxiety that painters faced in the middle of the 19th century when their work was replaced by technology that was more accurate than their brushstrokes could ever be. In Europe, painters began to question opticality, what does it really mean to see? How does the painter’s eye impact the work? How can the painter begin to think about capturing the ephemeral, light, moments. You begin to see the shorter brushstrokes, the change in subject matter, subjectivity (and eye) taking centre stage. Painting outside rather than in a studio, trying to re-see the mundane with a criticality of what it really means to see.

John Berger writes about Impressionism, “However intensely and empirically observed at the moment, an impression later becomes, like a memory, impossible to verify” Interestingly, in trying to find ways to find relevance for a medium that was being taken over by photography, the Impressionist painting of the early  20th century ended up asking similar things of their viewer as the photograph. As Berger writes, “What an Impressionist painting shows is painted in such a way that you are compelled to recognise that it is no longer there. You cannot enter an Impressionist painting; instead it extracts your memories.” So, like photography, the Impressionist scene does not dictate or tell an entire story, but rather it represents a fleeting moment, and everything else is what the viewer brings to it.

So when we think about the studio image, and all that we have imposed on it, ideas of independence, modernity, self-fashioning, and how often times it can be mistaken for a document, an objective record of a certain time. When really, it is something more contrived, both in its initial commissioning and in its reception, it becomes a site where the viewer can impose her own ideas, memories, dreams.

How can we think of the relationship between painting and photography on the African continent? It is a connection that feels symbiotic or additive, rather than one of opposition. They continuously feed each other. The photograph is often a source for painters, a reference that serves as a starting point for them to create something that is a distillation of the image in front of them and their own ideas and experiences.

The exhibition is anchored by J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere’s images, both in the studio and outside of it. Ojeikere exemplifies the quest to capture the ephemeral, but he also had a very intentional pursuit to create an archive of Nigerian culture. Apart from the obvious nostalgia in the images on show, there is a universalism to them. A wedding, a graduation, ladies dressed up outside church. In the same ways that he methodically documented hairstyles, he takes a disciplined approach to photographing events. Subjects are usually in the centre of the frame, in focus, with a prioritisation of symmetry. When speaking about his hair series, Ojeikere said, “all these hairstyles are ephemeral. I want my photographs to be noteworthy traces of them.”  In Ojeikere’s image there is a constant push and pull between the eternal and the ephemeral, what it means to capture a moment, and what it means for a moment to serve as an archive for the future.

The idea of time, or its absence, comes up in Ekene Emeka-Maduka’s diptych, Super Sweet Gist: Vanilla FanIce; FanMilk LTD Ghana (1960), 2023. Similarly to what we see in  Ojeikere’s work, she was thinking about how intimate moments become universal. So with the product placement in the painting, the ice-cold Fan Ice after a long day at school, she is meditating on this idea of relatability. There is nothing in this painting that betrays an era or a time, but it feels like something we can all relate to; gisting with friends, sharing an ice cream, walking home from school. The use of text is a nod to pre-independence advertising, and the artist was thinking about how public imagery can borrow language from intimate moments.

Another artist who employs text in their work is Chinaza Agbor. With An Unrequited Fantasy (2021-2023), she references the form of a postcard, the ultimate souvenir. Again, we see this idea of wanting to capture a point in time.  It’s not enough to live something, but we also need the proof that it happened, something tangible to accompany our memories.

A key theme across the entire show is that of delegation to the viewer and their experience. A large part of the works in this show are made complete by that which the audience brings to them. As Elizabeth Bigham posited of Seydou Keita’s photographs, the viewer becomes an author in the work, enriching it with their memories and experiences. In the creation of fragments rather than the whole, impressions rather than facts, the artists in this show seem to treat the viewer with an invitation, a call to collaboration. As Berger writes about Monet, “Given the precision and the vagueness, you are forced to re-see the lilacs of your own experience. The precision triggers your visual memory, while the vagueness welcomes and accommodates your memory when it comes.”

In Helena Foster’s paintings, she plays with this idea of precision and vagueness by often taking photographs of films, zooming in on a part that might not necessarily be the focal point, and using these photographs as bases for her paintings. In both paintings on display, we see details such as the floral patterns on the subjects’ clothing, or the outstretched arm of a subject, a stem dangling from it. But we still cannot place the scenes, we don’t know where or when it takes place, or who these people might be to each other. But there is a feeling we get from it. In I See You in My Eyes (2023),  it even looks like they are posing for a photograph. Through her style of painting, and her brushstrokes, she oscillates between short detailed strokes and more sweeping gestures; the precise and the vague.

Remi Ajani also paints from photographs, specifically family archives. She is fascinated by images from her parents’ generation, their parties, their friends. Personal documents that have stories behind them that you might never know, but you bring to them your experiences. In Looking Glass (2023), it is a scene from a party, but the subjects are faceless, their anonymity inviting the viewer to project. Berger writes about Monet, “What he had in mind were colours; what is bound to come into the viewer’s mind are memories.” Ajani’s work situates itself somewhere between figuration and abstraction, creating scenes that are somewhat recognisable, but not allowing the viewer the full comfort of the artist’s dictation. If Impressionism and its questions of opticality came about due to a crisis of confidence in a human’s ability to compete with technology, Ajani pushes even further the question of what it means to see. What do you see and why? How do you paint a feeling, an atmosphere?

It is interesting to compare Ajani’s work to Esiri Erheriene-Essi, who also depicts a party scene from a different era, but layers the work with multiple photographs.. Essi has an archive of old photographs that she continually references. While Ajani steers away from detail, Essi emphasises them with her detailed depictions of clothing and hairstyles, as well as references to specific products, such as Henkes’ Schnapps gin.

An aspect of the studio photograph that has made its legacy so important, is that of myth-making. The permission for Nigerian artists to create their own visions. In the work of Chioma Ebinama and Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, they build upon mythological and historical traditions that exist both locally and globally, and use them to propel an idea forward. For Ikhide, he plays on the idea of memory, of tales he was told as a child in Nigeria, and then held on to when he moved to the UK. He was thinking of books such as My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola and Tales by Moonlight, and considering how to create stories and images that stand the test of time and remain relevant touchpoints as you move through the world.

Similarly for Ebinama, Ihe 11 was created in New York, after a stint in Nigeria, and she began exploring themes of Igbo cosmology and ancestor worship within her work. The idea of unity here, with the figures intertwining at every angle possible, in some ways evokes the family members that would come to Ojeikere’s photography studio. Ideas of togetherness, care and interconnectedness. Both Ikhide and Ebinama both use watercolour, but in dramatically different ways.

It has been interesting to think about the ways in which photography can also respond to painting. In some ways, This is Modesty by Lakin Ogunbanwo is reminiscent of a painting. Maybe it’s the small painted flowers on the agbada, so starched that it seems to defy gravity. Or the symmetrical folds as the subject clasps his hands behind his back. There is a formalism to Ogunbanwo’s work that is reminiscent of pre-photography portraiture in painting. But more than painting, Ogunbanwo’s work is in the lineage of African studio photography. However, with an updated outlook, a subversion of sorts. For instance, his subjects almost never meet the gaze of the viewer. It adds to a sense of vulnerability of the male subject, the juxtaposition between the formality of the stance, and the shyness of the pose. What happens when the subject of the studio photograph not only completely avoids the gaze, but turns their back to the camera?

The self-portrait also plays an important role in the show, acting almost as a mirror for the viewer. For Logo Oluwamuyiwa and Mobolaji Ogunrosoye, collage has been a useful medium to think through their relationship to image-making. They both play with ideas of materiality, expanding the photographic form beyond the digital and into the tangible. In the series on display here, an ongoing experiment in self-portraiture, Ogunrosoye morphs into a 1960s woman, not dissimilar to the ones present in Ojeikere’s images. It is a study in photography, but also again in the idea of fragmentation, of different parts coming together to make a whole. She speaks about expanding the meaning of collage, so that it is not just about layering on top, but also layering beside, thinking about how laying out works in proximity to each other might force an audience to view them in a certain way. With his use of mirrors, Oluwamuyiwa also thinks about self-portraiture in a way, forcing the viewer to quite literally view themselves in the work amongst all the paraphernalia he has placed in the frame, again capturing the viewer at a specific moment in time.

For Adebunmi Gbadebo, in a way she is also working within the tradition of self-portraiture, but she is also thinking about her family archives, and ideas of trade, self-hood and ancestry. Part of her process is to create paper made out of hair, and eventually silkscreen print images of family members born in the 19th and 20th century. The idea of self-reflexivity, of printing one's heritage onto elements of oneself.

The works on show are incredibly varied, and in many ways, are probably not consciously responding to the studio photograph. However, the studio image seems to be an essential reference when thinking about what it means to be a contemporary Nigerian artist making work. The show looks at artists that create worlds and mythologies that are local yet considerate of the other. Work that embodies hybridity in action and considers double-consciousness. Works that attempt to capture memory and to distil ephemera into a moment and a time. Artists’ who prioritise the subjecthood of the viewer. This is not a photography show, but rather it is about recognising the studio image as a foundational moment not just for our reputation in the West, but for us as well. The studio photograph as a catalyst for ideas that we continue to question and re-interpret.

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