The fellowship is targeted at early to mid-career individuals who write in English and are interested in deepening their engagement with photography about the continent. Preference will be given to those with little to no formal training in the visual arts or art criticism. A good publication history is assumed, as well as a grasp of the newsletter’s ethos and format.

“Theresa,” by Nneka Iwunna EzemezueA photograph of Ghanaian photographer and archivist Gerald Annan-Forson by artist Jesse Weaver Shipley, courtesy the artist and Nuku Studio.A photo can preserve things that were lost, and a photo can be a thing that is lost.Our assignment: “choose a ‘family photograph’ (loosely defined) and pair it with another in the TP collection that aligns in form or mood or theme. So if a photo from [your] exhibition works, that's perfect.”A family can be two partners, or several, or a town.A family can be a nation, a religion, a crown.A photograph can be a print, a film, a file.A photograph can be burnt.And so can a heart.¶The first photograph by Nneka Iwunna Ezemezue frames a woman’s struggle to hold onto the memory of her late husband. The torso and hands of a figure in a dress holds a black-and-white studio photograph of a young man and woman in fine wax print fabric, tightly pressed together and dripping with cool. The man died years earlier. According to the artist, when the woman refused to participate in certain funeral rites that the town insisted on, she was kicked out of the house by the second wife, and her possessions with her husband were burnt. All she has left of him is the picture.The second photograph by Jesse Weaver Shipley layers dual narratives of love and loss: revolutionary leaders’ struggles to hold together their nation, and an independent photographer’s struggle to hold together his collection. The leaders in question are Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings and President-elect Dr. Hilla Limann, on the occasion of Rawlings handing over power to three months after his 1979 coup (the first of two). The photographer in question is Gerald Annan-Forson, who was Rawlings’s schoolmate in the 1960s, and who became a freelance photographer documenting the nation’s political flux in the late 20th century. Rawlings and Limann navigate the threshold between authoritarian rule and democratic government, and Annan-Forson navigates the transition between analogue and digital technology. Shipley, meanwhile—the artist who nests the pictures-within-the-picture—navigates how to tell stories of an aging generation.If we treat the idea of “family” loosely, “Ghana” could be the collective body, and the men in front of and behind the camera could be both its members and narrator/actors. Their political struggles with structure and representation might not be so different from the personal struggle of the widow who mourns her husband. Where lies the fine line between picture-as-potential and picture-as-prison? How do we (learn to) hold onto images, and how do we (learn to) let them go? ¶ The photograph of Annan-Forson and the related film “Burnt Images” (2022) are part of Routes of Rebellion, an exhibition of film and media by Jesse Weaver Shipley made through three decades of research in and connected to Ghana. As co-curators, we see the exhibition as an opportunity to explore the materiality of memory and the precarity and potentials of socially distributed archives. Routes of Rebellion opened at Nuku Studio on 4th November and continues through 29th February 2024, in collaboration with Red Clay, Tamale. Follow Nuku Studio, Robin Riskin, and P.N.O. Ankrah on Instagram.About the authorsRobin Riskin and P.N.O. Ankrah are curating artists who grew their practice through the community movement known as blaxTARLINES KUMASI. As co-curators on some of the early blaxTARLINES exhibitions, Riskin and Ankrah developed rhythms for working together on artist-led, site-specific, multi-sited, and slow-growth projects. In their independent work, they expanded upon blaxTARLINES’s tactics of ecological, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational curating. While Riskin’s experimental exhibitions have focused on oral, digital and multi-vocal language, Ankrah’s creative productions have been importing craft and communal processes. Like their teacher kąrî’kạchä seid’ou, both Ankrah and Riskin are interested in the transformative potentials of art.Read NextI’m Just Somebody Who Wants to Love and Be There for You.OnlookersAwramba: A Self-Sufficient CommunityThe Space Between

From June 3 until last Saturday, I wrote micro-essays that aimed to find affinities between photographs featured so far on Tender Photo. I called the series “concordance,” with the image of my boyhood in mind, when I’d pore over the large Bible concordances that belonged to my father, for the simple thrill of seeing how words and phrases were networked.

In Sehin Tewabe’s photograph, a neat, large trail of light puts two men in focus. In Hashim Nasr’s photograph of a hand, a polygon of light has formed at the corner of the room, so perfect in its serendipity it seems like an opening to show small, precious photographs. And in moshood’s picturing of a “slow Sunday” in Accra

In all four photographs, the sitters are positioned in the center of the frame, and all except one show a lone figure. Nnebuifé Kwubeï’s photograph of Ekene, a woman from his hometown, is distinct for its portrayal of a settee, seen nearly full-width. The setting, unlike the others, is indoors.

The sharpest figure in Ifebusola Shotunde’s photograph is the road construction worker sitting with his back to the viewer. He is more at ease than the others, the twin sets of men, who are either bending or standing, lifting wheelbarrows or wearing masks. A block bears the name of the construction company

The most dramatic of this trio of photographs is Jansen van Staden’s picture of a street in Cape Town. In almost every case, the onlookers are seen with their lips apart, and their heads inclined aloft, in the same direction. Their pose indicates a climax of an incident whose resolution

Certain photographs are intimations about the flow of life. The figures in Aina Zo Raberanto’s photo are depicted in such a hurry they seem like blotches, as the flash of brightness in a dream. In Rafalia’s panoramic scene of a street in Madagascar, the movements are to such a degree even the shadows seem poised for encounters

The passersby are cast against cropped backdrops: a trio of buses and canopies arranged like enfilades in Amanda Iheme’s “Casa De Fernandez House,” similar to the vehicles in Jean-fidèle’s “Owo Da?”; also, the buildings behind the walkers in photographs by Edem J. Tamakloe and Ọlájídé Ayẹni. Hence, if the combined narrative relays the hurry of encounter

Consider the four photographs above in the order of their publication. Begin from Léa Thijs’s “My Father and I,” in which the man is standing in the middle of the picture, and a slice of her frame is seen from the side. Then, proceed to KC Nwakalor’s “Isolating with You,”

The eye in a photograph is similar to an aperture: an opening through which light can pass. And just as the camera is an optical instrument for looking outwards, so the eye is never seen to be facing rearwards. A final similarity—if the analogy isn’t already strained—is that an eyelid, like a shutter, can stay shut.

All three photographers use “community” to describe the reach of their ethos: “I first went to Awramba in 2016 and was fascinated by how the community managed to build a system for itself,” notes Maheder Haileselassie. “Being able to tell everyday stories from my own community and shine a light on the beautiful things happening there is another opportunity to interact,”

In an aftermath, the character of an event is settled, which is not to imply the scene is relaxed. Where there are people—as in photographs by Teresa Meka and Olaoluwa Adamu—the mood seems to fold in one collective expression of unease. In Meka’s photograph, for example, others might have the luxury of waiting

There are marks of human presence in all three photographs. “A limb animated the scene; to whom it belongs matters little,” is how Kwena Chokoe puts it. Only one of these spaces—the room photographed by Immaculata Abba—can be said to be entirely bereft of attention, flourishing with neglect.  Yet, when the ghosts of another time are evoked in a photographic metaphor

I have tendered 52 photographs in all, not counting close to 100 others that were included from the portfolio of the photographers. The format has remained, mostly, the same: a photo, a caption, and a statement. For the first few weeks I included hyperlinks to photo-related writings, and for a month