From half a world away, Africa has come to Vermont. That is, in the form of a touring exhibition of photographs and videos from Lagos, Nigeria, and Johannesburg, South Africa, to the Middlebury College Museum of Art.
The continent’s cities are the fastest-growing in the world, according to exhibition text, with Lagos a metropolis surpassing 15 million residents and Johannesburg an industrial center of more than 5 million. The images by nine contemporary artists featured in “Urban Cadence” do more than offer glimpses of those burgeoning cities; they also represent the evolution of African photography in recent decades from exclusively journalism to a creative art form, and from predominantly portraiture to personal expressions of place.
Moreover, photography has been increasingly available to Black artists since the dismantling of apartheid in the early 1990s. Only two photographers included in “Urban Cadence” are white — Jodi Bieber and Jo Ractliffe, both from South Africa.
The concept of cadence in the exhibition title is manifested in multiple ways, according to wall text: as the “ebbs and flows of residents navigating Lagos and Johannesburg and the movement of artists registering this urban flow,” and also in “the rhythms an artist creates when visually telling a city’s myriad stories.”
One of those stories is about overwhelming congestion. In “Each Passing Day,” by Nigerian photographer Akintunde Akinleye, a perspective from an overhead walkway looks down on teeming masses of vehicles, pedestrians and the colorful umbrellas of street vendors. Adjacent to this sea of humanity is a row of well-worn multistory buildings, tangles of electrical wire and shouty billboards. For claustrophobes, it’s a terrifying scene.
Other images depict city dwellers simply going about their business, such as Sabelo Mlangeni’s “Woman and City.” In the black-and-white shot, the South African photographer catches a professionally dressed woman’s eye as she weaves through traffic. Perhaps on her way to or from work, the young woman looks unruffled by the chaos around her.
Some of the photographers have focused on changing infrastructure, whether decaying or emerging. Bieber’s “Diepkloof Hostel Conversion Project,” for example, shows a development in the sprawling suburb of Soweto: colorful, townhouse-like family dwellings going up against a background of drab workers’ barracks.
Akinbode Akinbiyi’s black-and-white photo “Aguda, Lagos Island, Lagos” captures the evolving neighborhood through the “cacophony of wires” competing for space on an electrical pole. According to the Nigerian photographer, the image “shows the almost desperate will of people living in the vicinity to somehow tap illegally into the practically defunct electrical power supply of the authorities.”
Fellow Nigerian photographer Uche Okpa-Iroha seeks to expose the living conditions of impoverished migrants to Lagos — some 275,000 of them per year, according to text for his photo “American Dream.” A selection from his “Under the Bridge” series, it shows a pair of young boys walking through an area below a bridge “which becomes a place of business to some during the day — and home to many at night.” An American flag printed on one boy’s T-shirt inspired the photo’s title.
The cadences of everyday life in African cities include literal rhythms, too, captured in photos such as Bieber’s portrait of the Black heavy metal band Ree-burth. Kelechi Amadi-Obi‘s “Captain Rugged” series depicts Nigerian musician Keziah Jones as the “superhero for Lagos.” He variously poses with a ridiculously futuristic car or his guitar, and occasionally in flight with a red cape billowing above him.
“Urban Cadence” is a project of the California-based initiative Touring Exhibitions of Contemporary Artists of Africa, whose mission is to bring the work of African artists to college museums in North America. The Gund Gallery at Ohio’s Kenyon College shepherded this exhibition, which includes a handsome catalog. The collected images, whether sobering or exuberant, invite viewers into myriad scenes of contemporary African city life. A music video (offered via QR portal) enhances the visit.
“Urban Cadence” is on view through April 23. Learn more at middlebury.edu/museum.
This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2023.
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