World Afro Day 2022
Happy World Afro Day 2022! Today is a global day of celebrating Afro hair and the culture and identity around it. Afro hair is significant in connecting Black people across the diaspora and giving us a sense of identity. The way we wear our hair is a deep political statement that doesn’t need to be spoken out loud, a loud reclaiming of our history, and our own ancestral standards of beauty.
Today we want to spotlight the works of 5 amazing photographers from across the globe, whose works celebrate the diversity and coolness of afros, as well as Black culture.
James Banor
James Banor photography
James Barnor HonFRPS is a Ghanaian photographer who has been based in London since the 1990s. His portraits depict the self-assurance and individualistic fashion trends that dominated both in London and Accra. With a practice spanning six decades and two continents, ranging from street to studio and fashion to documentary, he is now recognised as a pioneering figure within the history of photography.
Kwame Brathwaite
Kwame Brathwaite photography
Kwame Brathwaite is a Photographer/Activist from New York that chronicled Black culture throughout the diaspora. His archive documented the Black is Beautiful Movement, Fashion, Politics, Music and Art from 1956 - 2018. He is know to have popularised the phrase “Black is beautiful” and perfecting a film processing technique that made black skin pop in a photograph.
Samuel Fosso
Samuel Fosso photography
Samuel Fosso is a Cameroonian-born Nigerian photographer who has worked for most of his career in the Central African Republic. His work includes using self-portraits adopting a series of personas, often commenting on the history of Africa. He is recognized as one of Central Africa's leading contemporary artists.
J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere
J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere is regarded as one of the greatest African photographers of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1950s, he produced an impressive portfolio of two thousand negatives documenting the ways women styled their hair into monumental headdresses. On Ojeikere's death, he left behind an archive of well over 10,000 photographs of his home country Nigeria.
Malick Sidibé
Malick Sidibé was a Malian photographer who chronicled the exuberant life of the young people in Mali in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Throughout his exuberant, black-and-white portrait photography, Sidibé documented everyday life and youth culture in Bamako, the capital of his native Mali. His practice not only captured a shift in atmosphere as his society transitioned from French colonial rule to independence in the 1960s, it also created the space for these shifts to take root.