Gazelle Mba is a Nigerian writer in London.
On 9 June 2020, two weeks after the murder of George Floyd, a photograph appeared on my Twitter feed of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. She was wearing a stole made of Ghanaian Kente cloth, its bold yellow and black geometric design set off by her red suit and heels. She was surrounded by a group of Democratic congressmen and women, including Chuck Schumer and...
Two walls and a lightbulb, that’s all it took. For any other photographer, a subject so simple, seemingly lacking the high-stakes drama and political critique associated with American documentary photography of this period (Gordon Parks’s protest shots, Robert Frank’s The Americans, Diane Arbus’s weirdos), wouldn’t be worth the film it was shot on – but...
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