IT IS NOT UNUSUAL to be moved by the ocean, stirred by frothy swells of salt water rolling onto the sand and withdrawing in perpetuity. Still, I did not expect to tear up looking at a photograph of the ocean on the second floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art on a rainy Wednesday afternoon. Made with a medium-format camera and exhibited as an unframed, black-and-white inkjet print tacked down with paperclips, the image belongs to “Sea Never Dry,” an ongoing project begun by master photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi in 1982. The series is a sweeping record of “Bar Beach,” an iconic stretch of coast in Lagos. Bar Beach was once the place to be: to play, to rest, to pray, to invoke spirits, to buy, sell, wander, wonder. During the dark decades of Nigeria’s military dictatorship, it became a place to die. From the early 1970s to the late ’80s, thousands of people gathered to watch thieves and failed coup-makers get shot down by firing squad against the extraordinary expanse of the Atlantic.
Akinbiyi zooms in on the ordinary. In one picture, Bar Beach, Victoria Island, Lagos, 2006, two friends—twin sisters?—dressed identically, their backs to Akinbiyi’s camera, hold each other— one’s arm draped across the other’s waist, the other across her shoulder—as they stare out at the water. The other people in the frame hold space almost perfectly, in a rhythm and alignment that seems rehearsed. The ocean rises like a wall ahead. In another photograph, from 2010, a woman carries a sekere. She may have just finished making music or dancing. We do not know. She is dressed in porcelain-white robes—the garb of the Celestial Church of Christ, which famously held prayer and worship sessions on Bar Beach. We can see her feet and prints in the sand. Foaming waves rush to her feet, but do not quite reach them.
Akinbiyi’s work is undoubtedly the jewel of “New Photography 2023,” the twenty-seventh such presentation organized by MoMA. This edition was curated by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, who explains that the exhibition is meant to showcase artists who are “embracing a documentary tradition only to let it go.” In many ways, Onabanjo’s show departs from the traditions of MoMA’s recurring contemporary photo survey, introduced in 1985 by John Szarkowski, the legendary longtime steward of the museum’s photography department. First, there’s a geographical focus: The seven artists participating in this iteration—Akinbiyi, Kelani Abass, Logo Oluwamuyiwa, Amanda Iheme, Karl Ohiri, Yagazie Emezi, and Abraham Oghobase—are from Nigeria, making work rooted in one city, Lagos. They are all showing at MoMA for the first time, and comprise the first ever group of living African photographers the museum has exhibited. The show also kicks the series’ recent habit of offering an “ocean of images,” to quote the title of the 2015 edition, which included nineteen artists. Onabanjo instead opted to “have a smaller number of artists and care for those artists in an expansive way.”’
“New Photography 2023” is less in dialogue with previous shows at its host institution—whose collection suffered until recently from a dearth of work by African photographers—than it is with two exhibitions by the late Okwui Enwezor: “In/Sight: African Photographers” at the Guggenheim, in 1996, and “Snap Judgments” at the ICP, in 2006. Those surveys, however groundbreaking, were products of their time, corrective in spirit and mission. They offered the Western viewer a new way to “look at Africa” beyond disaster and poverty porn. They interrogated identity and postcolonial memory through the eyes of dozens of artists who spanned the continent.
“New Photography 2023”—its arrival already prepared by the trailblazing work of Enwezor and other African curators such Koyo Kouoh, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Simon Njami, and the late Bisi Silva—has no such burdens. It does not concern itself with redressing geopolitical prejudices or combating stereotypes. Still, contemplating the title, I couldn’t help but ask, new to whom? 1-54, a New York fair that has shown work by artists of African descent since 2013, is still covered in the American press as if it were novel, trendy, or aspiring to a loftier perch in the hierarchy of the art world. (Consider two nearly identical New York Times headlines about the fair, one from 2018, “Touria El Glaoui Brings Contemporary African Art to the World,” and one from this year, “The 1-54 Art Fair Brings Africa and Its Diaspora into the Global Mainstream.”) To quote Toni Morrison, speaking in a 1998 interview: “It’s inconceivable that where I already am, is the mainstream.” But I digress.
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