Photographers - Part 52

Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989), above, was one of the great black photographers of the 20th century.  He was born in Nigeria, where his father was a politician and chief in the Yoruba region.  In 1966, after a military coup, his family fled to England with 11-year-old Rotimi.  He moved to the U.S. in 1976 to go to Georgetown University in Washington DC, then got his MFA in photography from the Pratt Institute in New York City.  While in New York, he met Robert Mapplethorpe, who was an influence on his work.

He returned to England in 1983.  His work explored his sexuality (he was gay), his race, and his African heritage.  His models were almost always black.  Some works were conventional nudes.  Above, Untitled, 1988.

Untitled, 1985, is a striking black nude.

But his work often had a meaning beyond just art.  He felt like an outsider in three ways: because he was gay, because he was black, and because he was from Africa, and all of those things were reflected in his work.

Above, Cargo of Middle Passage, 1989 makes us think about the "middle passage", the route of slave ships from Africa to America.

Much of his work draws on his Yoruba heritage that Americans and Europeans would not understand.  For example, you might think that Sonponnoi, 1987, above, depicts some kind of party game or kinky exhibitionism.  But the title refers to the Yoruba god of diseases such as smallpox.  Knowing that, the spots take on an entirely different meaning.

Bronze Head, 1987, showing a nude man sitting on an African sculpture of a head, depicts two Yoruba concepts, ori and idi.  Metaphorically, ori means destiny and idi means cause, but physically ori means head and idi means ass.  Is the head penetrating the man's ass?  Did the man give birth to the head?  There's a lot going on here.

Technique of Ecstasy, 1987.  Although the two guys are not actually going at it, an American or European would assume the title refers to sexual technique and ecstasy.  But in Yoruban religion, "technique of ecstasy" refers to transcending material reality and attaining a spiritual state.  In many of his photographs, Fani-Kayode was trying to go beyond the plain objects that the photos depicted.  However, since he was gay, I have to wonder whether the title was a sly reference to both the Western and the Yoruban interpretations.

Abiku (Born to Die), 1988.  In Yoruba religion, some children may be born only to immediately die because of an evil god.  This is one of a series of photos suggesting the struggle for survival.  In another photo in this series, the plastic tubing is wrapped around his neck like an umbilical cord wrapped around the neck of an unlucky fetus.

White Bouquet, 1987, gets us back to issues of race and sexuality, with a white man presenting flowers to his black male lover.  In real life, Rotimi Fani-Kayode's partner and lover was white photographer and filmmaker Alex Hirst.  The man on the daybed looks like it might be Fani-Kayode himself, which makes me wonder whether the white man is Hirst.  The image is a double exposure, so the white man looks insubstantial.  Is he real, or is he a dream?

The sexual motif is stronger in Milk Drinker, 1983.  Although not explicitly sexual, it's not hard to imagine what the white liquid going into and spilling out of the naked man's mouth represents.

We end with a late work, The Golden Phallus, 1989.  Alex Hirst wrote: "The Golden Phallus is there to show that we were dealing with issues of stereotypes, black male sexuality, linked to issues of AIDS, but not directly… The Phallus – many people (black and white) have this idea that black men are studs. We wanted to challenge that. The gold makes the dick the center of attention but the string shows the burden is too much to live up to. It’s a very subversive picture."

At the time, Rotimi Fani-Kayode was already battling AIDS.  He died in December, 1989 of a heart attack while recovering from an AIDS-related illness.  He was 34 years old.