In sunkissed portraits against the pastel tones of the buildings, the red earth and purple skies, Terry finds the “beautiful whilst referring to really some of these big potentially problematic themes.” Photographed sitting in a striped top he captures the elderly man, who shared so much about the place he once lived. “He is obviously the physical photographic representation of all of these people who would have had this attachment to the land that are now forced to live away from a place they love and cherish.” In the book he attributes a quote to him: “if I could return to the river, I would have already started running.”

In images, the photographer draws on his stories: a beautiful white goat recalls the story of the one slaughtered to appease Nyaminyami, the serpent-like river god, who villagers called on for protection after their displacement in 1958 following the construction of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River. The anger of the river god is said to have caused devastating floods during the dam’s construction as the rock by the entrance to the gorge close to the dam wall site, which was regarded as the home of Nyaminyami, would be buried more than a hundred feet below the water surface. Terry went to the area it was believed to have been sacrificed and stayed with the descendants of the tribe that had carried out this act.

When the Lake Kariba dam wall was opened by the Queen Mother on 17th May 1960, along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, it was declared an engineering feat: “the white man in Africa conquering the wild Zambezi river,” says Terry. It was supposed to produce the cheapest electricity in the world. But it destroyed more habitat than any engineering project before it. Gone was the life of abundance people described before, where the rich river soil meant most things would grow, and instead was a hard life. The resettled populations had been relocated to areas where the soil is really arid.” They work really hard, they survive off the land, but very meagrely,” says Terry.

The communities who were displaced were promised to be taken care of but as the title of his book alludes to, there was this “sort of grand colonial deception,” he says. “I was meeting with resettled tribes who still 60 years after the construction of this lake don’t have running water, don’t have electricity. The dam was built for hydroelectric power but some of these tribes who live less than 20 to 40 kilometers away from the lake shore still have no electricity,” Terry says. They were promised the ability to go back to fishing, hunting and farming; and told they would be given an allowance and have houses built for them but “there’s a continued lack of acknowledgments of the resettlement terms, things that were promised to these people that were never delivered.”

It’s not always the struggles that Terry captures but he does show life on the lake as it is now: villagers drying maramba fish under electric blue fishing nets; a moth lit up against the sun glistening in the Chibwatata Hot Springs; Charara Point where young boys dive into the lake; the homes of his fixers and friends where photographs crowd the walls; and the silhouette of Zimbabwe’s white cowboys against a barely lit sky with the crescent of the moon overhead. In one beautiful image, the shadow of leaves veils a man’s head. Solomon and Terry formed a dee friendship after he picked him up as a hitchhiker going into town. “He sort of became like my confidant, my fixer, Solomon just knew everyone,” he says. “He’s this big, loud, bubbly, friendly guy that everyone kind of knew and loved.”

These contacts, connections and stories really only happen when you give a project time, says Terry. But it was his personal connection to the land that gives the work its beauty and depth. “My dad wanted to have his ashes scattered at Lake Kariba so that was the beginning of the seed that started the story because when I found that out there were a few more questions in terms of returning to the land, belonging to a place, and I guess specifically in terms of white Zimbabweans, I get the idea of returning to a land that we are originally not from. That struck me as quite powerful, but also problematic and quite complicated.”

They Still Owe Him a Boat is available now via contacting the artist at iamjonoterry.com

“We have a very rich history, heritage, and culture. The problem is the traditions that we can’t seem to change. The weight of the past is suffocating us despite this facade of modernity”

The work was socio-political in the same way his series Ânes Situ (Donkey in situ) was a statement about the paradoxes in Casablanca that have resulted from quick development, where contemporary architecture and luxurious cars like Bentleys share the same roads as donkeys. And his work, The Hole, used the image of a pothole as a metaphor for people who are stuck, trying to get themselves out of the way they are living but trapped by their circumstances. In fantastical imagery that is completely real but highly unlikely, he reflects on Moroccan society and the ways in which he thinks that it doesn’t function.

After seven years of living in France, Benohoud returned to Morocco to find a country that had embraced the internet and was globally-minded, but where, for the average person in society, not much had changed. “Despite the modernity that has caught up with us, Moroccans struggle to free themselves,” he says. “We have a very rich history, heritage, and culture. The problem I’m pointing out is the traditions we’ve inherited and that we can’t seem to change. The weight of the past is suffocating us despite this facade of modernity. It’s their right and sometimes even their duty for people to cling to their past. We’re obliged to obediently follow this heritage without questioning it because if we don’t respect it, it can become a crime.”

Since coming to power in 1999, King Mohammed VI has pursued an ambitious modernisation agenda in Morocco with a series of reforms that have improved the economy, schooling and infrastructure of the country. Every rural Moroccan now has access to electricity and drinking water (up from less than half in 2000); while average life expectancy has increased and the absolute poverty rate has declined. But, he told the Guardian: “You see people driving in the wrong direction on the motorway, or not stopping at red lights; others throwing stuff out of windows; donkeys weaving through traffic. There are laws, but everyone just does as they please. It is the world upside-down.”

In The Hole, Benohoud takes photographs of homeowners in Marrakech’s old medina in rooms that look like so many others in Morocco, with low sofas and patterned cushions, kilim rugs, and tiled floors. But his compositions are uncanny. Blending humour and absurdity with the real, he captures two men dangling upside-down as they break through holes in the ceiling’s plaster-work; a woman sitting, unperturbed, in a hole carved in her chequered floor. Body parts, like hands, torsos and feet, punch through walls. “The idea is to show a society swallowed up in a hole and unable to get out,” says Benohoud.

“In everyday life, much like in Western countries, we are suffering from inflation and the gap is widening more and more between the rich and other social classes,” he says. In 2015, he began photographing “people working hard to make ends meet” in his native Marrakech, asking strangers if he could dig holes in their living room floors, walls and ceilings. Then he photographed the homeowners poking out of them. Although the images look photoshopped, in reality: “I arrive with a small team made up of masons, painters, tilers and choose a place in the house, often in the living room, because there is more space and step back to take pictures.”

The work lasts a day or two even if the shots don’t last more than a few seconds, he says. In one picture, ten holes were carved in a small room with orange furniture, a pot of tea stewing on a silver platter on the floor, while more than half a dozen people poke their bodies through. The expressions on their faces are comical, like they might laugh at any point. In another, three walls in a series of narrow rooms are carved, a person sitting in each, that gives the feel of an optical illusion; meanwhile a woman sits in her hole beside a pile of rubble, a bunch of colourful flowers nearby.

Before digging Benohoud will make sure that he can find the same tiles, with the same colours and patterns, in specialist stores so that he can replace what he has destroyed, and instructs the workers to put everything back as if nothing had happened at all. 

Sometimes several families live in the same house and each family occupies only one bedroom, while other spaces are often communal. The families he photographs “organise their interiors within their means.” In one picture, three men emerge from the red and black, woven-carpet of a small living room, all of them looking towards the austere yellow walls blankly. In another, six hands clasp each other in sets of three handshakes. 

“The individual does not exist in our society because it is all about the community, the tribe, and the family. What can the individual facing the power of these entities do? Either respect the rules, values, and traditions or he is condemned to exclusion or marginalisation.” Feeling trapped is not always about wealth and social status but also by the intensity of community more generally.

Benohoud’s work is a conversation about freedom and control, as well as “this question of power,” he says. By distorting reality and comparing unlikely things, he offers a light-hearted critique of post-colonial identity, showing both the hope and despair he sees in society. “For society to move forward, it is necessary for it to allow its citizens this freedom of expression without any value judgment. It must accept criticism and different, even contradictory, points of view. For the rest, on the economic level for example, we are fighting just like Westerners to improve daily life, whether in terms of the economy, health, or education.”

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“Fani-Kayode is trying to talk about what he clearly says is entanglement and desire and the confusions of relationships that are enmeshed or immersed around the Black body”

Born in post-colonial Lagos in 1955, Fani-Kayode’s family fled the Nigerian civil war for the UK in 1966 — where he came of age in Brighton, before a brief stint in America where he was exposed to queer life and activism. In the United States, he completed a BA in fine arts and economics at Georgetown University, an MFA in photography at Pratt, then studied under the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. There are similarities in the style of their imagery but Mapplethorpe was more phallocentric, looking at the male form in an observational way rather than from a place of internal struggle, says Sealy. “Fani-Kayode is trying to talk about what he clearly says is entanglement and desire and the confusions of relationships that are enmeshed or immersed around the Black body.”

Throughout his brief career, which was cut short by his early death from AIDS at 34, the artist looked to the Eurocentric art historical canon as much as the Yoruba cosmology he learnt about from his Nigerian parents. In doing so, he tried to dismantle the hegemonic white gay narrative, while breaking some of the taboos around homosexuality in African culture. “This is someone operating on what I would call a kind of dial of difference,” says Sealy. “There’s a degree of trying to resolve something.” But, adds the curator, there’s also “this idea of pain and intimacy runs through the body of work.”

“What a lot of people don’t realise is that back then in the eighties, the idea of the black male nude was controversial – taboo even,” says Fani-Kayode’s friend and model, Dennis Carney, who first met the artist at a Black gay club in Soho called Stallions in 1985 or 86. “[Fani-Kayode] was in this club in a black leather jacket, black leather trousers, and dreads. At that time you didn’t really see a lot of black men walking the streets of London in full black leather. And he had the most beautiful dreads I’ve ever seen.” There was always a huge amount of laughter between the friends: “he didn’t take himself too seriously – he was playful.”

When it comes to photographers “bringing ideas of identity, desire and black body representation,” says Sealy, “Fani-Kayode is probably one of the most important artists working in Britain at that time.” Carney adds, “Fani-Kayode may have been a victim of the racism that existed in the field of photography at that time and it was a struggle for him to get his work out there because of that. But he succeeded to a large degree. He was making progress even with all of those challenges and struggles.”

His work has had a wide-reaching impact on artists globally today: when Fani-Kayode’s photographs were shown at Stevenson Gallery in the early 2000s, South African artist Zanele Muhuli was hugely influenced by this work. The same is true of the American photographer Paul Sepuya, whose intimate studio portraits explore the relationships between camera, subject and viewer; Ghanaian photographer Eric Gyamfi, who looks at queer life in Accra, and the British artist, curator, archivist and activist Ajamu, best known for his fine art photographs of same-sex desire and the Black male body. “I would argue that without Fani-Kayode, this sense of lineage of work in the field of queer dynamics isn’t possible,” says Sealy. 

 The Studio — Staging Desire is at Autograph Gallery until 22 March 2025

“I was interested in how John and Funmilayo were going into these domestic houses and crazy interior designs and crashing patterns and how they took that same formula onto the street”

Studio portraits offered a way for city-dwellers to show their newfound wealth and aspirations to family and friends. In one portrait, a woman wears a new outfit that’s clearly been newly unboxed with creases down the front where it’s been folded. Others read detective books from abroad or look seriously at the camera in their favourite sunglasses. “Everybody would receive these images almost like postcards,” says Ohiri, whose mother had her own portrait taken at Lucky Star Studio in Lagos before she emigrated to the UK. Across West Africa, the portraits took on a distinct quality: the black and white portraits of clients dressed in their finest were taken against chequerboard floors and floral patterned curtains. “They look the same but that’s really nice to see because it’s a constant reminder that it’s all part of the human condition,” says Ohiri, “they’re all chasing the same dreams and aspirations and same things.”

Young people would pose with their new phones and radios or their scooters and guitars — adopting the trends of an era. It was a time of music and creativity with British and American rock bands finding popularity in Nigeria, as well as local Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, King Sunny Adé and Victor Uwaifo. At home, teenage boys were photographed in their bedrooms with images of naked girls cut out of magazines on their walls. “With film there’s this relationship between the photographer and the sitter, which is really about just the moment that we’re having. There’s more styling and there’s more time to compose the shot.” 

“You see this idea of kinship and community and how these different people that were there were known to John and Funmilayo, and you see the warmth in the way they capture the essence of who they were,” says senior curator Bindi Vora. “I think there can be some misconceptions about African studio photography being of a very particular volition but what we are seeing here is the fashion, the culture was everywhere: it was at their homes, in the street, in the studio. It was how they were.”

John and Funmilayo Abe were a power house couple, raising their eight children with the help of their many studio assistants. John would go out to funerals, weddings, naming ceremonies, and freedom parties (a right of passage ceremony); while Funmilayo would hold down the fort. She’s one of the few female practitioners to have been credited so prolifically in such a male-dominated field. “We’ve always had this idea about reinserting some of these histories that have been obfuscated or left out of the canon when it’s not about discovering them, it’s about saying they’ve existed and these are the missing chapters,” says Vora.

“I was interested in how John and Funmilayo were going into these domestic houses and crazy interior designs and crashing patterns and how they took that same formula onto the street. It was telling a bigger story about what it was like to run a commercial studio at that time and how you were constantly having to adapt and constantly change,” Vora adds. But the images were never supposed to be seen in the context of a gallery space, so the framing of the photographs reveals more to the viewer than what would have been presented to the customers: the different floor types, props, lamps and backgrounds. “I think that’s one of the interesting things in many ways is how we readdress these images.”

Ohiri and Kassinen are on a mission to preserve as many photography archives, like Abi Morocco’s, before it’s too late. With the heat worsening and the summer’s humidity threatening the negatives; Lagosians getting pushed further from the city’s centre; and studio owners dying (shortly after they finished their project and research, John passed away) — the portraiture that defined an era is at risk of being destroyed. “I didn’t want this cultural heritage to be lost,” says Ohiri. “There were only a handful of photographers that were there.”

Abi Morocco Photos: Spirit of Lagos is on show at Autograph Gallery until 22 March 2025