“If we can’t see where we’re from, maybe we can invent a homeland”

That informal education helped the brothers forge a style unburdened by documentary conventions. “Because we didn’t go to photo school, we didn’t get too obsessed with reportage or journalistic truth,” says Jibril. “Our lens was always through cinema, where fiction is welcome. We were more interested in creating worlds that invite imagination.”

Their earliest experiments in Los Angeles were inspired by the analog revival of the early 2010s. After discovering medium-format film on Tumblr, they met British photographer Tyrone Lebon at a Q&A, a pivotal encounter that introduced them to darkroom printing and led to their first editorial work for i-D Magazine. “We sent him our images, and he gave us feedback,” Jibril recalls. “Eventually, he introduced us to the team at i-D, and we got our first commissions, profiles on Rejjie Snow and Keith Ape.”

As their editorial work developed, the brothers began reflecting on how their itinerant upbringing shaped their outlook. “Being exposed to so many cultures has been a gift,” says Jibril. “When you’ve actually seen the world, your vocabulary for images widens. What we used to see as displacement, we now see as a tool for maturation.”

In 2017, revisiting their family photos from the Caribbean proved transformative. “We realised that what moved us wasn’t just other people’s aesthetics,” says Jibril, “but the warmth and sunlight we grew up around. We decided to use those techniques to tell stories about the Caribbean, about tropical identity. That’s when we stopped imitating and started defining our own voice.”

Movement has defined the Durimel blueprint and seems to continue to colour their visual worlds. Their subsequent move to Paris expanded their exploration of occidental design and African diasporas. “We were struck by the African presence in Paris,” says Jibril. “At first we thought we’d photograph the diaspora there, but after speaking to people we decided to go directly to Africa.” Travelling to Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal deepened their ongoing book project, Quiet as the Country (a working title), a long-term body of work that weaves portraiture, landscape, and costume into a fictional yet emotionally grounded world.

“We wanted to make a photo book based on a fictitious tropical republic,” Jibril explains. “If we can’t see where we’re from, maybe we can invent a homeland. Through that make-believe, we’ve learned a lot about ourselves.”

The project, which has been in progress for nearly nine years, began partly out of frustration with the commercial fashion system. “Fashion can be too hierarchical and too fast,” says Jibril. “It was limiting. The book became a cry for autonomy – a way to rediscover creativity without deadlines.”

The brothers now work with small crews, relying on natural light and minimal styling. “We love bare makeup and simple materials.  Coconut oil, sunlight, the park at sunrise,” says Jibril. “We like to keep things light: a bag of clothes, a reflector, and our cameras. It’s about letting the image feel like it’s already happening.” That simplicity mirrors their broader creative philosophy: “We try not to over-manipulate,” says Jibril. “We want the photos to feel natural, effortless.”

Their latest project, Lundambuyu’s Mobility Program features Habiba Hopson as ‘Lundambuyu,’ a fictitious mobility trainer, it’s an ode to the able body. Here, the goal is beauty in the pursuit of dignifying our everyday lives, Durimel printed a limited run of 500 posters from the series that was shared for free at Climax Books in New York City, the first public reception of their work, on 27 October. 

Nature itself has become an essential part of their visual and spiritual vocabulary. “We look at nature as the idea of God,” Jibril reflects. “The best art feels like God made it. When you look at a tree or stones in a river, there’s effortlessness. That’s what we try to achieve – something that feels organic, like it already existed.”

Recently, they have been experimenting with still lifes of natural concretions — stones that form without human intervention. They realised they were always drawn to the images that felt untouched. Jibril says, “that’s when it clicked. Even in our portraiture, we’re searching for that same natural expression.”

Despite their shared vision, collaboration remains a careful balance. As one can imagine, working with family can’t be a straightforward feat. “Working together is a social journey,” says Jalan. The brothers have had to learn how to communicate better, but admit “it’s something we’re still figuring out,”, says Jalan. Their process now gives each twin autonomy within their shared practice. “If one of us has an idea, that person leads the shoot,” Jalan explains. “The other assists completely. It’s about surrendering power so ideas can flow.”

Both brothers are also cultivating individual practices: Jibril has returned to drawing and draftsmanship, while Jalan is teaching himself music and songwriting. “Having our own outlets has been liberating,” says Jibril. “It makes the collaboration healthier.”

Now based in New York, they are continuing work on Quiet as the Country while seeking the right publishing and gallery partners, aiming tentatively for a 2026 release. “We don’t know exactly when,” Jibril admits. “But what the project has done for us – for our relationship, and for how we understand image-making – has already been enough.”

At the centre of their work is a commitment to transformation – a belief that art is not only about making something beautiful but also about becoming through the process. “Art is metamorphosis,” says Jibril. “Each project teaches us who we are. We just want to make something beautiful that makes people feel something.”

durimel.co

“Bring a print back to people. It’s the best way to open doors”

The images themselves resist easy reading. Miksys’ portraits, often taken with a flash in dim, smoke-thick interiors, show people posing with an intensity that feels both performative and private. “At first, I thought of posing as unnatural,” he admits. “But I realised those pictures were telling me a lot. They’re proud. They’re saying: this is who I am.”

The images are of a proud culture. Resisting patronisation, Miksys allows the community the space to represent themselves how they choose, such as the boxer Spartacus, with his fists up in a loose position, white vest and black bowler hat. “He’s from southern Lithuania and I photographed him in 2006 just before I published my first edition and then in 2019 I went and found him and photographed him again for the second edition.” 

Many images are also of domestic spaces and cultural artifacts, such as radios, wallpaper patterns or photo frames. Here unfurls an archive of a Soviet history that was falling apart around the Roma community. Fogged windows, plastic flowers, a coffee cup on a ledge, lace curtains bright with daylight. “Maybe they seem simple,” Miksys says, “but they have a lot of information about Soviet history, about how things look and feel here. The fog, the damp. It’s all part of it.” In one photograph, a single window glows with the warmth of a lived-in room. The image, he notes, was taken in Taboras, in a house that no longer exists. “People thought that neighbourhood was just a horrible place. But when you were inside, they’d invite you for coffee. They became my new community.”

The heart of BAXT lies in Taboras, a long-standing Roma settlement in Vilnius that once housed some 500 people. Over years of visits, Miksys watched the neighbourhood’s houses be torn down one by one. “The city was slowly demolishing it,” he explains. “Some of the homes just burned. I realised I had to continue documenting it, to have something, at least, as a record of what happened.” The last house was destroyed in 2020.

To preserve what could not be saved, Miksys began salvaging materials from the ruins – charred wooden beams, fragments of doors, children’s toys – and incorporating them into sculptural installations. “I had a solo exhibition at MO Museum in Vilnius,” he says. “We built these twelve doors with photographs on both sides, about what home means and what its destruction means.” The installations have since appeared in community spaces too, including a disused synagogue in Žagarė, the small town on the Latvian border where Miksys now lives.

This move from photography into sculpture reflects how BAXT has expanded in scope and intention. “I still feel there is a lot of the erasure of Roma culture and a limiting discussion about it especially with state institutions. I found that very frustrating and I felt I really had to make this document for the history books, at least to have a record of what happened.”

“With all my connections with the Roma community, we do everything together,” he says. “At the exhibitions, the openings, the closing parties, bands are playing, people are talking about everything. It’s important that they have that space.”

Representation – how and by whom it is made – has always been central to BAXT. In the beginning, Miksys spoke no Lithuanian, Russian, or Romani. Communication was mostly “sign language,” he laughs, or photographs themselves. “Larry Clark once told us, at school: photograph once, then bring a print back to people. It’s the best way to open doors.” The gesture proved crucial. “The Roma are a very oral culture,” Miksys explains. “Family history often survives only through photographs. So when I gave them pictures, they used them – put them in their homes, transformed them. Sometimes they’d even tear their page out of my book and hang it on the wall.”

Designed anew by Claudia Küssel in Düsseldorf, the book now adopts a vertical format and introduces unpublished photographs alongside essays and interviews with members of the Roma community. Its publication coincides with upcoming events, including one at The Photographers’ Gallery in London.

The BAXT book launch will take place at the Photography’s Gallery on 06 November, 6:30 – 8:00. A talk will be followed by a book signing in the Bookshop, with copies of BAXT and a limited number of rare, out-of-print copies of DISKO available. 

“There are many interesting ways in how we view virtue and care around image making”

“The works in the archive are predominantly black and white, maybe with the exception of some hand tinted photographs, but mostly everything is gelatin silver prints,” Fortune tells me. “So I decided to work in colour because I wanted to really underline the modern context of the photographs I was making. That was a shift,” Fortune admits. “I had not done a lot of colour work and it was a nice challenge, but it also really allowed me to go back and photograph in places where I already had so many inroads.”

Fortune is inspired not only by archives such as TAAP, but also by the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers established in Harlem in 1963: ”Kamoinge represents a huge sloth of black artists working in the ‘70s who really paved a way to make their own infrastructure because the larger photo world was paying them no attention.”

In Fortune’s essay for the book A Long Arc: Photography and the American South: Since 1845 (Aperture, 2023), he explores the history of Southern photography and the distance between fine art and vernacular photography, “what makes a photograph fine art compared with something that’s in an antique store.” His essay asks questions around authorship and ownership of images in Black communities: “sometimes these images are discarded or we don’t have access to them,” he tells me, “or we have them in our family albums and we hold them dearly, but maybe the photographer is unknown. There are many interesting ways in how we view virtue and care around image making.”

Fortune tells me he’s precisely interested in the “cracks between those ideas.” When it comes to photographing what he considers his own community, he’s been journeying around Texas, “exploring shared histories – a lot of it is slightly cultural anthropology. I’m photographing various regions that had a particular historic importance to a post-emancipation history in Texas.” 

These are places such as historic churches or neighbourhoods with a centuries-old high percentage Black residents. One image in Between a Memory and Me shows a young man riding a horse past a humble Southern church; small, bare-faced, and topped with a rudimentary hand-painted sign that reads ‘FAITH TEMPLE, CHURCH OF GOD, IN CHRIST’. In another scene, one that feels classic of Fortune’s repertoire, a woman’s hands sit folded on her lap, her Sunday Best traditional African dress and ring glimmering.

Fortune tells me he is “charting the influence of black Americana within Texas, which reaches through music and through rodeo culture and fashion, as well as geographic locations of freedman colonies.” These photographs have been a growing body of work; first in his debut book Oklahoma, then in 2022 at Recontres d’Arles, Fortune won the Louis Roederer Discovery Award for I can’t stand to see you cry, the book of which was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Award — Photobook of the Year. And later, Hardtack.

One shot, Prairie View Homecoming Parade, demonstrates the artist’s aptitude in colour, despite the novelty of the format for him. A young boy leans forward in a painterly pose in a carriage; the group around him compliment each other with their matching purple shirts but each busy in their own world, bar the boy who stares out of the frame. Here is where the words ‘kinship’ and ‘community’ clearly find their place, reflecting CPW’s Kinship & Community season.

Though he recognises the term has somewhat become the phrase du jour of the art world, Fortune defines community as “obviously your familial structure, but I also think there’s a moment as an adult where you choose your own community,” the artist, who has lost both parents, tells me. “Or you choose your participation within a larger idea.” 

Now, the artist is – who tells me he is also an avid guitarist – is continuing this novel streak and working on another project in colour: “a new language for me.” He’s also shooting on a 6×9 camera which is a different aspect ratio to what he’s used to, as well as working on less formal portraiture. “It’s a bit more candid.” Although some self-doubt seems to creep in – “All of those elements make for a higher failure rate as well” – Fortune feels comfortable in following his intuition. 

Between A Memory And Me opens 20 September at CPW Kingston, New York, until 11 January, 2026

“For me, I say that I keep people in good company because I’ve been doing this for so long that I have created a certain kind of company”

Her treatments have often been driven by intuition, curiosity and accessibility, but never really by longevity since the workbooks weren’t intended to be revisited – not even by her. “The books in a way represent how I live with my work,” she says of her use of everyday materials around her, like fax paper, which was “not meant to last”. It created an interesting tension between preservation and perishability: “For me, there was something quite intriguing about the fact that you have an image that can disappear.” 

Another material always within reach was herself, which explains the number of self-portraits in the book. “I wanted to have a character and the one that’s always around me is me,” she says. In this sense, I Will Keep You in Good Company behaves like a personal “time capsule”, too.

The diaristic nature of the book also comes through implicitly, particularly in the fragments of text layered into the photographs, ranging from functional captions to abstract annotations. Johnson Artur began creating the workbooks when she relocated to the UK, a move that transformed her relationship with words. “When I lived in Germany, I actually did a lot of writing, but I changed that when I came to London. I started to work much more through pictures,” she explains. “Language has always been there, but I’ve used it very differently to when I used to write. To me, language became a visual tool.” 

In the spirit of continual transformation, Johnson Artur was eager not to simply create a facsimile of her workbooks but to produce a new artefact, one that gives space for the images and sequencing to breathe. Some excerpts were chosen for their continued relevance, others simply because they stand out. Together, she hopes they unfold as an intuitive “visual narrative” rather than a specific storyline: “I wanted to make a book that somehow tells a certain story about what can happen to pictures when you have them close to you, and when you engage with them the way I’ve always engaged with my photographs.” 

This sense of intimacy also explains the book’s name, which is based on the response she once gave to someone she wanted to photograph who had asked what Johnson Artur – a film photographer – would later do with the picture. “A lot of what I do depends on people trusting me, giving me their picture. For me, I say that I keep people in good company because I’ve been doing this for so long that I have created a certain kind of company, because I put one person next to the other,” she explains. “I think the main focus for me is that each and every person has their presence there, but also that they, I hope, are fine together.”

 I Will Keep You in Good Company is now available at Self Publish Be Happy

“We are here”

Finally, in new work finished mere weeks before the opening, Bourouissa reutilises his archive to produce multimedia, metal-heavy assemblages, caged vertical vitrines featuring hands and faces, trapped in an aesthetically balanced, hauntingly spectral cage of plexiglass and metal. Francesco Zanot’s curation of two sections clefts the show in half, literally bridged by MAST’s third-floor walkway; re-represented communities reunderstood by the artist’s lens, followed by later works, harder to process, bitter to taste. Repression and poverty, and the unfair weight of it on people of colour and immigrants, are painful topics to explore. But Bourouissa entirely dedicates himself to them.

Much of the show is mounted on metal grids, giving the feeling of cages, hygienic and dissociative enclosures akin to contemporary images of the ‘megaprisons’ currently being developed and populated in El Salvador, America and the UK. Other visual cues include automated warehouses and state-of-the-art-museum storage. The aesthetics of modern confinement are littered across the show. The cage is sterile, orderly, a well-oiled system, as much industrial as carceral.

Across Hands, metal grills become part of the assemblage. A 180-degree spin and the viewer is hit by the difficult, arresting portraits of Shoplifters, enclosed in an amber of racially charged, criminalised poverty. “I really wanted Shoplifters included. I think this series is very important to my practice. It’s a different type of language,” the artist says. Some have described Shoplifters as absolution, a transmutation of ‘thieves’ into quasi-religious icons of defiance. If this is the case, then Hands extends this martyrdom; the works are not just in dialogue, they shout in mutual pain.

When asked about the reception of his work, and what he thinks people get wrong, Bourouissa takes a long pause. “Some people might relegate it, they see it as cool pictures about young men and maleness,” he says. “They see the guy from the banlieue making works about the banlieue. But conceptually, they don’t focus on deep thought. Maybe they see the first layer of the image, but it doesn’t lead them to question their perception of the image. All I’m doing is questioning perceptions of what [the viewer] sees in my pictures. It is what it is; if you don’t do the job of looking past that first layer, you don’t get to the tension. My work is in the tension.”

MAST often showcases exhibitions focusing on the intersection between photography and industry; in Communautés. Projets 2005–2025, perhaps the industry in question is the global image culture in which we are now trapped. It could also be the automotive industry, progenitor of many of Bourouissa’s increasingly ambitious metalwork assemblages. Here, the prison industrial complex – an industry as transparent as it is opaque – is inescapable. Jail is often employed as a metaphor, but Bourouissa flips that dynamic, making everything a metaphor for the prison.

For two decades Bourouissa has staked the claim that these young Black and Arab men are not antonyms of their respective nations; they are not a juxtaposition, a reappropriation, or a foil. They are in fact nothing new, but the next generation. The men of the banlieues are as French as any other, and hold a civic right to the nation’s cultural imaginary – and not just in its nightmares. Bourouissa sums it all up matter-of-factly: “We are here.”

Mohamed Bourouissa: Communautés. Projets 2005–2025 is at Fondazione MAST, Bologna, until 28 September 2025. mohamedbourouissa.com 

“I think there has been some reluctance to touch the mystery of magic of Carrie”

The subtext here taps into concerns Weems often refers to: a flattening of her oeuvre as exclusively Black art. She is equally concerned with notions of gender, gender dynamics, epistemology and collective memory, state violence, history, faith, bodies, place, ownership and rights. This is of course all channelled through her lived experience as an African American woman, yet one feels a tension when Weems, or her illusive, often-faceless ‘muse’ (played by the photographer herself) is seen as a metaphor for just – or nothing but – the Black experience.

One gets the feeling that this muse, described by Weems as a “witness, an agent, a being”, is a universal avatar, one representing all women, all people. Yet critics, scholars and curators tend to hone in on the melanin, failing to see the muse for all she is – a “stand-in for other possibilities”, as the artist describes her. It goes without saying that Weems is Black and proud, yet this conundrum begs a question, why the Black body, and artist, is restricted to only relay meditations of Blackness, while the white artist can dabble in a non-centralised intersectionality. Why can’t a Black woman represent us all? 

Through the exhibition, this seems to be Meister’s concern. Weems is not one of the most important Black American women artists of our time, it argues, she is one of the most important artists. “It emerged from the possibility of putting Carrie herself, her physical likeness, her voice, her family history, her spiritual journeys… putting these at the centre was both a way of considering her career in a way that hadn’t happened before, and touching on a lot of incredibly important work made across it,” says Meister. “I don’t want to throw shade on other curatorial colleagues, but I think there has been some reluctance to touch the mystery of magic of Carrie.” 

The Heart of the Matter sprawls across the labyrinthine underbelly of the Gallerie d’Italia, an impressive space now housing five chapters of Weems’ expansive career. Including works such as Roam, Leave Now! and the iconic Kitchen Table series, Weems also showcases new work. In Preach, the artist turns her documentary-adjacent lens on her church community in Syracuse, NY. Preach is spiritual, ecstatic and jubilant; Weems traces the short walk from Black American Church life to the struggle for civil rights and Black emancipation. “Dr King and Malcolm X both began in the Black Church,” she says. “The Black Church and the civil rights movement grew out of one another. There wouldn’t have been a movement without the Church.” The magic Meister mentions is afoot. 

A lot has been said about Carrie Mae Weems, but that is not to imply that more cannot – should not – be said. Reflecting on the exhibition, practice and intent, Weems knows what drives her: “Hope. Hope and hunger. And mystery.” Both Meister and Weems hope that at The Heart of the Matter, audiences will see Weems, and her muse, as a universal being. Her body, and by extent body of work, can and should be read as a default, an ambassador for humanity, and not only for the other, the subaltern, the minority. At the heart of the show, Meister and Weems stake that exact claim. Or, as Weems surmises: “We are all human. We are all crawling towards ourselves. Every day we crawl towards humanity, life, new ways of being.” 

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter is at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, until 07 September 2025

“My interest in going to L.A. began in early 1992. I was strongly influenced by the Hip Hop coming out of the streets of Los Angeles and other cities across the country,” Rodriguez says, speaking to Saatchi Gallery. “These youth were rapping about the very important issues in their communities. Their music was like the newspapers of the streets.”

Bojorquez, based in Los Angeles, documents the intersection of Hip Hop and celebrity from the 1990s onward. His portraits include figures such as Missy Elliott, Birdman, 50 Cent, and OutKast. Works like Birdman in Eastover (2005) and Andre 3000 & Big Boi (2002) reflect a shift from underground culture to commercial visibility.

The exhibition extends beyond photography. Music, interviews, and memorabilia are integrated throughout, with boomboxes, DJ equipment, and a Spotify playlist providing historical and cultural context.

HIP HOP – Living a Dream is free and runs until 11 September, 2005.

“Many Black and African women photographers are unfortunately typecast into covering topics solely related to Black culture, social justice, or race”

The database now serves as a resource for industry gatekeepers, including photo editors, directors, curators and art buyers. But it also provides members with community, funding, mentorship and professional development, including free webinars, workshops and portfolio reviews. That sense of community matters, says Irungu, who admits that, “At times, there’s a feeling that I have to ‘prove myself’ more than others, or that my work is underestimated based on my race.” BWP also launched the free annual Black Women Photographers Summit and the Black Women Photographers Podcast Network, and has partnered with brands including Adobe, Flickr, Live Nation and World Athletics. 

One of the big prevailing problems in the industry is pigeonholing, which limits both what Black and African women photographers are asked to shoot, and when. “Many Black and African women photographers are unfortunately typecast into covering topics solely related to Black culture, social justice, or race,” says Irungu. “Often, they’re only recognised during Black History Month and overlooked during Women’s History Month. This limited perspective hinders broader recognition of their skills and versatility as photographers. Black and African women photographers excel in a wide range of assignments, including outdoors, sports, music, fashion, editorial and commercial work.” 

The historic lack of representation also means stories relevant to Black communities or Black women have often been told by white or male (or both) photographers, usually with an outsider’s perspective. “The value of having Black women photographers document stories within the Black community, or African women photographers cover issues on the continent, can’t be overstated,” Irungu argues. “Their deep cultural understanding and lived experiences bring an authenticity and nuance that often fosters a more respectful and intimate approach to storytelling. This perspective results in narratives that are not only more accurate, but also resonate with a depth that might be overlooked by someone without the same background or cultural connection.” To date, BWP has also provided over $185,000 in financial grants, as well as $60,000 in new camera gear. Grace Ekpu, a Nigerian photojournalist and documentary film-maker, based in Lagos, was the recipient of a $10,000 BWP and Nikon grant for her Bridging Pain project, which focused on people with sickle cell anaemia and the disparities in healthcare access in different regions. “Being part of BWP has helped me feel part of a community of like-minded creatives,” Ekpu tells me. 

“It’s strengthened my views on how important it is to tell our stories and my resolve to continue to be a voice of change through my art.” Ekpu is particularly interested in socially-driven stories, including the impact of climate change on vulnerable people, especially women and children. “It’s important that as a Black woman, I’m able to freely tell the stories that affect me,” she says. “Stories about women’s issues, for instance, can only be told from the lens of a woman who can relate and can give it the best attention, and can also make the subject comfortable sharing their experiences. In my work around women who were former brides of Boko Haram terrorists, the women were able to share their stories to us fellow women and were comfortable in front of my camera. We need to eliminate the male gaze and do more stories that speak to the soul of our characters. We, as women, can also document historical events and shouldn’t be boxed into one corner. There’s a lot we can offer as Black women.” 

Tobi Sobowale, a British-Nigerian photographer based in London, found that joining BWP opened her eyes to the wide range of career opportunities. “Seeing people who looked like me in these roles inspired me to expand my perspective, helping me refine my focus and clarify how I wanted to evolve both my creative vision and my work,” she says. Community membership has brought many practical benefits, including Capture One sponsorship. “The software’s become an essential part of my creative process, especially in experimenting with and enhancing the use of colour in my work,” she says. “For the past three years, I’ve also had biweekly accountability sessions with Whitley Isa, a photographer from Belgium, who I met through the community. We set goals, support each other in achieving them, and reflect on our progress at the end of each year.” 

Sobowale strives to redefine Black beauty in commercial and fashion spaces. “Mainstream media often limits the portrayal of Black women, but through my photography I aim to highlight their vulnerability, strength, power and youthfulness,” she explains. “One example is my series Efflorescence, which explores the softness and delicacy of Black women, symbolising the transformation from a seed to a flower in bloom. As a Black woman myself, I approach photographing other Black women with intention and care.” 

Irungu has also had a busy period. Alongside running BWP, she worked at the White House for three years as the official photo editor for Vice President Kamala Harris, and as a photographer in the Biden-Harris administration. “Photographing in such a prestigious and high-profile environment has been the honour of a lifetime,” she says. “It’s been an opportunity to break barriers and be part of history, but it also comes with the weight of representation. Every time I walked through the doors of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building or the West Wing, it was a reminder of how far we’ve come. Before myself and Cameron Smith, there had only been one Black woman photographer at the White House Photo Office: Sharon Farmer [hired in the early 1990s to photograph President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton].” 

BWP started out with a focus on photographers, but its membership has evolved, and it is now organising “two new verticals” – Black Women Videographers and Black Women Cinematographers. And Irungu has other big plans. “I’m excited about the future of Black Women Photographers and its continued growth as a global resource,” she says. “By our fifth anniversary in July, we anticipate BWP will have distributed $240,000 in grants and $80,000 in equipment. My aspiration is to reach the one million dollar mark in the near future. I’m committed to scaling our initiatives and fostering a thriving community for Black and African women creatives in every way possible.” 

blackwomenphotographers.com

“Traveller communities, frequently marginalised or misunderstood, assert their identity through performance, tradition, and resilience in these spaces”

“Tangerine Dreams seeks to challenge the cliché of British identity by confronting the dominant narratives that have long shaped how Britishness is portrayed – narratives often rooted in whiteness, middle- and upper-class norms, and a narrow set of cultural references.  For me, the way people form community, express identity, or practice ritual expands dominant narratives,” continues Green. “I see cultural traditions not just as personal or familial acts, but as powerful forms of resistance -– especially when they persist in spaces where mainstream culture tends to overlook or erase them.”

In one beautiful shot, a young boy, Nathan, challenges traditional ideas around gender aesthetics, for example, with his face in full glam make-up (and the makeup is perfectly placed). In another image, young Jarnail stands in front of a pink fairground in his blue Sikh patka (head wrap) at Bournemouth Beach. Back at the Modified Nationals show, two cans of Foster’s lager hold up a car hood. It’s a very ‘British’ scene. For over a decade, Green’s ongoing project Bangers and Smash, which features multiple times in the book, has explored the raw, high-octane world of banger racing – a subculture where cars are meticulously built, smashed to pieces in competition, then repaired and raced again the very next week. 

“There’s something whimsical and eccentric about this cycle of creation and destruction. It defies convention and embraces a kind of joyful anarchy,” she says. “Banger racing is not just a sport; it’s a performative ritual passed down through generations of families. It fosters community, identity, and a profound sense of purpose – offering belonging in the most unexpected of places.”

Whereas Gypsy Gold captures annual Traveller horse fairs, rich with centuries-old traditions like horse trading and family reunions. “Traveller communities, frequently marginalised or misunderstood, assert their identity through performance, tradition, and resilience in these spaces. Gypsy Gold reveals a side of Britain that is deeply connected to its own unique histories – offering a counter-narrative to simplistic national clichés.”

One of the most persistent cliches Green addresses in the book is the “tired image of Britain as grey, drab, and perpetually rain-soaked. Of course, it’s all about perspective,” she says, “but the real England, as I see it, is far more beguiling – kaleidoscopic, full of character and richness. I like to use bold, saturated colours to amplify the stories I capture, offering a fresh and vibrant take on British life. 

Green’s Britain is a necessary one: with a growing hostile environment (Starmer’s Labour seems to only be hardening previous dangerous rhetoric against migrants), it seems only inevitable that the arts will continue to respond in the spirit of a common humanity and in search of a universal home beyond borders. 

 sophiegreenphotography.com

“When I started in that place [the attic] nobody knew I used it. I had my luggage, and my dresses were inside, everything I used was inside. So I would go up and take pictures and come back. I would never tell anybody what I have done or not. The place became my hiding place”

As a result, Amouzou’s images create several distinct ghostly encounters with the camera, allowing the audience to reorient presumed ideas around how we see, and why we seek to identify, probing us to consider how we may find new ways to acknowledge presence through the camera.

“As far as I can remember, I don’t have any approach or memory of being in contact with photography in the beginning,” Amouzou says. “At school, when I was small, a photographer used to come and take pictures – about six portraits, and parents will pay to have it at home. That moment is what I can remember. Sometimes in our village, photographers would come and take pictures of parents and older people, but nothing was planned.”

Amouzou’s work invites us to explore the liminal spaces of our existence. As she tells me: “At first, I was making videos. I thought one day I would go back home and record children or my parents’ stories for myself. I never thought above this. I wanted to have those stories for me. That is how my approach for making images started.” From this early relationship to images, it is clear that Amouzou always knew that she wanted to create work with a purpose. These were to be photographs that carried a narrative, and a weight and vulnerability recognising life on the periphery. What appears before us are images that register new ways of existence through the camera. Made predominantly within Amouzou’s home in her abandoned attic, it is here where Amouzou takes refuge from the outside world. Within this space, she documents her process of awaiting official status.

What culminates is a visual interplay of disappearance and reappearance into the fabric of the space, with Amouzou’s own figure materialising in an almost phantasmic manner. Amouzou activates these notions of visibility through her acute technique when concerning figuration. For Autoportrait, she shoots in analogue, often using a double exposure which allows the body, object and space to echo an interior sound that ripples in distortion. In effect, the image abstracts within itself, with the exposure culminating in thin layers of imagery that reveal and obscure the figure of the artist. What follows is a movement that feels lucid and wet, mirroring the process of analogue photography.

One effect of Amouzou’s frequent double exposure is the subsequent blurring consistent across the photographs. From the nude figure that oscillates from position to surface, to the recurring suitcase which acts as a figure in itself, to Amouzou’s figure fading into the brick wall, to a disappearing silhouette sinking into the background; each blur activates a new visuality that understands disorientation through a new lexicon of revelation. Taking on their own language of aesthetics and subjectivity, Amouzou’s blurring is where one can redefine the various spaces of the ‘in-between’ that can be activated through photography of racialised bodies, opening up new definitions for their subjectivities.

Amouzou is probing us to find her within these different obscured layers, and we do. We find her in a space of solace and contemplation, and we also feel her through her evocations of longing and uncertainty. It is a state which echoes Fred Moten’s sentiment of the ability of Black subjects to “not consent to a single being”, as he so poetically terms it.

By abstracting herself, she allows multiplicity to mirror an open space which allows bodies to transcend the boundaries of the physical world. “[In art school] I was the only one Black and a woman,” she says. “When we started the first year, the topic was self-portraits. In my mind, I said self-portraits meant I had to tell my story, and people would know that I’m fragile. So I needed to hide my inside. In my third year, my teacher said to me that the self-portrait does not mean you must be literal in the picture. It could be something you like, a dress… He said just try. I said OK.“

Amouzou’s figure interrogates the role of the subject matter beyond its visibility. The artist’s figure takes on a new identity before the lens, becoming a conduit of the image which enables it to exist through multiple figurations. In one image, Amouzou is captured sitting centrally before the lens, with her hands positioned upon her knees. Her positioning closely resembles that of an official identification photograph, a form of documentation to recognise one’s claim to citizenship, typically found within legal documents such as passports and licences. They permit certain rights of access, and also, as Tina Campt writes in Listening to Images, they are images “produced predominantly for the regulatory needs of the state or the classificatory imperatives of colonisation… They are images required of or imposed upon them by empire, science, or the state”. 

They are a form of images with a bureaucratic impetus at their root, which intends to cast its subjects under the blanket uniform of conforming to the state – subsequently muting them while, in the case of those seeking citizenship, they adopt a new identity through the imposition of a new nationality. In this same image, Amouzou is seen in a traditional West African wrapped gown and accessories that signal her cultural heritage as a Togolese woman. Shot on coloured film, the photograph reveals a relationship between traditional clothing, cultural heritage and time. The attire is a direct reference to an item of clothing which spans generations of past, present and future, while speaking specifically to a material genealogy which traverses geography and place.

Adorning the gown, Amouzou highlights the fact that, despite her gradual transition physically into her new home country, Belgium, her relation to her other homeland, Togo, remains as much a part of her identity. This position sat in defiance with her ongoing official status, which sought to define her as stateless. Rather than accepting that status, Amouzou instead exercised a right to multiplicity through her provocation of impermanence, revealing a tension between a figure wanting to be seen, and yet contempt to being still and existing in solitude.

“I went shopping and I saw dresses. I don’t know why but it spoke to me,” she reflects. “My jeans, trousers and top – that is me in Europe. It is Hélène in Europe. I wanted something to express my inside… I bought the dresses and I needed a space that was neutral, and a place that means something to me and tells me a story. Where I will feel safe and a hiding place where nobody will disturb me and come and see what is happening there. I found the attic where the door was closed. I opened and found the place and said, ‘Wow’. The people who were there left things just like that. A sofa, table, TV, and they didn’t touch anything. So I cleaned up a small space and I borrowed the camera from school.

“When I started in that place [the attic] nobody knew I used it. I had my luggage, and my dresses were inside, everything I used was inside. So I would go up and take pictures and come back. I would never tell anybody what I have done or not. The place became my hiding place. Because without having papers to work, I was always at home. I used to take my daughter to her school, then when I got back, I didn’t have anything to do. So it became my work, and every day I wanted to be in the darkroom and develop and print. In that darkness, the images were becoming real for me.”

Amouzou’s playful subversion of the multiplicious potential of the figure echoes the work of Lebohang Kganye, who, by superimposing her figure on that of her late mother’s, articulates a relationship between photography, memory and death. In Kganye’s archival excavations, the image of her late mother is unfrozen and able to move from the past into the present. This movement ripples through the image, and as a result, Kganye’s mother can pass through life in a new form through the vessel of her daughter. Likewise, the artist relives moments captured from her mother’s lifetime.

The result is a poignant reminder of how, though some things may be considered a ‘still image’, what exists within them still has a life to live. The work echoes the words of Ariella Azoulay in The Civil Contract of Photography, who writes: “The photograph bears the seal of the photographic event, and reconstructing this event requires more than just identifying what is shown in the photograph. One needs to stop looking at the photograph and instead start watching it. The verb ‘to watch’… entails dimensions of time and movement that need to be reinscribed in the interpretation of the still photographic image.”

The sentiment of watching provokes a deeper relationship between the idea of the subject matter and the audience. Amouzou’s Autoportrait evokes the sense of a discovered diary, something which feels found as if by accident. At face value, we see a woman in a scene of solitude, with nothing but herself, some objects, and an assumed camera as her lone witness. As Amouzou says: “For me, that was just me using my time with the camera to pass my days. This was without a project.”

Using photography as a way to pass time does not mean she is photographing without consciousness. Even when Amouzou is not looking directly into the lens, one still feels the sentiment of watching through the direct and meticulous composition of each image. In these intimate and private compositions, Amouzou mimics the aesthetics of 19th-century spirit photographs, which use the spectral imagination to articulate a relationship between image, life and death. However, much like the work of early 20th-century photographers such as James Van Der Zee, beyond these spectral imaginations, Amouzou also uses the camera to capture the spirit of the subject.

Across the series, Amouzou collages herself within and around different household objects, from the suitcase, a pan, flowers and more. With the repeated floral dress, Amouzou wears the gown as if it is camouflage, and likewise armour. In some images, the dress is suspended alone without a physical figure, and yet it still imposes a kind of animated physicality which mimics the figure of the artist. This garment is a representation of the spirit evoked by Amouzou; much like watching, stillness is another position from which Amouzou emerges. Whether a disappearing figure or an emerging presence, Amouzou is still a figure made known to us through her still movement.

Stillness here is not the absence of movement but the endurance of it. It is a kind of endurance which Amouzou can afford herself, conjuring a rhythm similar to breathing, in which one can exhale brief moments that might be akin to freedom. Breathing, or rather the cognition of that breathing, reconstitutes a reminder of living, and as Christina Sharpe acknowledges in In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, breathing is an “aspiration”. The practice of putting breath, life, back into the body of Black folks is an act of wake work.

Watching, stillness, breathing; each evokes a pace of living which accounts for a speculative space in which we – the artist, the subject and the viewer – can freely explore an inner world in which one can reclaim sanctity through reclamation of the space that images permit. “I tried to go to other places to photograph and take pictures outside of the attic,” says Amouzou. “And when you compare them, there is a big difference. There is a big difference because they are artificial. They don’t have a deepness. No history behind, and they do not relate to the work I was doing at the beginning. So I stopped going outside and just taking pictures. I wanted to prove to myself that I could take a picture and that I was capable. But I stopped doing that and I followed my inside.”

I ask Amouzou about her current relationship to Togo, and what it means to present her work to that audience, and she says that, “I ask if they will understand. Because those pictures were my sufferings, my questions, my deep, deep fears. This was when I missed [my family], I would ask, will they understand how dark my mind was? Or how dark my heart is? Or, how my heart was suffering in their absence in my life? I spent more than 18 or 19 years here [in Belgium] before I went home. And now… I’m still searching for my place there, the place I left when I came here.”

Relocation means more for the artist than what is lost; it represents uncertainty. In Amouzou’s work, I recognise her refusal to succumb to the presumed function of images when relating to those who are displaced, in exile, considered an immigrant, marooned, or waiting in limbo. Seductive and disorienting, Amouzou is declaring her right to be identified in ways that the human eye cannot contain, and as a result, affords herself a new breath.

Her work is a declaration of a figure which can exist within the illegibility ordered by displacement and disappearance. It is resistive, but beyond this, it is disobedient, activating a type of disorderly practice which allows one’s existence to no longer be defined by what one is not. Instead, Amouzou is able to create life within the instability of shadows that have been placed on her. Accordingly, her work allows her to both belong and un-belong, revealing how we may locate and dislocate, becoming a refusal of erasure. 

In Between, Hélène Amouzou’s first public art commission in the UK, will launch on The Line in London’s Royal Docks on 18 June 2025 

@helene.amouzou