“How to not photograph Nigerian women… again”
“Despite the stated goals of this project — to recapture on film the dignity of these young women — in the end what we get are 83 portraits that evoke only a single frozen moment in each women’s life, one that has everything to do with suffering and sorrow.
Although it seems that the young women might be in a limbo of officialdom, they still, one imagines, have come out of a harrowing time with different stories of before and after, different identities, different dreams and different possibilities in their lives ahead. Yet, there is nothing of this either in Searcy’s phenomenally tone-deaf rendition of the lament of the newspaperman in Africa nor in the images that resulted from all her hard work. The portraits are shot through the lens (sic) of an historical artefact from Nigeria’s past — the 1974 portrait of Adetutu “Tutu” Ademiluyi, by Ben Enwonwu. This portrait, though beautiful, also has a story of expropriation and disappearance and rediscovery attached to it…
It is, though, astonishing that the New York Times would juxtapose such a collection of images with the story of a journalist’s tough road to capture them. It is quite literally a ludicrous juxtaposition between the extreme trauma and violence all of the photographs’ subjects have experienced and the pathetic struggles of an American writer in search of a particular image. It is, too, this image that beggars belief.”
Related: “How to Write about Africa”; “Africa Is The Future Magazine Covers”; “The West ignores the stories of Africans in the middle of the Ebola outbreak”
