Before Nollywood: The Ideal Photo Studio curated by Amy Staples. Iké Udé: Nollywood Portraits Originating curator: Selene Wendt; Smithsonian curator: Karen Milbourne

Abstract

Two photographic exhibitions at the National Museum of Africa Art offered profoundly different approaches to modern Nigerian visual culture. Iké Udé: Nollywood Portraits, a traveling exhibition, celebrated the Nigerian film industry from a transnational elite perspective. In contrast, Before Nollywood: The Ideal Photo Studio explored the popular studio photography of Solomon Osagie Alonge during the late colonial and early national era, documenting community leaders and middle-class lives in Benin City, Nigeria.Before Nollywood emerged out of long-term research, conservation, and curatorial partnership between the Edo kingdom, the people of Benin City, the Osagie and Alonge families, the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments, and the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives (EEPA) of the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA). The Alonge Project included NMAfA's major 2014-2016 exhibition Chief S.O. Alonge: Photographer to the Royal Court of Benin, Nigeria. In 2017, the Smithsonian presented parts of the show as a permanent gift to the National Museum of Benin in Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria (Staples 2017b). This has allowed thousands of community members to encounter long-lost images of themselves, friends, and family members; to reflect on the popular visual history of Edo State; and to contribute to a continuing community-based research project on the city's social and cultural history.The deep excitement over the installation in Benin City was echoed at the October 1, 2022 opening of Before Nollywood at NMAfA, as dancers and drummers of the diasporic Edo community performed in the presence of many members of the Alonge family and the Edo Association of Washington, DC (Fig. 1). The excellent catalogue Fragile Legacies: The Photographs of Solomon Osagie Alonge (Staples, Kaplan, and Freyer 2017) remains a vital scholarly anchor of the overall project.Roland Barthes suggests that cameras are “clocks for seeing,” moving viewers back and forth across time's passage in sensuous, uncanny ways (Barthes 1981: 15). Indeed, the dominant sensibility pervading the Ideal Studio exhibition was not so much time's loss, as time regained, making time's passage visible while binding together discrete temporal moments. Entering the gallery, visitors saw a wall-sized mural photograph of the members of the Benin Social Circle, taken in 1938, the year of the organization's founding by the city's educational, cultural, and political elite (Fig. 2; center right is Nnamdi Azikiwe, who later became Nigeria's first president in 1963). A small diagram identified known members of the Circle and requested visitors’ help in filling in the blanks. In an evocative demonstration of the enduring vitality of Edo cosmopolitanism and resilience across the generations, a 2015 color photograph featured the surviving founding members of the Circle, along with curator Amy Staples, marking the 77th anniversary of the organization's creation, seated once more together in Benin City.In a form of time-binding, Alonge's images of Stella Osahiere Gbinigie and her sisters, taken during their adolescence in 1950, hung adjacent to 2019 images by Victor Ehikhamenor (a key partner in the Living Legacies: Benin Then and Now project) of Madame Stella and her sisters in Lagos. Nearly seven decades later, the women's warmth and humor still shone through. In a comparable vein, the installation's outer wall featured seven paired “Then and Now” photographic sets, starting with Chief Harrison Okao, standing ca. 1965 with his Volkswagen Beetle in front of Alonge's studio, juxtaposed with a recent picture of the Chief in ceremonial regalia at the Benin Museum posed in front a mural photograph of precisely the same image (Fig. 3).A “living” installation, the show relied on crowdsourcing and collective consultation from visitors, especially members of the Diasporic Edo-Benin community.1 This process was facilitated by the museum's important initiative in translating all exhibition text in the gallery and online into Edo language, a first for this museum. Each wall of photographs, arranged in a gridlike fashion, featured a finding guide under the title “Do you know me?: U rhen mwe ra?” that included a QR code link for digital submissions by visitors, as well as an Eliot Elisofon catalogue number and known information about the date, location, and sitters featured. In many cases, the identities of sitters remained unknown. The exhibition extended into a new community gallery, where visitors were invited to fill out cards to “Share a Memory” (“Laho ta ma mwe ewin n'yere”). Visitors placed their cards on the “Tapestry of Benin Memories” wall, consisting of four long shelves, which echoed the gridlike assemblages of the adjacent Alonge photographs (Fig. 4). Some cards, as intended, directly identified sitters who were friends or loved ones, but others, in keeping with the overall exhibition theme of time-binding, evocatively brought the past into the present. One handwritten memory card read, “Going to the Mile 3 market with my mum in Port Harcourt. I miss you everyday, mummy.”The eye-catching decor by NMAfA in-house designer Lisa Vann featured 1960s geometric wall designs, floor to ceiling murals, and bright colors, Whimsically designed chairs invited visitors to sit to have their own photographs taken by family and friends, emulating the creative forms of self-fashioning that took place in Alonge's Ideal Studio across the decades (Fig. 5). The exhibition soundscape featured the distinctive Highlife-style music of the recently deceased Sir Victor Uwaifo (1941-2021), known to many as Guitar Boy Superstar, whose “progressive traditionalism” blended classical Benin musical forms and global beats in the Edo language. NMAfA photographer Brad Simpson designed an engaging tribute to Sir Victor's memory in the form of a musical slide show with seventy Ideal Studio portraits of Benin-Edo community members.In recent years, NMAfA moved forward with repatriation plans for the twenty-nine “Benin Bronzes” held in its collection, under the terms of the Smithsonian's new Ethical Returns policy. On October 11, 2022, a signing ceremony took place between the Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch; Abba Isa Tijani, the director general of Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM); and Prince Aghatise Erediauwa, the brother of the Oba, who served as representative of the Palace and the Royal Court of Benin, on behalf of His Majesty, Oba Ewuare II, Oba of Benin (r. 2016-present). This event marked the public transfer of ownership of the artworks from the Smithsonian to the NCMM. Appropriately, this ceremony took place in the Before Nollywood exhibition gallery, honoring this long collaborative initiative and the creative genius of Solomon Osagie Alonge. The signatories were seated in front of a portrait of the late Oba Erediauwa, the Prince's father, with his brother and uncle before his departure for King's College, Cambridge, in 1947. Oba Erediauwa (r. 1979-2016) was the principal global advocate for the return of the Benin works of art stolen from the Palace in 1897. As the principals signed the transfer document, they were seated directly in front of the portraits of Stella Osahiere Gbinigie and her sisters, adjacent to the grand mural of the Benin Social Circle, dating to 1938. In this respect, the two central poles of the Edo-Benin world, the royal establishment and civil society, were co-present at the ceremonial transfer.For centuries, image-making in the Benin Kingdom has been a pivotal technology of ancestral veneration, bringing visible and invisible realms into dynamic, life-giving productive relationships (Agbontaen-Eghafona 2017; Freyer 2017; Auslander 2016). It was hard not to feel that the honored Dead, embedded in these evanescent photographic images, were now extending their blessings to the long-delayed homecoming of sacred palace objects.In striking contrast to the adjacent Alonge show, the visually spectacular Nollywood Portraits exhibition ushered us into the contemporary global cult of aristocracy, the cinematic star system, within a distinctly Afropolitan frame (Fig. 6). Large color photographs, carefully composed to look as painterly as possible, emulated the Western tradition of royal and elite portraiture, fused with high fashion photographic conventions, to celebrate the star actors of the Nigerian film industry, known popularly as Nollywood (Fig. 7). The show concentrated on thirty-three large-format portraits, created by the New York-based Iké Udé during his return to Nigeria during 2014-2016.The NMAfA iteration of the show included mannequins wearing stunning garments, such as the attire worn by the late actor and broadcaster Sadiq Daba, the beloved “Shield of Nollywood,” in his adjacent portrait (Figs. 8–9.) Also displayed was a special Genevieve Nnaji gown commissioned by the museum from designer Yolanda Okereke, whose portrait is included in the full series. (Fig. 10) The project is documented in the large coffee-table publication, Iké Udé: Nollywood Portraits; A Radical Beauty (Kan, Obioma, Akpata, and Wainaina 2017).As in the Before Nollywood space, the installation promoted audience interaction in real-time and in cyberspace.2 The Museum brought in stylists several times a week so that visitors could be photographed in a set evocative of Iké Udé's photographs. The Museum also engineered a popular interactive app that allowed visitors to experiment firsthand with the artist's postproduction practice, with options to select varied backdrops and clothes for some portraits.The show's main long gallery was centered on an enormous wall-sized digital composite, created specifically for NMAfA's iteration of the show: The School of Nollywood, modeled on Raphael's famous fresco The School of Athens, which honored ancient Greek philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists (Fig. 11). Over eighty of Udé's portraits were digitally integrated to present a pantheon of the Nollywood star system, towering over the viewers.The School of Nollywood exemplified all that dazzles Udé's fans and perturbs his detractors. The work can be read as a wondrous decolonizing homage to radical African beauty, placing African creative genius on global center stage. Yet, much was missing from this massive work, which uncritically reproduces the contemporary global cult of filmic celebrity. Raphael's fresco elevated the world of learning, but here we saw no trace of Nigeria's brilliant scientists, mathematicians, or philosophers. Nor did we encounter many of the figures who, behind the camera, have brought Nigerian film into global prominence—editors, musicians, composers, sound engineers, gaffers, extras, or other wage workers. This was emphatically a celebration of the dream world of the cinematic imaginary, as envisioned by the artist in partnership with his sitters.Similarly, the large, sumptuous portraits encountered through the gallery were joyously ennobling, honoring beauty in diverse, cosmopolitan forms of Blackness, proudly striding the global stage. Some long-term fans of Nollywood may miss the grittiness of many Nigerian films, and the experimental, provocative, and often proudly low-budget aesthetics of industry products across the decades. The emphasis on stars from the better-known Yoruba-, Igbo-, and Hausa-backed productions omitted local projects emerging out of more marginal ethnolinguistic contexts. There was relatively little evocation of the music that has helped make Nollywood films so beloved by millions, of the songs that profoundly speak to ordinary people's deepest longings, fears, and predicaments.NMAfA has a long and proud tradition of showcasing artworks that honor nonelite struggles for dignity, livelihood, and joy amidst social suffering. Ironically, Nollywood Portraits is adjacent to Romuald Hazoumè's 2007 Rainbow Serpent (Dan-Ayido-Houedo), a vast circular snake composed of tire rubber swallowing its own tail, evoking ordinary West Africans’ struggles for survival on the margins of a vast petrochemical industrial complex. The Iké Udé portrait series seems a world away from this unflinching gaze at lives of precarity, which finds fragile beauty in the shadowlands of the global economy. Instead, Nollywood Portraits might be read as a culmination of the century-old promise of cinema to allow shared escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday life: within the dream world of film, either celluloid or digital, all of us are allowed to walk with the sequined immortals through halls of opulence, wealth, and power.Side by side, the Alonge and Udé installations present very different conceptions of what decolonization in museum contexts might look like. The Alonge project was centered on long-term collaboration with a specific Nigerian community, serving as a dynamic popular visual archives of multigenerational self-fashioning, based on continuing trans-Atlantic reciprocal exchange. Iké Udé: Nollywood Portraits, in contrast, was a virtuosic reclamation of the camera lens and the portrait form by a singular artist, elevating resplendent Nigerian stars into a universe as dazzling as Wakanda. Each vision, surely, has its place, as artists, activists, and museums struggle to envision postcolonial modes of being in the world.