‘The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women’ by Catherine McKinley was recently published to critical acclaim. On its pages, 130 images represent some the very earliest in Africa, beginning in 1865, through the Independence Era, and into the 1970s. Among a vibrant collection, many depicting postcolonial women in photo studios — a place of theatre and fantasy-making — other more sober sepia and ink stamped early photographies unfold on fresh leaves, restoring a dormant history: a once carcass of an archive.

As McKinley assembled the images and text, she began a conversation via Instagram with Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo who’s account features scrolls of archival and found media, as a sort of experimental digital archive. Having several mutual friends, among them cinematographer Arthur Jafa, the two creators quickly built rapport and began dissecting The McKinley Collection; the author’s trove of archival, vintage, vernacular and contemporary images, especially concerned with style. What resulted is Orupabo’s series of 11 striking digital collages which stitch together complex histories with contemporary interpretations.

Frida’s works in The African Lookbook are assemblages of images from the Collection, paired with photographs of textiles, including a commemorative cloth for DeGaulle, images of landscapes, silhouettes, a bible and religious statue for example. They are the detritus of Empire, concerned with dismantling and unpacking colonial violence, gaze, female invisibility, patriarchy, and the relationship between white masters and Black/African women. The works are also reifications of the makings of the deepest gestures of culture and resistance — like the indigo cloth below the odalisque which invokes a slave ship. The background reads of association to a boat – to the kidnapping of enslaved Africans, here with a specific focus on women captives.

Orupabo’s process-based work consists of image-mining from personal and public archives, exploring identity, self and in the context of the book: collective selves. “I try to create new ways of seeing – new narratives and identities that reflect my own experienced truth,” she shares. Aesthetically, the forms and figures are often corporeally almost ‘absurd’, grappling with histories of the Black female body which disproportionately occupies colonial African archives in exoticised form. “When choosing images I am looking for resistance or some type of tension, especially in the way a subject sees, or stares. It forces you to stop,” she adds.

Orupabo’s collages visually play with the idea of ‘dressing and undressing’, the title of the third chapter of The African Lookbook. Cropping, adding and manipulating in collage-making are reminiscent of tailoring, the sewing machine,and sartorial constructions; a topic that is heavily explored in the book. In this way, the collage medium significantly lends itself to the process and narrative around the significance of cloth.

In many African traditions, cloth is understood as almost a second skin, affixed onto bodies that have and continue to resist and subvert an alien gaze. “The twisting of bodies, or limbs taking on more abstract shapes, I think just speaks to a deep need of wanting to escape the physical body. To escape the violent ways the body is perceived,” Orupabo shares.

On poetic encounters with Orupabo’s colliding and repurposing of archives, McKinley reflects: “Her assemblages were like the words I sought - made up of many seemingly incongruous ideas and things, in the middle stages of writing The African Lookbook. It was a deep encounter to look through her catalogue of work and then look at my own ‘primary documents’: the pieces that make up the archive…. An intense exercise was looking between these weighty images and Frida’s interpretations of them, spun into narratives that deepen the already seismic capturing.”

While looking and listening attentively to these reconstructions, in the spirit of black feminist theorist Tina Campt, haunting realities of colonial ghosts in the archives begin to emerge. From floating heads and limbs, I decipher the quiet and quotidian practices of resistance, not as silence or inaction, but as embodied acts of refusal presented more urgently in collage form. The collages confront both the subject and viewer, in what feels like a call to question our own gaze and identity.

Orupabo’s Norwegian-Nigerian heritage and lived experiences reveal the influence of African archives on her practice: “Being brought up in Norway in a predominantly white society, in a white family (except for my sister), I felt for a very long time that I was unable to speak. The only thing I had was my eyes and my anger. Anger is a form of resistance. It sends out a message to your whole body that something is wrong - that what is being done towards you is not okay, even when you remain quiet as an oyster. And so, this is what I recognise in many of the images from the colonial archive - the anger and the quiet resistance.”

Similarly, McKinley’s upbringing in a predominantly white New England town - one of the first of less than 15,000 Black and “mixed race” children adopted by white families in the 1960s and 1970s - birthed a rage and persistent hunger for people and places of affinity and comfort, what she speaks of as “Company.” The two share deep connections with photography, exploring their ties to the African continent, the spectrum of Black women identities, and the ways in which art and embodiment are vehicles for speech beyond words.

Between bare skin and traditional cloth illustrated in The African Lookbook, Frida’s collage works stand at a crossroad for the viewer asking: Where do we go from here? Where history (the archives) meet future-seeking narratives, gradually moving beyond response/reaction to colonial narratives, into mimicking its absurdity, and embracing the sheer will to create.

The African Lookbook (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Catherine McKinley is out now in the US and published on 22 April in the UK

Ethel-Ruth Tawe is a multi-disciplinary artist and editorial director of Africa 2.O Magazine

Words Ethel-Ruth Tawe

Visit The McKinley Collection
Visit The African Lookbook
Visit Frida Orupabo

Published on 29/03/2021