The African Lookbook

September 7, 2020
Selecting from her personal collection, curator McKinley (Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World) showcases 150 studio photographs of African girls and women (mostly from Burkina Faso, Chad, Gambia, Nigeria, and other countries in the Sahel and along the continent’s Atlantic coast) in this richly detailed and immersive visual history. Spanning the 1870s to the 1970s and covering the colonial, independence, and postindependence periods, the images and McKinley’s commentary—which pays special attention to the subjects’ clothing, accessories, and jewelry as indicators of their identity and status—tell the story of exploitation and resistance as it played out in everyday life. Some of the colonial-era photos were printed on postcards as soft-core pornography for European men “battling the heavy spell of Empire,” McKinley writes, but by the time of independence (beginning with Ghana’s liberation in 1957), “dress and the camera” were “powerful decolonizing agents.” The new fashions women wore to be photographed in studios “were the dramatic proof of a conscious engagement with Pan-African and other radical politics across the continent and the globe.” McKinley also chronicles the importance of the sewing machine for African women’s self-expression and economic agency, and highlights the emergence of female studio photographers, including Ghanaian artist Felicia Ewurasi Abban. Packed with arresting images and incisive analysis, this well-conceived survey tells a powerful story of African liberation.

October 15, 2020
If you've ever attended a West African celebration, you may have noticed that some of the female guests were wearing the same fabric, fashioned into different styles. This is to signify the powerful idea that a woman can tie your cloth to their cloth. In other words, they can tie your soul to theirs so that they share in your joy or your mourning on a truly profound level. This is but one example of the revelations of the visual journey that curator and author McKinley (Indigo, 2011) provides via photographs documenting 100 years, 1870-1970, of African women and their self-expression through clothes and image. From young girls in Mali wearing hot outfits beneath attire deemed respectable by Muslim culture to women defying Western Christianity by wearing traditional African attire to church, McKinley focuses on the ways in which fashion is a form of protest and resistance, preserving history in more resilient and revealing ways than any other. The African Lookbook is an exquisite collection of African photographs and stories bearing witness to the power and grace of African women.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)