Amanda Iheme speaks of photographs as Memories, from a series called The Way of Life. So which is it, the past or the way we live now, and what will we choose to remember?
It is a pressing issue for “New Photography 2023” at the Museum of Modern Art and for Africa. Only three artists now live in Lagos, the port city in Nigeria, but all seven take it as their subject. All are at home, too, but laden with memories. 
Some things are just hard to forget. When photography goes global, one had better remember.
Iheme closes in on single objects all but impossible to set aside. They are as stubborn as a summons to court and as thick as a brick. In a larger series, the brick gives way to entire buildings—emblems of British rule that barely took on a second life before facing abandonment or demolition. She documents the stages as Preservation, Stagnation, and Restoration. It sounds like a hopeful ending to a sad story, but is it? Is it more important to set the past behind us or never to forget?
Americans face much the same choices with regard to their own history, and the dispute can be bitter. Could it be any less so in Nigeria? Yagazie Emezi photographs a protest against death squads and police violence, where the future does not sound promising. As a protest sign has it, We Are Tired of Being Oppressed. Still, a man kneels in prayer—and, apart the sign and a bullhorn, the crowd could just as well be killing time at a music festival. And indeed Marilyn Nance, a Brooklyn photographer, traveled to Lagos for a festival back in 1977, and her work hangs right outside the exhibition’s entrance.
Not that the post-colonial present is free of constraints. That “tired” protester stands just past a sign calling for exact fare, and Logo Oluwamuyiwa has more than his medium in mind in calling a series Monochrome Lagos. It celebrates public spaces, with bicycles and pedestrians, but beneath utility towers cutting them off from the sky and along a highway cutting them off from the sea. Swimmers enjoy waters with the shine of oil spills. Beach-goers on Victoria Island for Akinbode Akinbiyi had better remember still another warning: Don’t Defecate.
Still, people make their accommodations. Akinbiyi’s subjects seem to enjoy the occasion—if only milling about and, by Western standards, not always dressed for the beach. As the series title has it, this is a Sea Never Dry. The photographers take things warmly and personally as well. A letterpress case for Kelani Abass holds snapshots, mostly of children, as a family history. He sees himself as “casing history.”
Past and present collide in media, too, as with the dated technology of a letterpress. A cassette tape for Iheme serves, no doubt, for serious memories, if she can still play it. Abraham Oghobase overlays vintage text on colonial portraits, while Karl Ohiri preserves portrait studio discards, deteriorated and discolored. Photos are not above the occasional selfie or image manipulation either. Oluwamuyiwa’s Oil Wonders has its swimmers above, but also feet below somehow upside-down. Who knows what it takes to walk on sand or water?
MoMA returns with a greater focus after a pandemic break from “New Photography 2013,” “New Photography 2015,” and “New Photography 2018.” It gives more space now to each artist and to a single place, through September 16. The curators, Oluremi C. Onabanjo with Kaitlin Booher, see it as questioning old truths, including the truth of documentary photography, but it works well enough as a document for me. It does have the blur and heightened sheen of memory. Those discolorations in studio portraits run to far brighter hues than in life. But then the entire show is an “Archive of Becoming.”
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