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Authored From Within: MoMA’s Ideas of Africa

Authored From Within: MoMA's Ideas of Africa Kwame Brathwaite. Untitled Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs. 1964–68. Inkjet print printed 2018. The Museum of Modern Art New York. Committee on Photography Fund. © 2025 Kwame Brathwaite

MoMA’s exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination revisits the golden age of African studio photography—roughly the 1950s through 1970s—through work shaped by the questions raised in V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Idea of Africa. Where Mudimbe exposed “Africa” as a Western epistemological construction built to maintain colonial power, the photographers here offered something radically […]

Echoes of Pain: Mike Kure’s Photography of Migration and Longing

Portrait of a woman in a sleeveless brown dress standing amid dense green foliage.

What does it mean to feel displaced, to long for home even when it’s far away? For photographer Mike Kure, the answer lies in the eyes of children who carry the weight of lost faith but still harbor hope that tomorrow might bring better opportunities. Working predominantly in dark tones and black and white, Mike’s […]

Women’s Day Through Their Eyes: African Image Makers, 1950s–1980s

Women’s Day Through Their Eyes: African Image Makers, 1950s–1980s Chantal Lawson

  From the 1950s to the 1980s, as Africa waged its fight for independence and self-definition, a quiet revolution unfolded—one captured through the eyes of African women behind the lens. Defying colonial legacies and patriarchal gatekeeping, they reclaimed photography and film as instruments of power. Thérèse Sita-Bella, Felicia Ewurasi Abban, Safi Faye, Awa Tounkara, Ifeoma […]