Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination
Edited with text by Oluremi C. Onabanjo. Text by Brent Hayes Edwards, Momtaza Mehri, V.Y. Mudimbe, Yasmina Price.
A rich examination of the role of portrait photography in the construction of Africa as a political idea
At a moment of profound change marked by decolonization and the civil rights period of the mid-20th century, photographers across Africa and the African diaspora used the photographic portrait in order to fuel incipient ideas of Africa. Published in conjunction with a groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination charts international histories of resistance and liberation up to the present day in order to contend with the construction of Africa as a political idea, and the tools that artists used to forge it. Featuring more than 100 photographs by renowned artists of the time, such as Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Jean Depara, and by contemporary artists of African descent, such as Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi and Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, this richly illustrated publication explores modes of Pan-African possibility in powerful images of everyday people, where the personal was undeniably political. With an introduction by curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, excerpts from landmark texts by V.Y. Mudimbe and Brent Hayes Edwards, and a conversation between Yasmina Price and Momtaza Mehri, Ideas of Africa highlights the potential of the photographic portrait as both a creative endeavor and political mechanism.
Featured image is from 'Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
The Art Newspaper
Simon Bainbridge
Rather than nostalgia, 'Ideas of Africa' proposes a more dynamic reading of these pictures as evidence of how independence looked and was imagined. In their confident gazes and glamour, the sitters were picturing a different world.
Hyperallergic
Imani Wiliford
It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.
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Featuring more than 100 artists working from the mid-twentieth century to today—covering decolonialization and the civil rights period across the Diaspora—Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination is an essential examination of the role of portrait photography in the construction of Africa as a political idea. But “Ideas of Africa dispenses with the burden of representation that dominates the popular discourse about the African continent,” MoMA curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo writes, instead highlighting “the full range of creative capacity embedded within the photographic process. … What remains undertheorized in the public sphere—and particularly suited to curatorial forms of meaning-making—is the treatment of political imagination through photographic portraiture. As such, this exhibition aims to unfix the portrait as solely an index of identity. With this approach, Ideas of Africa is indebted to the work of Jennifer Bajorek, who argues that, in the case of city dwellers in Dakar and Bamako, ‘Africans’ embrace of photography was a key factor in expanding the existing spaces of political imagination . . . . [I]n the middle decades of the twentieth century, west Africans took full advantage of this expanded imaginative field. They used photography to open new routes and relays of communication; they creatively exploited its infinite capacities for recirculation and resignification; and they used its remarkable plasticity, lack of fixity, and aesthetic and referential open-endedness to reimagine, and remake, their world.” As we continue to witness transformative shifts in the global geopolitical order, it is useful to revisit a moment in history that saw the disintegration of colonial territories and the formation of transnational solidarity across the African continent and the African Diaspora. Ideas of Africa locates dazzling modes of Pan-African possibility in images made by inventive photographers who registered and beckoned new worlds.” continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 10.5 in. / 128 pgs / 105 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $70 ISBN: 9781633451711 PUBLISHER: The Museum of Modern Art, New York AVAILABLE: 1/13/2026 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited with text by Oluremi C. Onabanjo. Text by Brent Hayes Edwards, Momtaza Mehri, V.Y. Mudimbe, Yasmina Price.
A rich examination of the role of portrait photography in the construction of Africa as a political idea
At a moment of profound change marked by decolonization and the civil rights period of the mid-20th century, photographers across Africa and the African diaspora used the photographic portrait in order to fuel incipient ideas of Africa. Published in conjunction with a groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination charts international histories of resistance and liberation up to the present day in order to contend with the construction of Africa as a political idea, and the tools that artists used to forge it.
Featuring more than 100 photographs by renowned artists of the time, such as Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Jean Depara, and by contemporary artists of African descent, such as Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi and Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, this richly illustrated publication explores modes of Pan-African possibility in powerful images of everyday people, where the personal was undeniably political. With an introduction by curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, excerpts from landmark texts by V.Y. Mudimbe and Brent Hayes Edwards, and a conversation between Yasmina Price and Momtaza Mehri, Ideas of Africa highlights the potential of the photographic portrait as both a creative endeavor and political mechanism.
