Throughout the diaspora, studio portraits became sites for regeneration as well as tools for preservation. There has been a recent emergence throughout the digital sphere devoted to archiving these self-portraits, archives that include the work of studio photographers such as Tibin alongside Amin al Rashid and Mali’s Malick Sidibé. Sudan gained independence from British colonial rule in 1955 and Sudanese youth were determined to claim the endless possibilities of a new world order. Artists such as Fouad Hamza Tibin, who opened the “Studio Mwahib” in 1973, aimed to capture the reverbs of freedom. Studio portraits became a quotidian practice, a way of life that provided Sudanese youth the opportunity to capture their self image, culture, and lifestyle. The period between 1950-1970 is often described as the golden age of Sudanese photography. Photos of my father, Awad Saed Taha, taken in Khartoum, Sudan in the late 1970s to the early 1980s (photos courtesy Awad Taha) By attuning the ear to the sonic frequencies of an image, Campt had explained, one begins to develop a deeper understanding of an individual’s interior register.Īnd so, I began to listen. I remembered a lesson from my former college professor Tina Campt, whose important book Listening to Images implored readers to listen rather than merely view an image.
What were his dreams and aspirations? What were his visions for the future? How wonderful, I thought, to experience the visual manifestation of self in this way, and I soon began to understand them as more than visual. I gazed at the young man before me and tried to understand him.
#Portrait professional studio 12 series
Over the course of his young adult life, he had taken a series of portraits in professional photography studios across Sudan and saved the photos, gently pressed, in an album that would keep them safe for the next 45 years. Turning the pages, I confronted a series of studio portraits of a twenty-something-year-old man. It was during this time that I stumbled upon a bruised, old photo album neatly tucked away in the basement closet. The magnified blight and certainty of premature Black death resolves to create a world in which we are inundated with a perpetual, collective state of mourning. In the crevices of my bones and down to the ligaments of my feet, I experienced a heartache unlike anything I had ever experienced. When I learned that my father was diagnosed with a progressive lung disease in 2019, at the start of a pandemic that would disproportionately target Black lungs and in the midst of a growing political movement imbued by a collective and formidable suffering, I was overcome by grief. Editor’s Note: This article was produced in collaboration with the Arts & Culture MA concentration at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
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