Originally published in the recent edited volume, Akinbode Akinbiyi: Being, Seeing, Wandering (Spector Books, 2024) — the catalogue for the exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie, open until October 14th — Berlin-based curator Katia Reich’s essay ‘Like a Dance’ presents the creative process and experience-based narratives explored in the work of British-Nigerian street photographer, author and curator Akinbode Akinbiyi.
"The onlooker adrift in a world of endless impressions, desperate for a foothold, longing for the assurance of the indisputable standpoint."
- Akinbode Akinbiyi, 20191
Akinbode Akinbiyi observes and photographs exclusively in analogue and mainly in black and white. Equipped with a medium-format camera, a double-lens Rolleiflex,2 he wanders through the big cities of this world: Berlin, Brasília, Durban, Lagos. His gaze is open, the perspective subjective. He records the inscriptions of historic colonialism in the street names of Berlin’s ‘African quarter’, just as he does the social contrasts in Durban shortly after the end of apartheid or religious objects and ritual ceremonies from the Afro-Brazilian candomblé religion in Brasília.
Akinbiyi’s multilayered and ambiguous narratives are created at the points where objects of every sort or the movements, facial expressions, and gestures of passers-by appear to randomly meet elements such as writing, traffic signs, or posters.
He combines these ‘fragments of experience’3 into enigmatic, long-term series created over decades. Beyond the ostensibly ordinary, his pictures reveal the individual and social entanglements of people with each other and with the environments they have created. The political, social, and architectural consequences of a type of brutal colonialism are themes, as are religious and culturally specific rituals, or the manifestations and uses of photographic images. Akinbiyi’s multilayered and ambiguous narratives are created at the points where objects of every sort or the movements, facial expressions, and gestures of passers-by appear to randomly meet elements such as writing, traffic signs, or posters.
Extended Wanderings
Akinbiyi’s workplace is the public space — a sphere of focused attention and yet, at the same time, a confusing labyrinth, which he describes as a ‘maze of never-ending streets flowing together in countless ways’.4 Using his method of taking extended wanderings, he explores the world. He also returns to the same places over a long period of time. In Berlin, his city of residence since 1991, Akinbiyi takes regular rambles through the ‘African quarter’.5 In Nigeria and South Africa, he will walk, for instance, along the highways leading to the edges of big cities that are more sprawling than organised with infrastructure. ‘The slower, the better’,6 says the photographer, because only a quiet walk, bordering on strolling, makes it possible for him to perceive things visually. Often, he goes to traffic junctions or street crossings, and simply waits. Perhaps waiting for real life to present itself to his lens? For him, the act of photographing is like a dance, in which he is surrounded by dynamic bodies and shifts from seeking balance to taking up a secure, fixed position, out of which arises the picture.7 Respectful negotiation with whomever or whatever he faces is just as much a part of his creative working method as coincidence or serendipity.8
Akinbiyi’s workplace is the public space — a sphere of focused attention and yet, at the same time, a confusing labyrinth, which he describes as a ‘maze of never-ending streets flowing together in countless ways’.
Inside the urban construct, Akinbiyi is both a passer-by and an observer. With keen senses — vision, smell, hearing — he moves attentively, accordingly his own sensorial rhythm. Every city is perceived individually and finds its characteristic expression in the dynamics and vivacity of its inhabitants and visitors.9 The spheres Akinbiyi crosses, the moods he pierces and absorbs with all of his senses, are revealed in his images in an almost acoustic and olfactory way.
Most of the time, the photographer returns from his excursions through the city with several rolls of exposed film. Each individual roll produces twelve pictures printed on a contact sheet.10 They nail down his explorations, serving as ‘waymarkers through the past of endless time’.11 In the same sense that written syntax is divided into sentence structure and paragraphs, the contact prints12 structure the work around them. For Akinbiyi they ‘are crucial in writing the city’,13 as he calls it. As imagistic journals, these contact prints span longer periods of time, rendering both spatial and chronological sequences, often with only seconds in between. What happened first, what came later? Employing a self-critical process of editing, he selects the photos to use.
It is more than just the aspects of pictorial structure, such as framing, the camera’s own inherent perspective, and the moment in which the photograph is snapped that determine the visual perspective.
People positioned on the periphery of an image or in its corners, plummeting lines, and the subtle interplay between the written word and semantic meaning are the elements comprising Akinbiyi’s style, with the strict square of the medium-format camera framing them. It is more than just the aspects of pictorial structure, such as framing, the camera’s own inherent perspective, and the moment in which the photograph is snapped that determine the visual perspective: Akinbiyi’s method, which involves exploring continents and physical movement, does so as well. Even a slight rotation of the body, or a shifting of the lens, can change the relationship among the objects in the image and offers unfamiliar, surprising ways of looking at reality.
Forms of Writing
Akinbode Akinbiyi first devoted himself to literature in the 1960s while studying English14 at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. He intensified his linguistic studies in the 1970s at the University of Heidelberg. Here, he expanded his form of ‘literary seeing’,15 as he called it in 1980. Initially starting to take pictures at age twenty-six, using a single-lens reflex camera,16 Akinbiyi began a series of photographic narratives, reports, and messag- es, which he describes as a ‘visual form of writing’,17 a pursuit he has continued to this day. Parallel to his richly nuanced, long-term series, Akinbiyi also writes essays in which he reflects upon, for example, the ‘nature of photography’,18 as well as on the production and circulation of photographic images. Around 1988, he described the latent image as a ‘light-sensitive fiction’ that could be made visible through a variety of processes and, as ‘photos that have been thrown out there ... free of their origins ... they have mastered speech and description, and even worse, lying’.19 Or in 2019, he criticised the creation and distribution of manipulative and racist images of the African continent and advocated for visual counter-narratives by local photographers: ‘Whose images told the real story? Those of the dominating power bases, in control of almost every aspect of visualisation? (From the production of the cameras and film to the publication and dissemination of the final images, including their display in museums and institutions with captions and wall texts) But ... there was a gradual groundswell of opposition to this very one-sided narrative culminating in the last half-century of work done by indigenous photographers.’20
His visual universe is the result of a deeply personal conviction that his photographs convey a worldview beyond stereotypical and discriminatory images.
It is also worth mentioning that photobooks by select photographers,21such as David Goldblatt’s On the Mines (1973), Paul Strand’s Ghana: An African Portrait (1976), and Graciela Iturbide’s Pájaros (2002) — as well as illustrated magazines like Revue Noire and Drum22 — still today have an important influence on Akinbiyi’s work. The same is true of novels,23 such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958),24 Bessie Head’s Maru (1971),25 and Max Frisch’s Sketchbook, 1946–1949 (originally published in German in 1950).26 In a post-war era permeated by humanism, the authors Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head shape their own literary spaces as postcolonial counter-narratives, while Max Frisch, as an eyewitness, takes a critical view of the times and society in describing a war-torn Europe in the process of rebuilding.
Akinbode Akinbiyi’s photographs come out of a constant back-and-forth shift between continents and cultures, between Lagos and Berlin. His visual universe is the result of a deeply personal conviction that his photographs convey a worldview beyond stereotypical and discriminatory images. For over five decades, the photographer has created visual metaphors of critical, poetic ambiguity that tell multifaceted stories and probe globally urgent themes.
Bio
Katia Reich studied art history at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Università degli Studi di Milano Statale in Milan. Since 2020 she has headed the Photography Collection at the Berlinische Galerie. In 1999, she began conceiving and realising exhibitions on international Photography, especially East German photography, at venues such as the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) in Berlin (1999–2004) and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2004–12). Publications include such titles as Sibylle Bergemann: Town and Country and Dogs – Photographs 1966–2010 (2022) and Ulrich Wüst: Cityscapes 1979–1985 (2021).
Bibliography
1 Akinbode Akinbiyi, ‘Photographic Wanderings’, in Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, ed., Streams of Consciousness: A Concatenation of Dividuals, exh. cat. 4 12ème Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, Bamako (Berlin, 2019), pp. 331–36, esp. p. 333.
2 Akinbiyi notes that he has mainly used the double-lens Rolleiflex 3.5 F since 1990. Prior to 1980, he used various small-format single-lens reflex cameras, including the Olympus OM1 and OM2, and from 1980 onwards, medium-format cameras such as the Asahi Pentax 6×7, and later, the Fuji 6×9. He makes less frequent use of the Koni-Omega Rapid M, a 6×7 camera. See Akinbode Akinbiyi, email to the author, 19 January 2024.
3 ‘Akinbode Akinbiyi: Text und Fotografien’, Photonews: Zeitung für Photographie 4, no. 2 (February 1992), pp. 10–11, esp. p. 11.
4 Akinbode Akinbiyi, ‘Aufzeichnungen eines verlorenen Sohns’, in Elke aus dem Moore and Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V., eds., Prêt-à-partager: A Trans- cultural Exchange in Art, Fashion and Sports, exh. cat. ifa-Galerie Berlin and ifa-Galerie Stuttgart (Nuremberg, 2009), pp. 41–43, esp. p. 41.
5 For more on this, see also Katharina Jörder’s essay in the present catalogue, pp. 151–156, ‘Akinbode Akinbiyi’s Photographic Wanderings through the Linguistic Landscape of the “African Quarter”’.
6 Akinbode Akinbiyi, email to the author, 19 January 2024. 6 Akinbode Akinbiyi in conversation with the author, Berlin, 11 December 2023.
7 See Akinbiyi 2019 (see note 1), p. 332.
8 When photographing, Akinbiyi consciously works with random discoveries and events. See Akinbiyi 2019 (see note 1), p. 335. The ‘serendipity principle’ is explained more precisely by Clément Chéroux in his essay in the present catalogue ‘Akinbode Akinbiyi: Genius Loci’, pp. 145–150.
9 Akinbiyi himself has more precise things to say about the physical experiences while wandering and his perception of cities. See Akinbiyi 2019 (see note 1), pp. 331–34.
10 ‘From, say, a day’s wandering I come back with six exposed films, which eventually lead to six contact sheets, each with twelve individual images. That being the capacity of the medium-format cameras and films I use. [...] If I am lucky and the work that day went well,I might have six to ten really powerful images amongst the seventy-two. These six to ten are then eventually enlarged and go into the overall body of work on that particular city.’ Akinbode Akinbiyi, ‘Interview Akinbode Akinbiyi’, in Joanna Grabski and Carol Magee, eds., African Art, Interviews, Narratives: Bodies of Knowledge at Work (Bloomington, 2013), pp. 86–97, esp. p. 89.
11 Akinbiyi 1992 (see note 3), p. 10.
12 The photographer keeps his contact sheets in files sorted chronologically. During the process of selecting photos, he uses work prints. See the interview with Akinbode Akinbiyi in Lighting the Archive, 15 March 2021, online (accessed 15 December 2023).
13 Akinbode 2013 (see note 10), p. 89.
14 Akinbiyi began with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, as well as the novels and poems of various authors such as Wole Soyinka and Ayi Kwei Armah. See Akinbode Akinbiyi, email to the author, 24 January 2024.
15 ‘Akinbode Akinbiyi’, Camera 59, no. 1 (January 1980), pp. 9–13, esp. p. 13.
16 According to Akinbiyi, his first negatives are from 1972 (Akinbode Akinbiyi in conversation with the author, Berlin, 11 December 2023).
17 Akinbode Akinbiyi, ‘Die Methapher [sic] der Photographie’, in ZANGO e.V. Fotoforum, Munich, ed., Zwichen Elbe und Wolga: Sechzehn Fotografen aus Ost-europe und der DDR, exh. Haus am Kleistpark and nGbK, Berlin (Heidelberg, 1988), pp. 8–12, esp. p. 8.
18 To accompany a series of workshops for photographers from the African continent, organised by the curator Simon Njami with the participation of various international photographers and curators, in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut South Africa, Njami published Just Ask! From Africa to Zeitgeist (Bielefeld, 2014). For this book, Akinbiyi wrote twenty-three brief texts with titles like ‘Autobiography’, pp. 22–23; ‘Analogue’, p. 23; ‘Cropping’, p. 53; ‘Perspective’, p. 126; and ‘Zoom’, p. 187.
19 Akinbiyi 1988 (see note 17), p. 8.
20 Akinbode Akinbiyi, ‘Knowledge’, in Simon Njami and Sean O’Toole, eds., The Journey: New Positions in African Photography (Bielefeld, 2019), pp. 222–25, esp. p. 224.
21 According to Akinbiyi, the following photobooks im- pressed him due to the visual intensity of the pictures: David Goldblatt, On the Mines (Cape Town, 1973); Lee Friedlander, The American Monument (New York, 1976); Paul Strand, Ghana: An African Portrait (New York, 1976); Peter Hujar, Animals and Nudes (Santa Fe, 2002); Graciela Iturbide, Pájaros (Santa Fe, 2002); Danny Lyon, Indian Nations: Pictures of American In- dian Reservations in the Western United States (Santa Fe, 2002); and Diane Arbus, Revelations (New York, 2003) (Akinbode Akinbiyi in conversation with the author, Berlin, 11 December 2023).
22 The photojournalism magazine Drum was first published in 1951 in Cape Town, South Africa, eventually reaching a circulation of up to 400,000 readers. As a magazine made mainly ‘by Blacks for Blacks’, it focused on political and social themes on the African continent besides starvation and death. Non-African photographers, on the other hand, often hawked an image of Africans as victims and did not report with enough differentiation, as Akinbiyi has concluded. See Akinbode Akinbiyi, ‘Sterben vor kalten Objektiven: Fotografie in, aus und über Afrika’, du: Die Zeitschrift der Kultur 12, no. 1, Arche Afrika: Ausbruch ins Eigene (December 1995 – January 1996), p. 129.
23 See ibid.; see also Akinbode Akinbiyi in conversation with the author, Berlin, 11 December 2023.
24 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London, 1958).
25 Bessie Head, Maru (London, 1971).
26 Max Frisch, Tagebuch 1946–1949 (Frankfurt am Main, 1985); first published in English as Sketchbook, 1946–1949 (New York, 1977)
