Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s potent portraiture explores desire and ecstasy

In the 1991 film Rage and Desire, which plays on a loop in an old-box television set at London’s Autograph gallery, the fictionalised voice of the photographer Rotimi Fani Kayode demands that “we must imaginatively reimagine Blackness, maleness and sexuality”. It is a premise that guided the Nigerian-British photographer’s portraits taken in his Brixton-based studio in the 1980s and is activated through the solo exhibition of his photography at Autograph. Curated by Mark Sealy, Rotimi Fani-Kayode: The Studio – Staging Desire, builds on the art-historical notion that the photography studio is a prophetic space where fantasies, desires and identity can be explored and negotiated.

“Staging desires ties into this idea that you can build your world through the studio,” Sealy explains, reflecting on how the studio allows us to escape the homogeneity of the world. “Regardless of whether you’re a painter or a sculptor, the studio is where the creative magic happens. As a photographer, the studio allows you to build the narrative, create the environment and stage the models to reflect your fantasies.”

For Fani-Kayode, who was born into a Yoruba family in Lagos before they were exiled to England following the civil war in Nigeria in 1966, the studio and his broader practice became a space where he attempted to work through this geographical displacement, his sexuality and the subsequent isolation he experienced from his Nigerian heritage. More crucially, the studio allowed Fani-Kayode to imagine and make visible a visual language of Black African gay imagination that was sorely lacking in photography at the time. He did this by positioning the Black male bodies in his photographs in tandem with Yoruba traditions and deities, sometimes overtly in the form of a mask that obscures the subject’s face and other times through gesture and pose. 

According to Sealy, Fani-Kayode's photography broke through the deeply theoretical spaces of art history and Yoruba spirituality and invoked a truly hybrid nature to the work. “He wasn’t looking to be anybody else,” Sealy shares. “He knows where he comes from, in terms of his Yoruba background, but is at the same time exposed to his community in Brixton and Western art history. Improvising his studio, Fani-Kayode’s photographs fostered a dialogue between art history and Yoruba cosmologies to produce a new formation of thinking.”

Engaging with Fani-Kayode’s work in this specific exhibit, which, alongside archival ephemera and the film Rage and Desire, includes several black and white gelatin prints of primarily Black male subjects in various staged poses, the title of the show feels resounding apt. There is no dearth of queer desire and erotic imagination in the space. In the photographs, models are naked and, unlike some of his later works from 1989, not overly stylised. Instead, the attention in his contrasting black and white photographs is on muscular arms, bulges and near-perfect torsos, complemented by minimal props in the way of white bedsheets, gloves and a lot of leather.

The studio is where the creative magic happens. As a photographer, the studio allows you to build the narrative, create the environment and stage the models to reflect your fantasies – Mark Sealy 

Most of the photographs on display have not been exhibited publicly before and the selection has been informed by Fani-Kayode‘s essay titled ”Traces of Ecstasy”. Sealy explains, “Ecstacy is an interesting premise as it’s equally about pain as it is pleasure. As I was sifting through his works, I started looking and thinking through those parameters and examining where the edges of pain and pleasure exist in the photographs. I then used that way of thinking to try and highlight certain aspects of his practice so that people can begin to think about the work through the dynamics of desire.” 

As you walk through the show, photographs of male models flexing their arms and dressed in tight leather trousers that accentuate each muscle and vein are a testament to Fani-Kayode’s pursuit of Black queer-self expression and eroticism. While the photographs of men embracing each other in front of the plain backdrop of the studio – sometimes with compassionate clasps and other times with writhing passion – form the latter section of the show and situates his Brixton-based studio in Railton Road as a haven where sexuality was expansive and celebrated. 

Rotimi Fani-Kayode: The Studio – Staging Desire will be on view at Autograph’s gallery in Shoreditch, Londo, from October 31, 2024, through March 22, 2025.