Kanu’s photographic practice asks: to what end do we make these pictures? The photographer’s proximity to the Temne, as one of them himself, is a powerful corrective gesture. It shifts the project from anthropological claims to collaborative memory-making. A photograph could be, in part, a gift.

In this photograph of myself and an uncle, I am reminded of the tranquil state of the world as I saw it then on Sundays, my body—or was it my soul— having been lightened by the Word, by the welter of words I have consumed at Sunday School. And in the photograph of two brothers on a boat by Victor Adewale