EP18: "Photography Needs Time...Time for Light" – Nkata with Angèle Etoundi Essamba

In this episode of Art and Processes, Emeka Okereke sits down with Cameroonian photographer Angèle Etoundi Essamba — a defining voice in contemporary African photography whose four-decade career has centered the presence, dignity, and strength of the Black female body.

Born in Douala in 1962, Angèle left Cameroon at nine years old for medical treatment in France — a rupture that shaped a lifelong meditation on displacement, belonging, and "home."

The conversation moves from that culture shock, to the moment in 1980s Amsterdam when she realized the Black community around her was visually absent — and decided to put the Black woman at the center of her frame, on her own terms.

They trace her major bodies of work: Série Noire, Afro Cosmos, and the Renaissance series (including The Girl with the Amber Earring), and talk about photography in the age of social media and AI, motherhood and darkroom discipline, and what freedom and dignity look like when "progress" means moving away from stagnation rather than climbing a ladder.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Emeka Okereke

What is NKATA: Art and Processes?

NKATA is an Igbo word from the language spoken by the Igbo people of Nigeria. It simply means "Conversation". Thus this podcast series will feature conversations with selected individuals (artists, cultural operators, and creatives) whose work I have known – some over many years and others, a little less so. What sets them apart is that I consider them and their works to be compelling, engaging and relevant to the time. The idea of this podcast is to have in-depth but also accessible conversations about who these individuals are, their life’s journeys and how this translates into their vocation as creative people. Conversations will depart from exploring the background of the artists' personal history while meandering through key themes, positions, and ideologies central to their works. Each episode will feature one conversation with a selected artist. Emeka Okereke (Host).

[Intro music]

Emeka Okereke: Hello, hello, welcome to yet another episode of the podcast Art and Processes.

And today I am in conversation with the Cameroonian photographer Angele Etoundi Essamba.

Born in Douala in 1962, she has long lived and worked in Amsterdam, educated first in France and later trained at a Dutch school for professional photography in Amsterdam.

She is widely known for her powerful black and white portraiture.

Her work centers especially on the presence, dignity, strength, and self-representation of Black women,

often bringing together humanist photography and questions of identity, gender, and social visibility. She has exhibited internationally for decades.

And when I say decades, I read somewhere that your first exhibition was in 1985. That's how far back, right? I was only five years old then.

That's just to give you guys a sense of it.

And in 2022, she was among the artists representing Cameroon as its first participation in the Venice Biennale.

And personally, for myself, I think I encountered your work for the first time in Bamako in 2003, where I was exhibiting my work for the first time.

That was my first ever exhibition, but also my first ever travel as a human being, leaving Nigeria and going somewhere.

I came to Bamako, and Bamako was an important time for me. It was this exhibition curated by Simon Njami.

That's how far I've known about your work, but also followed it, and it has been consistent. It's such an honor.

And I'm so happy that after many years we are able, in 2026, to come together to have a conversation in the context of a podcast.

So with no further ado, I want to say, welcome, welcome, Angele to our podcast.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Thank you so much, Emeka. It's a great introduction and you said it all quite well. Yeah.

Emeka Okereke: If I have missed something, we'll pick it up somewhere along the way.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Oh yes, yeah.

Emeka Okereke: Yes. But I want to start out as I always start out these conversations, because I'm always excited when I'm having this kind of conversation.

I know that it's like you are an archive already. We are talking about you having your first exhibition in 1985, right?

So can you already start out by telling us who you are, how it all started for you? When was the first inkling of being a photographer and an artist?

How did it come about? When was the earliest time, and who were the people around you then? Who were the influences?

Who were the people who gave you the nudge, and in what ways did the nudge come to you?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Well, it's a lot of questions at the same time, but yeah, as you say already, I was born in Cameroon in 1962, so right after independence.

I, of course, was too young to see what really was going on, but I imagine—and this is something that really,

when I look at the photos from this family archive I was working on, I can see the euphoria of the people, of my mother, of my aunts.

So it was an important time. I left Cameroon when I was nine years old. This is something that many people don't know.

It was back then, in January 1972. I left for health reasons, and I was only informed about this departure maybe two weeks before.

So you can imagine all the excitement around my departure.

What I remember very, very well is going to buy a new dress—a new pink dress—and these red shiny shoes. I was so, so glad to travel.

And also, my father had gone to Paris a year before, so I was also very, very happy to finally see him again.

This departure is important to talk about because it was really a culture shock. It was a culture shock because, can you imagine? Nine years old.

I used to live with my family, my grandparents, my brother and sister, and suddenly I had to leave everything that was familiar to me.

And this I realized from the moment that I arrived at the airport.

Emeka Okereke: Was it?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: No, no. In Cameroon. In Cameroon, at the Cameroon airport, mhm.

I was handed to a stewardess who put a little pouch around my neck with my name and all the important documents on it.

And then I had to say goodbye to my family. From the moment I entered the plane, I started to cry. I felt abandoned. I felt alone.

I felt totally lost, and I cried the entire journey.

Emeka Okereke: And it was one of those journeys where you had to travel alone.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Yes.

Emeka Okereke: At nine years old.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It was.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: In 1972, you know. And so from that moment, I was really lost.

This is a story that my father, who was waiting, of course, at—it was not Charles de Gaulle at that time, it was Orly airport.

My father was waiting for me, of course.

And then we arrived and I saw everyone leaving the plane, and again, I was like, "What is going on?" until another stewardess came to pick me up and walk me through the exit.

And then I saw my father. The feeling of seeing a familiar face, especially my father after one year, it was such a strong moment.

I remember me crying, my father crying. And this is how I left Cameroon.

Then I arrived in that new environment—the airport with different people, a different culture, a different language.

Of course, at home we used to speak French,

and at school we used to speak French—we even were forced to speak French at school—but suddenly I realized that I was in a totally,

totally different environment where I was a minority. I realized that I was a minority at that moment.

That was the first culture shock: that you find yourself in a place where everything around you makes you aware of your difference.

I was nine years old, but these are the kind of memories that never leave you.

Emeka Okereke: And I can imagine that.

Emeka Okereke: That shaped you completely from then on.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Absolutely, absolutely. My father arrived with a coat and gloves and asked me to wear them because it was winter.

It was sunny, but winters back then were really rude. I mean heavy winters. So before we went outside the airport, I had to wear all this.

And then we arrived outside and I saw snow for the first time in my life, and I felt the cold. I had never felt cold before.

So these were really things that just hit me—of course, the magic of it and the mystery of it, but at the same time,

it was like I had just landed in a fantasy world, so far away from my reality, from my everyday, ordinary life. This was really something.

Emeka Okereke: Did anything prepare you for it? Like maybe TV or things?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: No, no. At that time, we didn't even have TV at home, so for me, it was totally, totally a new world.

I started missing my family badly—missing my brothers and sisters, missing my grandparents.

I was very happy to see my father, of course, but it was a totally, totally different environment. So this was my arrival in France at nine years old.

Being uprooted at such a young age shaped my identity profoundly. It also gave me a sense of displacement. Where is home? What is home?

You are leaving home, you are coming to a new place, and you're going to make it your new home.

And, you know, I only returned to Cameroon after fifteen years.

Emeka Okereke: For the first time.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: After fifteen years, and then with two children.

So it was like a period that I kind of rejected my country, my people, because of so much anger, because of that feeling of abandonment and rejection.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm, mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And then finally, when I had my two boys, before my third child was born in 1989, I had this calling—a really strong need to go back.

I have to go back. I have to go back to connect, to reconnect with the older ones, with the country, with the soul,

to get something where I can be armed so that I can feed my children, so that I can deal with a mixed culture,

so that I can raise them with my culture also. Because anyway, they will get the Dutch culture and the Western culture.

But I needed to go back, as a mother, as a woman. I needed to go back and come back armed.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: This is—yeah, this is the story.

Emeka Okereke: You know, you talked about that rejection. Let's dwell on that a little bit.

Because I think you are saying something that is very, very specific there. This feeling of rejection.

Oftentimes it feels like rejection is happening one way, which is to say something is rejecting me or people are rejecting me.

But then at some point, you also realize that that rejection begins to mirror itself on how you reject yourself as well—not knowing yourself,

pushing yourself away, or even hiding yourself somewhere, or not opening yourself up to the world.

I would like us to sort of come back to how you were experiencing that rejection.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: I think at the age that I was, at such a young age—I mean, nine, almost ten, going through adolescence—it's not the kind of rejection that you do by your own.

I don't know how to explain that because as a child, you still need your own people.

Of course, you can be separated, but if you are not prepared and it's so abrupt and so sudden, it becomes something like you feel it as an abandonment.

And of course, why you?

From my mother's side, we are ten; I am the fifth of ten children from my mother's side, or the second of eight from my father's side.

I mean, we are a huge family.

At the same time, it was a kind of privilege to be able to leave, to be treated, and to be helped to get that health treatment.

Emeka Okereke: What was the sickness?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: I got polio when I was two years old.

And so you can imagine from my two years old till my nine years old, I didn't have any treatment, and the atrophy was getting worse and worse.

So I got polio in one leg, and it just happened like from one day to the other. So I was really the concern of my family and of my father especially.

That is the reason that I left, but as a child, you don't understand that.

I mean, of course, my father was really the biggest joy to see him again, but all the other things, as I told you—the first culture shock,

living in the cold, realizing that you are a minority suddenly, and also all the treatment, experiencing the pain for the first time,

and many pains—all this as a child is something that you cannot understand.

So that's why talking about rejection is like—at such a moment, at such an age, it's not something that you can say, but it's something that you are doing by yourself, you know?

Emeka Okereke: Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: What I mean by that is that there is a way the rejection registers on you, and then it also reconfigures the way you see yourself, your self-worth,

self-importance, or even a sense of belonging.

If one carries the burden or carries a sense of rejection, there will always be a sense of incompleteness somehow in every space they enter, right?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: This came later and quite quickly, I mean around my thirteen, something like that,

when I realized that this uprooting—the fact that I left—that is something that was going to give me such a strength.

So you turn the rejection... or not rejection, I shouldn't say that because my family never rejected me.

Emeka Okereke: But yeah, yeah, I understand. The rejection is not something that someone... Yeah, it's really that sense of being uprooted, being uprooted.

And as a child, you're not making decisions, even though everyone around you is saying that it is good for you.

But there is something about agency that is not about other people doing things for you.

You know, I see it in my son, for instance—my child, sometimes he's acting up, sometimes I'm like, I know he's just negotiating his own agency.

He knows that you can tell him to do things, but he just wants to test the boundaries for himself to know.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right.

Emeka Okereke: And then—but then when they now take you and say, "Oh, enter the plane, no boundaries,

we decide a boundary for you," no matter how good it is for you, you will still feel like, "I am being uprooted,

I am being dragged along," and you don't understand it even. The very sense of not understanding is enough to bring a sense of rejection, you know?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right?

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And you know, there is something that you and me and other people—I mean, people nowadays—will do: you know that a child is a child,

but you put yourself on a kind of same level trying to speak with him, with her, explain things, which makes it so much easier to accept, maybe.

But at that time, like you say, yeah, people decide for you. You go at this day and that time, and that's it.

And this is it, and you are left on your own, you know.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Emeka Okereke: It's so interesting also that you're able to get into your mind at that age as well, because what you are saying here is so interesting.

And I feel like that is really at the core of what it means to travel. Many of us experience it, you know, and it's also at a larger scope.

It's also something about those borders that eventually came—the fact that you had to go to Paris to get your treatment, right?

You would have loved to get your treatment where you know that it's familiar to you, that is your home, but you have to travel, cross over, and then the journey starts.

I find that very interesting. Sometimes these are the kind of details that are missed in all our movements from the continent to the diaspora.

We miss this sensitivity, but we carry it around with us all our lives in all of that journey, trying to understand it.

So you were already talking about how you are able to transform that into strength, and that is a really interesting place to really enter properly now.

So please go ahead.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And in that sense, photography has been so helpful—photography and the connection, yeah, to connect again with my African heritage, with me as a woman, with the soil, with the spirit.

But why photography? You ask me why photography.

Because as a young child, I never, never, never thought about that it could be something I wanted to pursue as a career, never, or even becoming a photographer.

It was so far away from my reality. So this is something that came much, much later.

But what I do remember is that as a child already, I loved to observe the people around me. I loved to see how they move, how they express themselves.

It could have been also animals, but no, it was really the human—really the human being: men, women, children. I was just fascinated by the human.

And I think that all these images, I was capturing them and creating things in my little head.

This later, much later, found its way into my photography.

Emeka Okereke: But how did you start, like, literally? How did you—it's like by accident?

What is that accident that happened, and then you found yourself playing with the camera?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: So, like I say, it's really like a kind of natural extension that concretized much later.

As I told you, I went to France, had all this treatment, I finished my primary school in France, then I did my secondary school, then high school.

And during high school, I met some older friends who were so incredibly passionate about photography, and they were also members of photo clubs.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And they had this practice, a strong practice with darkrooms.

And I remember I was one of their favorite models at that time, and they were coming all the time with beautiful prints—black and white prints, black and white photographs.

And then I really started to be interested in that medium.

I thought, "Wow, this is so powerful," and the purity and the simplicity of black and white photography, I just found it really, really fascinating and beautiful.

I really believe in that quote that says a picture is worth a thousand words.

I mean the power of black and white photography—color also, but black and white photography for me is really the beginning.

It's magic, it's infinite, it's timeless. I like that.

So I think images can really touch the deepest of our soul, and I like the fact that with an image, you can touch everyone.

It crosses boundaries of borders, language, gender; it speaks to everyone.

Emeka Okereke: Is it like music also?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Exactly, exactly. So the medium itself is just powerful, and I love that.

Emeka Okereke: I...

Angele Etoundi Essamba: But I was—sorry.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

So it's interesting you keep saying it's powerful, and I like that because I'll ask you eventually: what do you think of that in the present day,

with all of the proliferation of images on social media and how that has affected the medium so much?

I personally, for once, am sort of affected by that because I started photography in 2002, 2001, and that was the passion that came into it—like,

the sky is the limit with what photography can do, how it can really be a tool for social commentary.

In a place like Lagos where we were photographing, there were many places where we were thinking about it in terms of, "Our camera has not entered here yet, so it doesn't exist yet.

We are going to make the place exist through the camera." And that was how powerful photography was

for us—that you could go into certain places and you could articulate those places in the poetry of it.

And in Africa, you sense that poetry as you live it.

Personally, for me, I saw that it's really a tool where you can really affect life, you can really change a narrative, you can affect narrative, everything.

And we came with that hope and that vision and that passion coming into the 21st century, and then social media happened.

And not only did it change how photography is regarded, but it also changed people's sensitivity towards the photographer.

Now there used to be a relationship with that that was almost mythical in a way, like, "Oh, the photographer," but now when you carry a camera,

it's like, "Oh, you are going to put me on social media." That's not the only place, and all of this narrative has changed it.

Now there's this constant proliferation of images. But I think I would love us to speak to that.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: No, you are right. You are right.

But you know, the good thing in all this proliferation of images, and also the fact that everyone who has a smartphone thinks that he can photograph,

I think it makes it even more interesting to distinguish the real photographers—the ones who really pay attention to things around them,

to the environment, to the people, who listen. So it's not that bad.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It's not that bad. It forces us to recenter—to recenter and to be more sharp in what we are doing, what we are seeing, and how we actually judge it.

"Judge" is not the right word, but I think with our eye, the way we have been formed, the visual education that we had, there is nothing that can replace that.

And when, for instance, I mentor and help young people who send me their portfolios and ask for advice, that's especially the part that I tell them: "Look, look, look, look.

And take time. Photography is about time." And now more than ever, it's time for the model, time for the environment, time for looking, listening,

and just the time for the light, and for the emotions to unfold. And for all this, it's about time.

So we are just in an era, in an age where we cannot stop that proliferation of images, but at the same time, we become so much more alert.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And learned, for ourselves, for what we are seeing, what we are looking at, the way we are looking at it.

So I think at a certain moment, because you get so tired of everything that you are seeing, suddenly when you see something special, particular,

an image that speaks volumes, an image that has emotion,

an image that points you to a certain issue or maybe not—the joy you feel really lifts you up.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm. Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And so this proliferation of images, let it be. It's part of this time.

Emeka Okereke: And how did you experience this—the scene, the practice,

the world of photography coming from 1985 all the way into the 2000s when the Bamako Biennale started happening,

and then the attention turned to Africa and people like us started coming? Depth of Field, Simon Njami, everybody started coming.

All of that was happening really at the beginning of the 21st century.

Can you give us a sense of how you experienced that movement, that wave, that wind all the way to now?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It was a lot happening. It was a lot. Can you imagine in the eighties—I mean, I arrived in the Netherlands in '82.

I left Paris, I arrived in the Netherlands, I was twenty years old.

And that's the moment that I really decided that I have to do something with photography.

At first, I opened myself to all kinds of things for one or two years just to be able to learn the language—the Dutch language. Not easy at all.

I thought I'm never going to be able to speak that language, but I did. And actually, I did the photography school in Dutch.

Learning as much as possible by heart, and this is how I learned.

It was not an academic, it was a very traditional school, but one where you really learn the basics: the light, the printing, developing your own films, your own photos.

So it was very formative. And during that time, even before I finished, I started already making portraits in the street—street portraits.

And slowly, slowly, I started to realize that in that environment, that visual landscape I was moving in, I was living in,

I missed images of Black people, Black women, which I could identify with.

So slowly I left the street to start working in spaces that I created—choreographed work, but still the human, still people.

But I said to myself, "This is strange.

In a country, in Amsterdam, a city with such a large community of Black people, how can it be that they are so less represented,

as if they were erased?" And this is actually the moment that I had a big click: that I am going to take the women, the Black woman,

and put her central in my work.

Also, the images where they were represented would be in stereotypical ways—submissive, dependent, or confined to subservient roles.

This is not how I see myself; this is not what I knew from my people—from my mother, my aunts, all these women, my grandmothers.

So this is how it started. For me, photography is not about taking pictures, but really it's making a picture. What story do I want to tell?

What do I want to say to the world? Which message do I want to send to the world?

It's about working together with these people and giving them this space also, where together we can construct something where they can be their own,

where they can be subjects making choices in how they want to be represented.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And yeah, so I started working on that. The feedback that I was getting from the people, from the models,

and the works that I made that could resonate with them—this really convinced me that I was doing something important, that I had to continue.

So it's really the lack of imagery in which I could recognize and find myself that surged me to start photography in a serious way, and to think about it, because it's a choreographed work.

It's different from documentary; it's an idea, you construct an image from an idea.

Emeka Okereke: Looking at photography when I came into it and all that, in hindsight, I say it's really like a gift of perception. It's a way of seeing reality.

It's a way of shaping what one sees of reality, especially for—I always say especially for Africans—who for the most part, you are looking at reality,

there is this direct perception of reality, but the story,

the narrative out of which reality is constructed or out of which the transaction of reality is constructed does not include us.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Very beautifully said.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: You know, yeah.

Emeka Okereke: It does not include.

And so we now began to say we have to put it, because the transaction is happening and yet we are not in the currency, the image...

Emeka Okereke: ...of transaction of reality does not include the Black person, or like you are saying, when it includes the Black person,

there is already an economy of subservience, an economy of the lesser. But—

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Then—

Emeka Okereke: I like—

Angele Etoundi Essamba: I like—

Emeka Okereke: Yes, I like that background, and I like when you say, "But that's not how I see myself."

Angele Etoundi Essamba: That was really something that I found incredible—like, where are we here? Where are we?

I mean, it's not in a village that I was living: Amsterdam, Amsterdam! And can you imagine Amsterdam of the eighties, early eighties?

It was vibrant, it was something, but I missed that element. So then I decided, okay,

I will put Black women central in my work and show her in a different light—show her through my own eyes and literally through my own lens—and break with all these stereotypes: show what moves her,

show what makes her, show her pride, her strength, her awareness, but above all, her humanity. It's about humanity.

These are things that will lead me in the next forty years.

Last year, it was exactly forty years that I have been photographing, and I see that I'm not done with these topics, these issues.

When it comes to challenging and deconstructing all these stereotypes, then I go for it and I'm very motivated,

because it's like we are still seeing through that colonial gaze—the exoticism, the submission. We are still seeing through this superior gaze.

Emeka Okereke: You think it's still very strong, even today?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Well, the thing is, it's still there. It's still there.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And this is something that we really have to break.

Emeka Okereke: Break, and for you, you're saying that what actually motivates you to continue to work after forty years—after forty years of consistently doing this?

And for those who are listening to this podcast, you really have to understand what consistency means.

You have to look at Angele's work so that you understand what consistency truly means.

There are photographers that when I think of consistency, I think of them: you are one of them, and then there is Akinbode Akinbiyi as well.

Emeka Okereke: You know...

Emeka Okereke: So that consistency revolves around something, and you have said it: it is about breaking that stereotype.

There was a point in time when you decided that you are going to centralize the Black woman, and then you are going to just work through your lens to demystify, to—

Angele Etoundi Essamba: —to construct, to deconstruct that stereotype.

Emeka Okereke: And that is going to be a never-ending process of seeing and seeing again, and seeing anew, freshly, freshly, freshly, all the time.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Of course, because you know how much you can renew yourself in the way you are working.

The Black female body is an inexhaustible source of inspiration because, first of all, for me, it's a body that speaks of struggle.

It's a body like any other body—first of all, a human body—it speaks of struggles, of fulfillment, of fears, of fragility, of hopes.

And it's a body that deserves to be celebrated.

Photography, of course, is a space of affirmation, a space of articulation, but it's also a space of celebration.

For me, it's about celebrating her, and I will never cease to celebrate her because, as I told you, I come from a family of women.

My mother—I was born in Yaoundé, but my mother comes from Douala.

She is a Sawa woman, and I grew up until my nine years old in both big cities, not a village.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: It reminds me of speaking with Koyo Kouoh.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Yes, yes. My sister from Douala.

Emeka Okereke: She said the exact same thing that you're saying—that she was raised by these matriarchs.

Emeka Okereke: You know.

Emeka Okereke: And—

Emeka Okereke: And there was so much the strength of the woman.

It's so interesting what you are saying, because one can see now how that very reality you were born into,

even though at the age of nine you had to leave it, but that reality you were born into carried you all the way.

Emeka Okereke: Oh.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Absolutely, absolutely. And you know these women—my grandmothers, my aunts,

my mother who gave birth to ten children and almost raised them on her own alone—I used to see them moving,

just building their own life with what they had and making their own choices. My mother, I mean, she's going to turn ninety this year.

Emeka Okereke: Wow. That's a celebration.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: She may not be so well, but I mean, what a woman! What a woman! And when people ask me why I photograph women...

I mean, without a woman, I wouldn't be. The way I saw them navigating life and just going, never bending, full of hope,

continuing to search themselves with dignity—with a lot of dignity—that's the strength that I have, that I want to show in my work,

and that I see in my sisters. Not especially related by blood, but the models, the girls and women I work with.

I recognize that; I really recognize that, and I want to capture that and show that in my work. It's not inventing; it's a reality. It's a reality.

I don't deny that difficulties exist and that there are also difficult times that a woman goes through, but it's not fair to only show Black women in that perspective, from those angles.

It's important also to show the joy, the strength, the dreams, the hopes, and how they project themselves into the future.

Emeka Okereke: And for me, I'm looking at your work and I say to you, everything you are saying,

it feels to me like on the level of aesthetics—or the ethics of aesthetics, I'll put it that way—it feels to me that there is so much, first of all,

the power of poetry.

It's as if you are saying that beauty is hidden in the poetry of light, first of all, that we must encounter the body at that place where it intersects with light, and see—

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: You know what the body does with light to free itself, to be itself, to express itself—just that relationship or responding to light, just like the plant responds to sunlight, right?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right.

Emeka Okereke: You know that the body—you must, first of all, see what this woman's body does when it responds to light.

Emeka Okereke: MM.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Oh.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Everything unfolds.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, everything unfolds.

Emeka Okereke: So I'm looking at your work and I feel like all of the work has this one line saying, "Look, first of all,

you have to understand that the stereotype is actually photographing them through the same light."

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Mhm. Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Yes.

Emeka Okereke: So we are going to now complicate that light. We are going to tell you that it is complex.

It is coming from different angles—infinite, infinite—and it's bringing many artifacts and objects with it.

It is shaping an entire reality because of the way the body moves in light. And because it's photography we were talking about, it's like, wait,

the stereotype is basically that you have the light in the same place all the time, and you are standing in the same place all the time.

That is actually what stereotype is like in the image: that the light is in one direction, the position of the person photographing is always in the same direction, in one direction, right?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: And then you come and say, "No, let's complicate all of this." I'm looking at how you play with light and shadow—it's just like bringing movement into—

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Light is for me everything. I mean, it's the beginning—first of all, it's the beginning of photography. It's the essence of photography, you know?

And really, when you put light on the body, you are the one who has to be flexible and to follow the light, and to follow the light.

But then you see how a body gets reborn, how the body changes expression, how the body unfolds itself.

That's why I said photography is about time—time for light, also time for light. For me, it's working with natural light, with the available light.

It's interesting and important because you need that time to also connect with the model, with the person you photograph, and with that light.

And you see, even in the Série Noire, for instance, where I put Black people on a Black background, it's just to exploit that light.

Emeka Okereke: It is the Série Noire that you spoke about, the work you created in 2000, right?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Yes, yes. Because for us—I know most people find it difficult to photograph Black people on a Black background with Black clothes—but me,

I sometimes like that because it's really about extracting the essence of the skin and letting the body and the skin speak for itself,

and also exploiting the purest of black and white photography.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: Black skin reflects light.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And I love that—working with the skin texture, with the texture of photography, with that intimacy, that individuality, or that minimalistic thing,

because it gives photography and it gives the image so much power, so much power. So light is, of course, essential, we know that.

But how do you use that light is another thing. I mean, flash kills people, you know.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: We know you receive in such a short time a certain amount of light, it can never be good.

But from the moment you let it just caress your skin, caress the body, caress the environment, then you will see so many different things, so many other things.

It's something that I am, after forty years now, also trying to deepen—how to go further and further, deeper and deeper with this searching in light.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: In light, you know.

Emeka Okereke: So is there like something you are looking for, or is it just the journey of it?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It's always a journey. It's always a journey, yeah. When I'm busy, in the moment I live it, I throw myself completely into it.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And I am just able to wake up at sunrise and just look how light develops until sunset, and look at the shadow it forms, because it's always different.

And the light here in Europe is not the same as the light in Africa, you know.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, yeah.

Emeka Okereke: And I was going to ask a question around that.

After all these years, forty years, I guess the journey has also been one of back and forth between Europe and Africa, going back and forth.

So one could even say that your photographs are basically holding something about the articulation of the space in between the back and forth—like that space in between the going and the coming,

and what comes out of that. I also see it in the work you make.

Sometimes it's like basically trying to capture something about the myth of what it means to be African.

Sometimes it's the symbols, sometimes the various totems of journeys,

the artifacts that sometimes we also carry back from home to the diaspora and put in our house,

and then it becomes a prop and makes it into the photographs as well. So can you speak to this, looking at these forty years, this back and forth?

Because you can say you are in both places, and constantly going back and forth. Can you speak of your work in terms of that movement?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It's interesting. It's interesting because, yeah, I lived here, and from the moment I really decided I live here in Amsterdam...

I mean, from the moment I decided to leave the studio and to go and encounter the other—because this work is about encountering the other,

with other cultures, African cultures, diasporic cultures, it's always about encounter.

At a certain moment, the inspiration that I was getting here was not enough anymore.

And when I started to travel, I didn't start with, "Okay, I go there to photograph." No, my exhibitions brought me to those places, except, of course,

going back home, going back to Cameroon.

But all these trips—Mali, Senegal, Ethiopia, South Africa, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Nigeria—I found myself at those places because, first of all,

of the exhibitions I had there: Tanzania, Kenya.

And this was also for me the moment to—not to capture, because I'm not capturing anything, I take time to be with the people, to feel the place, to work with them on something.

So it's not taking, it's really making pictures. And I started working—for instance, if we would be in Bamako or in Dakar during the Biennales,

you remember how it was: we were put in a hotel and then we would be picked up by a car or a bus to go there and so on.

I would always take that time—we stay like maybe ten days—to escape.

I used to escape this official thing and just go take a taxi and try to meet people in the neighborhoods, in different places, to see the real life.

I did it many times in Dakar and also in Mali...

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: ...and getting new inspirations.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah. Because there's always a sense that you are on a journey.

But again, if you, like you said, are always motivated by the need to deconstruct the stereotype,

you're constantly going away from the little pockets of ceremonies, and you're going into places where you can see things freshly,

so that the eyes can be nurtured, can be open, you know, can be opened up.

And this is very much tied to this journey that we are making as artists, especially from Africa,

who have been moving around—it's also constantly going to train the eyes so that one can see,

because there's a sense that what colonialism did was to put a limitation to our seeing, to our seeing ourselves.

But you sense it somewhere—the emancipation is that you are sensing that this is not how you see yourself,

but the world does not have a place to show you what you see of yourself, so you go out to go and search for it.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: To go and search for it.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, in search for it—in search for it to almost like to confirm it, to say, "Is it there?" It's almost like this constant searching, right?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right. And it never ends. It never ends because we know Africa is not a country, it's a continent—fifty-four countries—and different types of people.

It's a multitude, it's plural: different languages, different...

But there is a culture, there is something that I will recognize whether I am in Tanzania and Zanzibar, or whether I am in Senegal, in Mali,

in Cameroon, in Addis in Ethiopia, and even in the diaspora. I found myself in Colombia, and it's really this strength and pride and dignity.

Like I told you, I spent almost fifteen years without going, and when I went back, I did a documentary work at that time with old people,

because I thought going back, the first thing I need to do is to reconnect with the older ones.

And from that moment, it was like I have to go every year, or every two years.

I mean, at that time, of course, with two kids and then three children, a whole family, it's not a trip you can make every year.

But then I started like every two years, and at a certain point, sometimes it becomes even twice a year. So there is this need.

And not necessarily Cameroon—any place, any African country I will be, from the moment I touch the soil, I feel that energy that will carry me.

Emeka Okereke: Was there a time you had to pause maybe because of what life brings, like, for instance, being a mother and raising kids, and you had to pause and then eventually pick it up again?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Photography, you mean?

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: I never paused, really.

Even becoming a mother, as I was very much into photographing maternity, the symbol of maternity, what was happening in myself.

And strange enough, many of my friends were also pregnant at the same time, so they were modeling also, and so this is how I really worked,

following my own life and my own journey happening around me.

Emeka Okereke: My own journey, basically. Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: ...happening around me, you know.

Even I can say that it's during that time that I probably worked the most, because I was also so obsessed with darkroom work at that time.

I would be working sometimes until five, six o'clock in the morning, after feeding the babies, using that time where the others were sleeping to work.

You are a mother, you have children, but at the same time, you have such a new energy.

I was working, and you know how intensive darkroom work can be, but it looks like I didn't feel it.

I wouldn't be able to do that work now, but I did it back then.

Even with small babies, it gave me a lot of energy to become a mother—also new inspirations, new strengths. It was very, very satisfying. Yeah.

Emeka Okereke: It feels to me that you have been developing new bodies of work now, traveling back to maybe Cameroon to make more work,

and even having an exhibition recently in MoMA, right, and things going on. How are you looking at your new work now?

Can you talk about what you're working on recently or lately, and how you're feeling about that in terms of your trajectory so far after all these years?

How are you feeling about what you're doing right now? Where is it going?

Especially because we've talked about a profusion of images today—social media, artificial intelligence, all of that happening.

How are you looking at your work within all of this right now?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: As I said, I'm really from the old school of photography. I started with analog, and for twenty years I worked analog.

In 2006, I think, I switched to digital. But the fact that I switched to digital photography was actually much more for practical reasons.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: But it didn't change anything in the way I approach the models, the girls and women I work with, and it didn't change anything in the way I photograph.

For instance, I never shoot in burst mode.

So I am still... it's crazy because when I started, can you imagine, I started sometimes having to make a photoshoot with only one film roll, or thirty-six frames.

Emeka Okereke: Exactly.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And I was so greedy with every shot.

Before pressing the shutter button, you really have to think twice before taking that shot because every shot counted.

And can you imagine that I still have the same behavior? I still think the same way, as if I had just one roll of film.

And this is to say that what has really changed in forty years is that I've become even more conscious of how I photograph,

how I frame the people I work with, and the time I take to really have an image—to make images that tell stories.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: That...

Emeka Okereke: It must be something more and something larger than just the aesthetics of the image, which is very important for me, of course,

but I'm looking for something larger than that—something that shows dignity, something that shows humanity,

something that empowers and that resonates with other people.

Not only that I feel liberated when I succeed to make such a photo—oh yes, I'm so happy—but it's not only for me.

I have to bring it to the world, to an audience, and then hope that the audience or the viewer will be able to engage,

or at least to make it to dazzle into it and to just make it a moment of encounter. Yes, this is something important.

And like in this series, Afro Cosmos, which is probably the most recent series, it's also inspired by the painters of the seventeenth century,

the Dutch Golden Age—especially Vermeer for his lighting and compositions, which I really, really loved.

This series is about identity, about empowerment, about the androgynous, about spirituality, tradition, and modernity.

It blends many, many themes that are recurrent in my work, that I've worked with for many years now.

But in a way, this series is kind of new because we constructed kind of African interiors, and in these interiors, you will find Dutch tulips,

or you will see a woman reading some books—special books, I Am Not Your Negro, for instance, from Baldwin.

These kinds of details... but what I like in this series is how these women project themselves into the future.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And how their dreams and how they reinvent themselves.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm. Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: And this is—this is something that has also been very recurrent in your work, is this projection into the future.

Yeah, it's almost like sci-fi in a way as well, but without using the aesthetics of conventional sci-fi.

But there is something about this projection into the future which feels to me like the way you think of dignity: can we move forward?

Just yesterday, I was thinking about this idea of what is progress. And when people talk about progress, is it progress along linear time?

That is to say, from when you are not so rich to you are rich—is that progress, or is it simply moving away from stagnation?

And I think that progress that many of us are really looking for as Africans, the one that we know, is the move away from stagnation.

It is not to move...

When people think when we go to Europe or when we go to the US, we are not necessarily going—even though many of us think that we are going for greener pastures—

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: But we all know that if our country was working properly, we would not leave. We would prefer to be in the country and we would not complain.

No, the complaint is not because we want to have a better life somewhere else; no, it is simply because there is something about that colonial constellation that is about stagnation.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Yes, yes, yes. Very interesting.

Emeka Okereke: So I feel like your work is constantly looking to project away from that stagnation, which is a way to even describe dignity.

The dignity of a person is to move away from stagnation, to introduce movement into all those frames of borders that are now putting us down in stagnation.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And that we often create ourselves, you know, because these women, these young women, you cannot imagine what they are going through,

but still they manage to reinvent themselves, to shape new worlds, new imaginaries, to dream—yes, to dream limitless.

The camera is never the first thing that I take; I become part of the dialogue.

What happens on such a set, that's why I said to these women, they are subjects of their own representation.

They choose how they want to be seen, how they want to show themselves to the world.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm. Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And the way they were experimenting and reinventing and choosing these clothes that they brought on their own, and some that we went to the market and bought.

The way they mix it, it's such a joy to see them being what they want to be,

what they dream to be—to wear their dresses and their hair in any style they want,

and also the way they sometimes take distance from Eurocentric patterns.

Emeka Okereke: Exactly.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: This is so interesting.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm, mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It's such a strong statement, you know, and they are making a statement of freedom, first of all.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah. And free. Yeah, definitely.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: We are not free. By dreaming, we can allow ourselves—at least we can allow ourselves to dream. There is no one who can stop us from dreaming.

Emeka Okereke: Exactly, exactly. That's it, that's it.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: This limitation—we put a lot of limitations on ourselves, let's say it that way.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, and that's the conundrum—it's the mentality.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: But it's also getting caught up in this illusion that progress means to move in linear time, which is very much a trope of the modern world,

which is to move in terms of, "Okay, I want more opportunities for myself." And it's so interesting that they describe that as freedom,

but that is not really success.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Success, yeah.

Emeka Okereke: The real freedom is to be able to project oneself away from stagnation. I've been speaking to many African artists; they keep circling around this.

The movement is away—it's not towards success, it's not towards material acquisition, it's not status.

It is moving away from stagnation, as if there is a need to introduce movement into that enclosure of colonialism.

So they are really trying to bring movement into it, like they want to inject movement into it.

At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, all the artists who are working from Africa and the diaspora,

moving and who have become the players and the actors of the contemporary scene, have this as one mission: to inject movement into it.

And that is actually what freedom feels like it means, and that's what dignity means.

So in your work, when I look at your work, it becomes very clear to me what is happening.

You see that it is almost like it is not focusing on one thing; it uses aesthetics to make it dreamy, to make people—

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Poetic.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, poetic and dreamy.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Because I see in any work—I used to say that even if you photograph misery, the aesthetics is important.

My concept of aesthetics is personal; it's about my concept of beauty. But what is beauty?

It's so personal, and for me, that beauty is in the dignity—in showing that through clean compositions, for instance.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And it's not one aesthetic; like you say, this back and forth, it's an aesthetic that is made of many.

It's made of different aesthetics, and then you create a new one.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, you create a new one. And there's also something that is about enchantment, right?

To enchant—it's almost like the person who is the viewer of the image is woken up to enter the dream, to say,

"I can..." Just to wake up that aspect of the person that dreams, and it feels like the work is done, right?

You wake up that part and then the work is done. The work just makes you want to dream.

It's almost as if it says, "This body, the dignity of this body, is its ability to move you, to project you away from your own stagnation."

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Exactly.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: So it's an aesthetic of a woman of many parts, because you are rooted not in one place—it's impossible.

So this is what that work, Afro Cosmos, is all about: to challenge how these women show themselves in a different light.

And when it resonates with other people, when people really understand and see all the little details...

There are so many details also from the Netherlands' culture that I use specifically, to mix that with African props, fabrics—you create really a new world.

And that's me also.

Emeka Okereke: Having done this for many years,

do you think that you are in a place where you are basically synthesizing everything now and distilling everything—what you know already,

benefit of hindsight, maturity in the way of seeing, in the way of seeing people, knowing people, and what you believe to be right or not right?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Not at all, not at all. You know, it's so strange because I think in this world you never stop learning.

You are never a complete master of what you are doing, it's never-ending.

Because after forty years, I'm like, "Wow, I didn't see this thing that way." It's a way, for instance, I work now with spirituality, with the masks.

I didn't post the work yet, but it's so much more different than what I did with the first work in 1985.

And it comes because of all this about returning, returning to work, about restitution—it feeds you, and you also see these objects differently, and you want to engage differently with them.

It just happens. So everything is a continuous learning process, and for me, it's good.

As long as I exist, I will continue to deepen myself into that. And it doesn't mean that I photograph every day—not at all.

I can spend a month without touching my camera, you won't believe it, because there are so many other things.

But creating images begins long before I touch the camera. When I touch the camera, then I'm kind of ready.

Emeka Okereke: It's almost like you have the urge to—

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right, right.

Emeka Okereke: To bring it out. It's almost like it's pushing towards it.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Mhm, mhm. But that tool—wow.

If you would have told me thirty or forty years ago that tool would become something more than leisure, that you can articulate such strong ideas... oh, it's powerful.

Photography is powerful. I am blessed that I chose it. The journey wasn't easy, not at all, I can tell.

But at the end, it's not even that you get there, because you never get there, but the way to that—all the things that happened,

from the first exhibition to the first publication, the first acquisition by a museum—I just say thank you. I can only say thank you.

And it's not that I'm rich, because you know how it is: you have to continue to fight and to search.

And even if you have galleries representing your work, you have a lot to do on your own because you want to be able to understand what's going on.

You cannot leave everything to a gallery; you have to understand the kind of work the gallery is doing. So it's still a lot of work.

But when I see what I got back, starting with the people, the models I work with—I say models,

but they are not models from model agencies—the trust they gave me from the very beginning by accepting to pose,

and putting themselves nude... nude in the way that they open themselves.

This is something that is worth everything, that makes me say if I have to do it again, even knowing how hard it is and how difficult it is,

because I know there is a story to tell—there are many stories to tell—and that it can lift people up and make people happy when they see my work,

make them question, make them understand, make them dazzle into it, yes, then I would do it again.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, and I feel like your work also carries this longevity that could feed the younger generation coming behind now.

It carries that so much because it has this element of enchantment, of projecting oneself into the future as freedom and dignity, which is—for me,

I feel like these are the things that will become important for the younger generation to understand, because the life they are living right now,

these are the things that are somewhat elusive to them.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: Because it's all mixed up with their agency and their subjectivity, talking about, "My right to be who I want to be." But that right also has a form,

it has an aesthetics, it has an ethics to it, right?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right. And they want to go fast, you know. They want to go fast.

Emeka Okereke: They want to go fast, but they will find out that freedom has ethics and aesthetics to it.

It has a form to it; it flows, it moves in a particular way. And I feel like your work will draw them to that, to say, "Cool down.

Look." Like you said, photography takes time—time for light. So there is right now that feeling that everything goes, but at some point,

there will be a need to give it a form that is dependent on that aesthetics of freedom and dignity,

especially as it has to do with the body—how to look at their own body, how to look at themselves.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And to be proud.

Emeka Okereke: And to be proud, yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: You see, the Série Noire is really all about this pride of, "Look at me with all my blackness and darkness.

This is me, this is who I am, and I am proud." You know, also, all these girls and men doing skin bleaching... they only need to look at these images.

Emeka Okereke: It's interesting because now when you go to Rwanda, for instance, there are many of their young women who are nurturing their natural hair.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Braiding.

Emeka Okereke: Braiding and nurturing, and they are beginning to relearn how to nurture the natural kinky hair and make it into something.

But again, you realize that these are the things they have to learn completely anew.

Of course, they are going to learn it from some of your work right now, but they are also going to learn it from the work of J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere—the hairstyles, for instance, as well.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Exactly.

Emeka Okereke: But then all of that has to become part of their everyday aesthetics—the way they look at images for them to really begin to see, "Ah, okay, there is something there for us.

There is really something there for us."

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right. And you see this hair, for instance—that's why I say this series, Afro Cosmos, blends tradition and modernity.

The clothes they are wearing, but then the hairstyle is from the African traditions.

It's traditional, but still like from another time, and they like wearing that.

The fact that they rediscovered that, they can wear it again and mix it with Western clothes, it's fine, but keep something from your identity, from your culture.

Never, never break with that. It's important.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah. Well, this has been a wonderful, wonderful conversation.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: We didn't even speak about everything, there are so many things.

Emeka Okereke: There's so many—yeah, there are so many things that we could speak about.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: The gaze, which is so important in my work, with this series of the girl with the earring, which is inspired by The Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, which is an important series.

The whole work inspired by the seventeenth century, starting with Renaissance.

And Renaissance is also interesting because it's a kind of collaboration with designers,

and this is also an important side of my work: working with other people and other disciplines, like fashion, for instance.

Emeka Okereke: Has it always been so, or is this sort of where the work is expanding or opening into right now?

I know that you've always worked with fashion designers, but it seems like recently there was a bit of a more large-scale kind of—

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's just moments again, it has to do with the encounter.

You meet people, you see them, you engage in discussion, conversation, and then you just get inspired.

Emeka Okereke: Speaking of Amsterdam, I was thinking when I was looking at the recent work, what I have seen is like this is destined for the Stedelijk Museum, for instance.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: I wish you were the curator!

Emeka Okereke: The monumental, big, big prints.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: I'm telling you. But what do you think about the girl with the earring? It's so about the gaze.

You see these paintings of the seventeenth century where Blacks are relegated to the background or in the shadows,

and bringing to light such a figure, a Black figure in that style... for me, it's like, okay,

this is the way to say we are no longer in a time where we can just be represented in a way that we are like objects of study or objects to be observed.

No, you look at me, I look back at you.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: So the gaze is so important in that work and many of my works.

Emeka Okereke: This referencing of classic painters,

but also infusing that... because I've always said that in all of the knowledge that is being produced in the West—oftentimes great philosophers,

great thinkers—but when you read, for someone like me who reads a lot,

you realize that the only thing lacking is that the frame of reference still stays in the West. And yet—

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right.

Emeka Okereke: They are talking about the world. But I'm like, you're not giving me any example from Mozambique or from—to tell me that you have traveled the world.

Whether you are Einstein, or whether you are whoever you are, or Plato, you are still talking about the very small West.

And I feel like it's time—what needs to shift is the frame of reference,

and to see the ethics and the aesthetics that can nurture or that can bring forth so we can talk about this question of the gaze as well. Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It's important to me and it's central in my work—this gaze that you return, you look back, but also the gaze which is capable to reinvent, to challenge the colonial gaze.

And that work of the girl with the amber earring, not only do I put the sitter central in the work, not in the background, not in the shadow, but they stare at us.

They look back at us with a penetrating gaze, and it's a way to reclaim the right for looking, the right to be, the right to exist.

They are self-confident, they are aware, and they are conscious in their own representation.

So that gaze for me is like an act of resistance—resisting.

And about what you are saying, that inspiration should come from everywhere, from any place.

Since I live in the Netherlands, there is a lot to say about this Golden Age, because you can ask yourself: "Golden Age for whom?" At that time,

the Netherlands was the first world power, world economic and trade power,

and it was a time when art was flourishing—art and culture from such a small country was unbelievable.

But what you should know also is that this prosperity and this glory was based on an incredible colonial system of exploitation and violence.

So that's why the question that needs to be asked is: Golden Age for whom?

And this work, the Renaissance series and the girl with the earring, is questioning that. It's questioning it all.

These people who were not represented properly—they were like goods and possessions to enhance the status of their owners.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm. Mhm.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It's important to show something different where they are in the middle of the artwork, not behind.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, exactly. I feel like to read that work, one has to read the entire trajectory of your work,

because the thing is this: there is something that we have been trapped in as African artists, which is looking at resisting or challenging that gaze.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right.

Emeka Okereke: But if we look at the fact that there are some artists who have been building the deconstruction of that gaze slowly, one step at a time over time,

then you realize that this is only a natural consequence—a natural offshoot of all the work you have been doing all these years.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Exactly.

Emeka Okereke: So, critics reading it or historians reading it have to look at that trajectory, not just the work only.

I also think of it like the way I think of Otobong Nkanga's work, for instance.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: So you can't think of her work only in the body of work that you are seeing; for you to understand, you have to see the thread and how she has connected.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It's interesting what you are saying, yeah, because it's really this... I wouldn't be able, I couldn't have made this work ten or twenty years ago.

Emeka Okereke: Exactly, exactly.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: This is the moment.

Emeka Okereke: Yes.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: I started Renaissance in 2019, and then I did art history during Corona, and from there, it's like, wow, I started seeing different things.

Emeka Okereke: And it's as if one is now seeing that all of that gaze projected onto the Black body started from this way of looking—of already removing or putting the Black body in the background,

it's already there.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Removing, putting in the shadow.

Emeka Okereke: Yes.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: So it's good to reclaim that. And photography is also a dance—a dance to reclaim and to transform, it's transforming something.

Emeka Okereke: And it's moving along with the times.

Because yes, there are times now of like, "Okay, we are beginning to understand that the Black person is not something you project onto,

it's also someone that reflects light," also, like you said.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: You are a philosopher, you know that.

Emeka Okereke: So we're beginning to understand that now—that we are not here for you to project onto, that we also reflect actually that light back.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: So, any question comes and answers.

It's not for nothing, it's not coming from nothing that we are doing what we are doing, it's a result of something.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah. Yeah.

Emeka Okereke: And this is why I feel like even this conversation we're having now is so important, because there's going to be a lot of younger artists, female artists, female photographers...

I have them in my network—some of them students,

some of them following the work that I'm doing—and conversations like this really are a treasure to them,

because they get a sense of where this can go.

They can see from where they can continue the conversation themselves, because you've given them a sense of how it all started, right?

But then they can already see how far they can go simply by just continuing to think of it as a journey. And they develop.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: If I did it for forty years, they should be able to.

It's always a way of something that makes you understand at a certain point, and that will help you to move forward, to project yourself furthermore.

And it's great if such an exploration can contribute to that—absolutely—to shift perceptions on representation.

We are many artists, thinkers, writers who are working hard to try to redefine this narrative on the continent.

Emeka Okereke: Mhm. Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: To bring back movement into it. Yes, you know.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: To bring back movement.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, I like to put it that way because it's much more intense than redefining—it's to really bring movement.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Bring back movement.

Emeka Okereke: So that because we have not seen yet... where there is sun, things grow, things grow.

So there is a lot of activity where there is the heat of the sun. There's a lot of natural activity.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It's growing.

Emeka Okereke: It's brewing underneath all the time. There are life forms everywhere.

That's why we live with insects in our homes back home—you can't chase away all the insects or kill them, no.

Here in Europe, you have to make sure... oh, you see one insect, "Oh no, it's not supposed to be in here." But you cannot succeed in that back home;

you will always see something trying to... because it's always hot and sunny and heat.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Yeah.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, life is always happening even when you're not seeing it, right?

And that's always been the nature of a place like Africa, which is that there's this constant movement. But what is enclosing it then?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It's incredible, you know. And this is also the creativity,

the... there are so many things happening on the continent in terms of innovation and cultural dynamism in all fields—fashion, visual art,

technologies—things are happening. But how often do these topics reach the global headlines?

And it's important to tell about this joy, these innovations, how people navigate life and find solutions, solve daily life problems, and how they continue to move forward in the rhythm.

The rhythm of daily life is something.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: We talked about movement, rhythm.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, which as we go forward, and we were talking about progress in a place like Africa,

one of our challenges is to bring rhythm to that movement in a way that we can still preserve the freedom and the dignity in it.

So it's not a rhythm that treats the freedom and the dignity; it's not a rhythm that brings more enclosure, but one that really makes it like a channel for all of that movement.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right.

Emeka Okereke: Again, we come back to what you have been trying to do with that work, the way you define freedom and dignity.

But there will be a time when the conversation we're having about the African continent and every African moving around in the world is the ethics and aesthetics of that movement.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: It's not just going to be movement here and there.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: No, no.

Emeka Okereke: It's going to have a flow, a form. It's going to have a discipline, a structure, and a rhythm to it.

When I was also speaking with John Akomfrah, we were talking about how all of this work one is doing is to take all of these moving parts and to find the rhythm in it.

So again,

we talk about you going back and forth from Europe to Africa all these years—it's collecting all of these moving parts that resulted from all the colonial disruptions here and there,

and beginning to find a kind of rhythm to it, a rhythm that respects that freedom, that dignity, that projection away from stagnation.

The one that preserves, like you said, humanity.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: If we keep that in mind... it's not about gender, being a man or a woman or anything else; we are human at the beginning, first of all.

And what you are saying is interesting because all this—can you imagine when I said about the archive that this is becoming an African archive,

that at a certain point it's going to converge and come to one point and be like—I wouldn't say a Bible, but an incredible, huge work.

Emeka Okereke: You know.

Emeka Okereke: That's also how I'm looking at it for the benefit of those who are coming behind.

Because I remember I wouldn't have been here today doing this if there weren't the likes of Akinbode Akinbiyi there before, if you weren't there before.

I remember how I could not have seen the possibility of anything, but it has never for me been about going to France to make my life better—I don't even know what that means.

I don't know what it means to do something because you want to have material success or status; I really do not know what it means, literally, I'm not wired to know what that means.

So the way I thought about it was: wow, look at the room, the space for imagination, look at the space for dreaming, look at what has happened.

Look at how a photograph you make can immediately speak to someone to transform the human being, to transform the psyche of a person right in front of you.

That's powerful. And that for me was what I saw in the work of Akinbode Akinbiyi, in your work.

Many people are like, "Wait a minute, we know that colonialism..." Because if you've read about Biafra,

or even what is happening in Cameroon between Anglophone and Francophone,

if you have read about independence—Kwame Nkrumah—you will know that something was wrong about colonialism.

If you've known a bit about slavery, you will know that this is not normal.

So something is wrong with the concept of humanity; something went wrong somewhere.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Mhm.

Emeka Okereke: So you begin to say to yourself, okay, what is on the other side of that picture now?

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right. That's why looking is so important, and this is what photography teaches us: to learn to look.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: To learn to look, then we understand a lot of things.

Emeka Okereke: Yes.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Looking around us, because there are so many things embedded in our ordinary life. We always think that photography has to chase the extraordinary.

Emeka Okereke: No, no, no.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: These are the things that I have learned through this journey, and that continues to feed me.

And I love to be in contact with the younger generation, with younger photographers, because it's another world.

But how happy I am when one asks something about the darkroom, because what you do in the darkroom actually helps the camera.

To have all this experience is also good—this tactile connection with the paper, with the work that emerges from a bath.

It's good to have learned that because it's also about putting your own signature on something.

It's important, even if you stop doing that, to know the process—to continue to deepen into the medium as much as possible, from making to framing to presenting, to speaking about your work.

It's something that took me years: to speak about what I am doing.

Emeka Okereke: You know.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: You understand it and you think, "Oh, the image will speak for itself." Of course it does, but—

Emeka Okereke: There's also the economy of it, because there's a level to it that is also transactional, right?

You have to go in and form a certain kind of currency around that.

This is something I'm beginning to learn over time—it's like, okay, there is the actual thing that you do, there is the heart and soul of it,

but then there is a part of it that has to build an economy around it so that because that economy is the rails on which it is moving.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Exactly.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

And this is what you're talking about... because also like many of us, we are almost evangelical in our way of moving: you have to speak about what you're doing.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Especially now, people will look at what the work is saying, at the artwork itself.

So it's something that a lot of photographers from the young generation don't take into account.

And many things like, when you start, as soon as you have an exhibition in a museum, make sure that work enters the collection.

Even if you can make a donation, do it.

If someone had told me years ago, for instance, when I had my first exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, "Make a donation," I would have done it.

It's important to also think about that—not only exhibiting, exhibiting; make sure your work stays at a certain place where it can continue to engage.

Emeka Okereke: Continue to engage. Students are coming by.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Everybody's coming by.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: If you don't travel, it doesn't matter; your work travels, your work brings you where you have to be, where other people can see it.

These things are important.

Emeka Okereke: Wow. Wow.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Oh, this is such an interesting conversation.

Emeka Okereke: You know?

Emeka Okereke: Yes, this has been interesting.

And for me, I've been very much inspired, especially listening, getting a sense of what is really behind the motive of your work all those years.

I've been inspired as well.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Thank you. Your questions were very inspiring as well—very, very deep, very strong.

It's not easy with two hours almost, but you know how it goes with interviews: you will always have the same stupid questions.

But it's a different thing when you can keep talking, like we could continue talking for one or two more hours.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, yeah. Like you said, it's an archive that is building into something, and it will build. I strongly believe in that; it will come together.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Oh, yes. We might not see it, but the younger generation, they will see it happening. Things are happening, and that's beautiful.

Emeka Okereke: Because that's the only way to emancipate without becoming violent—that's the only way.

The only way to emancipate is what we are doing, without becoming the same violence through which the world became what it became.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And it was with a lot of violence.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: That's why art, like you say, things can be said in a very poetic way—enchantment.

That's why I'm talking about aesthetics, because if you look at the work of the Renaissance series and Girl with the Earring, you will see that it's beyond just beauty.

Emeka Okereke: Exactly.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Exactly, we have to show it in a beautiful way so that people can—

Emeka Okereke: It can enchant. There's an enchantment element to it. And it's with time, that's what I say.

That's why when I look at the work, I say this work building is going to speak to the younger ones strongly, because it has taken time to also cook strongly.

It has cooked so that it does not justify itself anymore against the Westerner's way of looking—it doesn't need that because it has crystallized on its own.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Right.

Emeka Okereke: You know, on its own.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: And when I talk about freedom... how many Western artists took their inspiration from Africa?

We have to allow ourselves to reflect on some Western artwork, and not only because people expect us to just keep reflecting on our culture.

Of course, we also do, but we shouldn't stick to that. The world is open and the world is ours, and we have that right.

If we don't get it, we will take it—one way or the other.

Emeka Okereke: Yeah, that's it. That's it, really. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much, it's been wonderful.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Really?

Emeka Okereke: Yes.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: It's a pleasure. And such an honor also for inviting me, you know.

Emeka Okereke: Yes, yes.

Angele Etoundi Essamba: Uh, really grateful beyond words.