Pictures taken with the attentiveness of intuition, not just skill or deliberation.“Itafaji”The photo sums up the whole accident of that period. It has a cause and effect feel to me. It raises questions that beg to be answered. — Olaoluwa Adamu“Owo Da?”I had observed the agbero—as they are popularly known in Lagos—having a disagreement with the bus conductors and one thing led to another and they were at each other's throats. I quickly composed myself and my gear and took this photograph just as the bus conductor got into the bus and the driver was about to drive off. The agbero, clearly not having it, didn't want to let go.  — Jean-fidèle“Untitled”During a walk around Cape Town's CBD, I noticed a crowd of people gathered, all looking up and pointing to a small open window across the road. Through the sirens of fire trucks and an ambulance, I heard someone scream “jump” followed by laughter from the crowd. The window was too small for a person, I thought. Turns out it was just a false fire alarm and an open window.  — Jansen van Staden“The Jump”This photograph was taken in Gao, Mali, in 2013. I was covering the French military intervention in Mali and I was wandering around town when I came across kids playing on the roof of the local soccer stadium. I took a bunch of pictures and was lucky enough to make this composition. — Joe Penney“People First”The photo was taken at the Giza Pyramids complex in Egypt where tourists take selfies with the great pyramids in the background. When I noticed all the people consumed by their phones trying to take a photo of themselves, I tried to fill all the spaces in the frame so I can portray what it feels like in that moment.  — Aly Hazzaa

I love to take photos that feature a human presence, without the human body itself. In this case, a limb animated the scene; to whom it belongs matters little. I love the composition and the content of the photograph. I was visiting my now-101 year old grandfather, which I only

The photograph was captured towards the conclusion of my project on a friendship with Momo tested by drug addiction. Momo had been unable to sleep due to extended crystal meth use, spanning around 6 or 7 days—though the exact duration eludes my memory. Eventually, he managed to find rest on

We were on our way to the village when we spotted cows and the young herdsmen taking care of them, so we walked over and asked to film them. Then I spotted him away from the herd, tending to his cows separately. So I walked up to him and signed with my hands that I wanted to take photos of him.

A sequence of same-styled photographs from the archive.

I am pleased to announce the successful applicants to the Tender Photo Editorial Fellowship. Beginning with the January 17, 2024 issue of the newsletter, the Fellows will initiate and facilitate correspondence with the featured photographers, write short narrative captions, and prepare the newsletter for publication. Join me in congratulating the following individuals in this esteemed cohort.

A sequence of same-styled photographs from the archive.

A sequence of same-styled photographs from the archive.

A sequence of same-styled photographs from the archive.

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.

Both sepia-toned photographs share expanse as their perspective, although the scale is distinguishable. Lidudumalingani took his from the 27th floor of an apartment complex in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, and I took mine from the window seat of a Washington DC-bound Amtrak, a hour after we pulled out of the station. Lidudumalingani reads the migrant history of Jo’burg into his photo

“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.

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.

It is one of the images that I managed to salvage from my pre-camera period. At the beginning of my photography, my primary tool was a mobile phone. I saw the two men fishing from afar and had to walk closer to them to take this image because of the constraint of my phone lens

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

I had just finished my degree at the university and wanted to capture moments and memories. The campus was empty and students who remained were either preparing to go on vacation or waiting around to finish paperwork.  I took the photograph while waiting. I was waiting for someone dear to me to come around when the colour of the road sign caught my attention.

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.

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