The Exhibition as Argument

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination examines how photographers and their sitters contributed to the proliferation of Pan-African solidarity during the mid-20th century. The exhibition considers the transatlantic call and response that constructed Africa as a political idea — in the context of the winds of decolonial change that swept the African continent in tandem with the Civil Rights movement in the United States.

The concept derives directly from V.Y. Mudimbe — the Congolese philosopher whose landmark text The Idea of Africa, published in 1994, argued that "Africa" has always been an ideological construction as much as a geographic reality. Mudimbe, who lived from 1941 to 2025, developed the idea that the African continent was conceived as a project of imagination as much as fact — and the MoMA exhibition departs precisely from this premise to read portrait photography not as documentation but as the production of subjectivity.

The most radical curatorial decision in the exhibition is not what it includes. It is how it refuses to organise what it includes. The curatorship rejects chronological and geographical order, proposing instead an interpretive reading of the histories of photography on the African continent and in the African diaspora — rather than a chronological, monographic or geographic frame. This is not a presentational choice. It is a philosophical position: if Africa is an idea in circulation, then the objects that circulated that idea cannot be read through the frameworks that the colonial idea itself created — the map, the timeline, the separation between "the continent" and "the diaspora."

The Portrait as Political Act

The heart of the exhibition is African studio photography of the 20th century — and here the argument gains body, literally.

Photographers Jean Depara, Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Sanlé Sory portrayed residents across Bamako, Bobo-Dioulasso and Kinshasa at a moment when decolonial change was sweeping the continent in parallel with the Civil Rights movement in the United States.

What these photographs do is precisely what no political discourse manages to do with the same effectiveness: they make a subjectivity visible. A man in Bamako in 1954, photographed by Seydou Keïta, well dressed, looking directly into the camera with a composure that asks permission of no one. A woman in Kinshasa photographed by Jean Depara in a nightclub — present, elegant, entirely herself. A young man in Bobo-Dioulasso at Sanlé Sory's Volta Photo studio, posing with the awareness that the photograph will circulate, will be seen, will persist.

Sanlé Sory worked in Bobo-Dioulasso, in newly independent Burkina Faso, in nightclubs, streets and his studio, Volta Photo. Seydou Keïta opened his studio in Bamako in 1948, creating what curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo describes as "sublime compositions that rendered Bamakois citizenry in the process of becoming."

In the process of becoming — this phrase deserves to be held. Not "what they were." Not "how they lived." But what they were becoming. African studio photography of the mid-20th century is not documentation of an existing reality. It is participation in the production of a new one. The portrait is an instrument of becoming — and the people who sat before these cameras knew it. The choice of suit, of pose, of framing, of gaze: all of this was a declaration. An assertion of modernity, of dignity, of presence in the century being built.

The exhibition expands the canon beyond the habitual centrality of Keïta and Sidibé, placing them on equal footing with other, somewhat lesser-known studio photographers working at roughly the same time across cities in West and Central Africa — Felix Akinniran Olunloyo and J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere from Nigeria, Jean Depara and Ambroise Ngaimoko from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sanlé Sory from Burkina Faso, and Oumar Ka from Senegal. This is one of the exhibition's genuine contributions: refusing the narrative of two geniuses and insisting on the existence of a distributed practice, a shared tradition operating in parallel across cities and countries without necessarily being in direct contact.

The Atlantic as Space of Production

The exhibition's most ambitious move is the extension of the conversation beyond the continent.

The exhibition spotlights James Barnor and Kwame Brathwaite — photographers living in Europe and North America who contributed to the construction of Africa as a political idea. Barnor worked simultaneously in London and Accra; Brathwaite in New York, at the centre of the Black Is Beautiful movement. Neither was documenting the African continent. Both were producing images of Blackness — of Black urban presence, of style, of affirmation — that circulated in both directions across the Atlantic.

This is the central idea the exhibition sustains most convincingly: that Pan-Africanism was not a movement originating in a single place that then dispersed. It was a transatlantic conversation — with multiple centres, multiple directions of circulation, multiple instruments. And portrait photography was one of those instruments precisely because it circulated: in magazines, on postcards, in newspapers, on posters, in people's wallets.

Curator Onabanjo describes the possibility of seeing a suite of Seydou Keïta images from the 1950s and 60s in Bamako alongside an image of Samuel Fosso embodying Keïta himself in his African Spirits series — and that image next to Fosso embodying Kwame Nkrumah, across from a text demonstrating Nkrumah's almost visual sense of vision for the continent in the 1960s: "this is no ordinary wind of change, this is the raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand."

This sequence — Keïta / Fosso as Keïta / Fosso as Nkrumah / Nkrumah in words — is a theory of how ideas travel. Not in a straight line. In spirals, through accumulation, through citation, through embodiment.

The Present Responds with Productive Scepticism

The exhibition does not stay in the past — and this is another of its strengths.

Contemporary artists respond with productive scepticism. Silvia Rosi's 2024 work Disintegrata di profilo fragments a portrait entirely, breaking the unified subject into planes and absences. Where Keïta and Sidibé constructed coherent visions of African modernity, Rosi asks whether such coherence is still possible or even desirable. Samuel Fosso experiments with the instability of identity through theatrical self-portraiture, performing the instability that earlier generations worked to stabilise. And Njideka Akunyili Crosby layers Nigerian and American visual references until neither dominates — mapping a diasporic consciousness that refuses singularity.

This dialogue between generations is the exhibition's strongest implicit argument: that the problem the photographers of Bamako and Kinshasa were trying to solve — how to become visible under conditions of imposed invisibility — was not solved. It transformed. It complicated itself. The instruments changed, digitalisation altered circulation, the diaspora multiplied. But the central question remains: who controls the image of the Black subject? Who decides what is modern, what is worthy of being portrayed, what deserves to circulate?

What the Exhibition Demands of Its Visitors

There is a tension running through the exhibition that is not resolved — and that, in this reading, should not be.

The exhibition is at MoMA. Organised by an American institution, funded by American endowments, presented in a museum whose access requires a thirty-dollar ticket in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. The photographs from Bamako and Kinshasa and Bobo-Dioulasso — made by Africans, for Africans, in African cities in the process of becoming — are now in a room in New York, under the curatorship of a Western institution, being analysed by a predominantly Western audience.

This is not a criticism of Oluremi C. Onabanjo's curatorship — which is rigorous, generous and intellectually honest. It is an observation about structure. The same conversation about the circulation of ideas that the exhibition celebrates applies to the exhibition itself: who sees these images, under what conditions, with what framing, in whose interest?

The answer is not simple. Exhibitions in major Western museums have legitimised and expanded the recognition of African artists in ways that directly benefit those artists and their markets. Visibility has real value. And at the same time, there is something structurally contradictory in celebrating the production of autonomous African subjectivity within an institution that remains the dominant arbiter of what counts as modern art.

The exhibition does not resolve this tension. But in making it visible — in posing the question of who constructs "the idea of Africa" — it invites visitors to apply that same question to the exhibition itself. That is what distinguishes an exhibition that thinks from an exhibition that merely presents.

Conclusion

Ideas of Africa arrives at a moment — the summer of 2026, with the restitution conversation at its peak — when the question of who controls the narrative around African art is more urgent than at any point in recent decades.

The answer the exhibition offers is partial, as all exhibitions are. But the central argument holds: Africa was always an idea before it was an administrative reality. An aspiration before it was a border. And the portraits that circulated that idea — from Bamako to New York, from Kinshasa to London, from Bobo-Dioulasso to the 21st century — were not documents. They were instruments of a political project that is far from finished.

The face in the portrait is not looking at the photographer. It is looking at the future. And the future is looking back.