The photographer who immortalized a Pan-African competition
Nance’s photography confounds the nameless and the notable, reflecting the spirit of a festival that leveled boundaries even as it celebrated difference. One of the strongest individual portraits is of Audley (Queen Mother) Moore, a Louisiana-born activist who organized to free the Scottsboro Boys, in the nineteen-thirties; co-founder of the Republic of New Africa, in the late sixties; and lived long enough to address the Million Man march in 1995. Nance finds her in a dramatically draped turban on the tarmac of the Lagos airport, holding out a crumpled Kleenex in a casual gesture that—due to Nance’s timing—makes her look as frantic as Napoleon crossing the Alps. No less memorable are the portraits of families, vendors and even fellow photographers – one of whom falls to his knees in ecstasy as a friend holds his raised arms. Spectators quickly turn into participation. A telling picture of a musician’s practice shed shows nearly a dozen men and women pushing through the door, peering from ladders and even crawling under the walls. As the writer Elias Canetti once said, “All demands for justice and all theories of equality derive their energy from the actual experience of equality known to anyone who has been part of a crowd.”
A portrait of Nance shows her sitting in a sculpture garden among a crowd of terracotta figures, wearing a polka dot headscarf and a T-shirt that reads “Okra is an African word”. Hands on her knees, pants rolled up to her ankles, she looks ready for the cultural kicking the etymology implies. After the festival, she became an indispensable chronicler of rites and feasts throughout the diaspora, from pews in Brooklyn to carnivals in Rio de Janeiro and Yoruba ceremonies in South Carolina. Her work, which appears in the collections of MOMA, the Smithsonian, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others, revolves around the improvised communal gatherings central to so many Afro-diasporic religions. Often there is no absolute distinction between observing and observing a ritual; spirit possession can be spread by touch. Nance’s photography reveals a common thread between these faiths – born out of the dizzying collision of African, European and American cultures – and the festival’s equally syncretic performance of pan-African unity.
“Last Day in Lagos” pays equal attention to unofficial outings where artists explored Nigeria and hung out with their peers. Nance visited Fela Kuti’s Lagos nightclub, the Kalakuta Republic, where the outspoken Afrobeat star held an “anti-FESTAC” that aggravated Nigeria’s military government. She took scenes from bronze casting workshops in Benin City, where the festival’s official emblem, an ivory pendant mask depicting Queen Idia of the Edo, had been created centuries before. (The mask’s appearance on buses, banners, hats and cafeteria cups throughout the festival was part of a continent-wide campaign for art restitution.) A group shot shows more than a dozen Nigerian and African-American performers in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, the ancient ritual center of Yorubaland; one of them, Winnie Owens-Hart, later returned to apprentice with local ceramicists. The festival’s impact on diaspora cultures—from AfriCOBRA, in Chicago, to the Grupo Antillano, in Havana—has yet to be fully appreciated.
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