There’s a nostalgic game that, at times, can be tempting to play. It involves imagining the creative friendships that could have existed if history had gone differently.
Take one example: If the photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode had not died in 1989 at age 34 of AIDS-related complications, he and Ming Smith, another virtuoso of the camera, would have been approximate contemporaries. Perhaps they would know each other. Perhaps they would both be sharing the shine of recognition today.
This fall, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, has made this hypothetical pairing feel closer to reality: It has opened dual exhibitions, “Ming Smith: Wind Chime” and “Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion.”
The concurrent shows, open until Jan. 5, 2025, were conceived at different moments and organized by different curators. Fani-Kayode’s exhibition was guest curated by Mark Sealy, a British cultural historian and the director of Autograph, London — which partnered with the Wexner on the exhibition. Smith’s show was organized by Kelly Kivland, a former Wexner curator who is now director and lead curator of Michigan Central’s art program.
As conversations progressed, it became clear that these two photographers — both of whom have made robust, unique contributions to Black image-making — could be presented in dialogue. But the affinity between them stretches beyond their racial identity: it also stems from their images and the questions raised in them.
At first glance, the pairing sounds unlikely. At birth, Smith and Fani-Kayode were separated by a world of difference and an ocean. Smith was born in 1947 in Detroit, while Fani-Kayode was born in 1955 in Lagos, Nigeria. Smith’s family were middle-class African Americans, while Fani-Kayode was raised in a prominent Yoruba family. Smith grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and has spent most of her adult life in New York; for her, the Wexner exhibition is a tender return home. Fani-Kayode spent his childhood on the other side of the Atlantic, fleeing Lagos for Brighton, England, at age 11 during the beginnings of the Nigerian civil war (he would later spend time in Washington, D.C., and New York before returning to England).
But despite these biographical differences, the photographers share a language in their work: a language of higher powers and preternatural forces. The cadence of their images might be compared to the way Smith described the sound of wind chimes in a video interview: “It’s like going into meditation.”
This quality is evident, for example, in the sensuous theatricality of Fani-Kayode’s 1989 series “Nothing to Lose.” In several images in the series, which are among the first visitors see at the Wexner, the artist pictures himself nude, embellished with body paint, jewelry or flowers. In some, his eyes are closed, as if in prayer or meditation, while his body affects various dance-like poses that might evoke a ritualistic act of devotion but are equally suggestive of an erotic gesture. Dense shadows rub up against luminous patches of amber and gold, evoking — as some observers have noted — the high-contrast drama of Caravaggio’s religious paintings.
In black-and-white photographs such as “Epa Burial” (1988), “Dan Mask” (1989) and “Ebo Oriso” (1987-88), bodies, suggestively flexing a delicate musculature, hold Yoruba religious masks and other sculptural objects. The human face is carefully obscured from the frame, giving the appearance that the body is a timeless extension of the devotional art object.
The spiritual essence of these images is drawn from Fani-Kayode’s connection with Yoruba cosmology and art, a key part of his life in Nigeria and elsewhere. In his often erotically charged images, this spirituality is closely tied to the body, and especially the queer body.
“He’s out there in a new space of looking beyond any kind of gravitational pull,” said Sealy, the exhibit curator, in a video interview. “He was trying to visualize almost what can’t be visualized and trying to work that through a visual language that is transgressive.”
While Fani-Kayode’s images were staged in the studio, in Smith’s work, it is the world around her that gets an ethereal treatment.
Photographs such as “Fragmentation (from Invisible Man Series)” (1991), which pictures an urban street corner, involve experimentation with a low aperture and shutter speed, techniques Smith uses frequently and masterfully. The crisp visual vocabulary that is expected from photography yields to darkness and indeterminacy; people and places seem to sink into a shroud of balm and blur that does not quite seem of this earth, despite the ordinary nature of the scene.
Kivland, the curator of “Wind Chime,” noted in an email that the works in the show reflected Smith’s view “that photography can capture the mystical, spiritual, and magical.”
“At the core of this sentiment are Smith’s belief in divine influence on our natural surroundings and the body,” she said.
Other images, such as “Watching for Katherine Dunham” (circa 1988), reflect Smith’s lifelong love of dance, an art form which, for her, is indissolubly linked to her photographic practice: Both demand attention to the body and its movements, while also inviting inward reflection.
Music has also been a key influence for Smith: “I just want people to be moved and feel my images,” said Smith, of the musical influences in her work. “You know, like the blues, like Billie Holiday songs or Betty Carter or Alice Coltrane.”
This aspiration is made literal at the Wexner, where a musical score by Smith’s son Mingus Murray plays in the galleries.
One of the rooms in “Wind Chime” displays early photographs Smith took while traveling across Africa in the ’70s and ’80s. In Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast and Egypt, she encountered new religious traditions. Later, through her observation of Dunham’s dance practice, she would also learn about many of the Yoruba spiritual practices vital to Fani-Kayode’s work.
In photographs like “Womb (Cairo, Egypt)” and “Masque (Cairo, Egypt),” both from 1992, Smith plays on the idea of the seen and unseen by deploying double exposure — also a favorite technique of Fani-Kayode’s — to lay one frame on top of another. Figures are suspended in between intervals of visibility, flickering and floating against the silhouettes of pyramids and sphinxes. The world of these images is hard for the eye to decipher; it offers a poetry rather than prose.
One can only guess what kind of poetry Smith and Fani-Kayode could have created together. According to Smith, they never met during the 34 years they shared on earth. But when their work meets, it does so in what feels like another realm.
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