The Mask Does Not Arrive Quietly
At the Festival des Masques in Porto-Novo, music, movement and the reaction of the crowd are part of what photographer Kelvin Selasie Quist remembers most. Over two days in July, he photographed the masquerades moving through the festival, the people gathered around them and the moments in between. “I was drawn to the energy, colors, […]
The Back of the Field
Across Buea, Lagos, Nairobi and Cairo, a running boom is exposing the hidden economics of belonging. Who pays to keep a community free, who profits when it grows, and why not one of six global brands would say what any of it is worth.
North African Design and Its Geographies
Above: ALTIN, Our AlUla Trilogy, Wadi. Photograph © Lorenzo Arrigoni The Institut du monde arabe has named twenty-six finalists for the fourth edition of its Design Award, across four juried categories, showing at the IMA from 10 to 20 September with the ceremony held the evening before. A Public Prize, new this year, runs across […]
Can a Piece of Clothing Bring You Home?
For Kimanzi, a Kenyan living in Riverside, California, home fits inside a scarf. When she left Kenya for the United States at 17, she had only two suitcases and a carry-on. Every item she packed meant another had to be left behind. Among the things she refused to leave was a kitenge scarf that had […]
What Dakar Built
Adama Paris has spent a quarter of a century taking Dakar Fashion Week out of rooms. The Medina show runs on a street closed for the night. It is free, there is no list, and residents watch from doorways and from the ledges of their own roofs while models pass close enough to touch. There […]
What Beadwork Is Worth
It took Noormesuku Kereto more than two months to finish the necklace. It was an Enkarewa, the wide beaded collar a Maasai woman wears at her wedding, and this one was made for a safari camp in the Mara rather than for a bride, which changes who will look at it but not how it […]
Gora and Fadel
Gora and Fadel is a portrait of chosen brotherhood, made at Lac Rose outside Dakar by photographer Morgane H. Gomez and director Tansi Makele. Its subjects are Gora and Fadel Gningue, two young Senegalese designers, stylists and models whose bond is a matter of heart rather than blood. Shot on Kodak Portra 400 across the […]
Dakar Coast
Dakar Coast is a fashion series made across a single day on the Senegalese coast by Paris-based art director and stylist Romain Antonini and photographer Khaled Fhemy Mamah, with model Pape Diouf. It takes the ordinary traffic of that coastline and dresses it: the fishermen and their pirogues, the roasted peanut seller, the beignet seller, […]
Echoes of Pain
Echoes of Pain is a series of portraits about migration and the grief that travels with it. Made in a forest in Switzerland, it places children among the trees, weary and watchful, unsure of the way out, as a picture of the state Mike Kure calls being physically present but emotionally suspended. Kure began the […]
Heal by Hair: How Communities, Culture, and Trust Are Redefining Mental Health Across Africa
In Siou, a village in Togo’s Kara region, a week before the Évala celebrations, the Heal by Hair Festival revealed a powerful truth: mental health is not only a medical conversation. It is a cultural, social, and collective responsibility. “We speak a great deal about healthcare infrastructure. We speak far less about infrastructures of trust. […]