In the 1960s, African photographers recaptured their own image

In 1994, Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe shared a West African proverb in The Paris Review: ​“Until the Lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” It was a long overdu idea that came right on time. That very year, Congolese philosopher and writer V.Y. Mudimbe published The Idea of Africa, a sequel to his groundbreaking 1988 book, The Invention of Africa. 

With The Idea of Africa, Mudimbe chronicled the Western obsession with desecrating the origins of humanity as a barbaric and savage ​“other” that first took root as Greco-Roman civilisations appropriated African knowledge and wisdom as their own. He then mapped the transmission of this disinformation across European thought, exposing its brutal impact of these lies across the continent. 

Three decades later, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, the Peter Schub Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), returned to Mudimbe’s classic work as the departure point for the new exhibition and catalogue, Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination. Here, Onabanjo brings together members of the pride for a groundbreaking exploration of portrait photography as the African Independence Movement ushered in a new era of self-determination. 

Featuring works by mid-20^th century icons Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, J.D. ​’Okhai Ojeikere, Sanlé Sory, and Jean Depara as well as contemporary artists Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Silvia Rosi, Ideas of Africa is a majestic look at the innate power that comes from authoring your own histories and centring Pan-African dialogues around identity and representation. The result is a complex, layered exploration of identity, history, and culture liberated from the oppressive confines of the white gaze, which was part and parcel of the European colonial project since the invention of photography in 1839. 

Working within the historical notion of ​‘The Long 1960s’, Onabanjo focused on portraiture photography in capital cities including Accra (Ghana), Bamako (Mali), and Lagos (Nigeria). It was to ​“to demonstrate,” she explains, ​“how individual forms of creativity and imagination in front of and behind the lens contributed to modes of self-making that resounded politically, as entire nations actively worked to remake themselves on their own terms.” 

With Ideas of Africa, Onabanjo embraces the diaspora as well, showcasing the work of Barbadian-American photographer Kwame Brathwaite, who ushered in the ​“Black Is Beautiful Movement” of the ​’60s as well as Ghanian photographer James Barnor, who has been based in London since the ​’90s. She observes, ​“In Barnor and Brathwaite’s pictures, we might locate the call and response of self-determination and solidarity during a moment when decolonisation is sweeping across the African continent, while the Civil Rights movement resounded stateside.” 

At the centre of the exhibition, large scale portraits from Samuel Fosso​’s landmark series African Spirits glow with pride as the Cameroonian-born Nigerian photographer casts himself as revolutionary figures including Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, and Patrice Lumumba. ​“For me, these uncanny, monumental pictures nod to the major narratives of transnational liberation movements at mid-century,” Onabanjo says. ​“By interspersing them throughout the space, I set them in direct conversation with photographic portraits of everyday people made during that time.” 

Taken in full, Ideas of Africa is a story without end, a reclamation of a past, present, and future that belongs to the people who birthed humanity. 

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination is on view through July 25, 2026 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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