Rofainka musicians form a leading line as they play, their movement softly blurring the frame.

There are songs that begin and end as private ceremonies of motion, and there are songs that insist on being seen. Bubu, the music of many Temne communities in northern Sierra Leone, is one of those: it moves between private and public registers with an ease that appears effortless only from the outside. Its instruments are home-made and elemental—bamboo and breath. It is the undulant geometry of a tune passed from hand to mouth. It is also a social technology, serving as a way of gathering, teaching, reasserting belonging, and marking passage. The photographs in this series, made by a photographer who returns to the sound of his own ancestry, place a camera at the edge of this living practice and ask, what does it mean to look at music?

Abdul Hamid Kanu, a Temne man, says these photographs are an effort to listen, observe, and record how Bubu lives today — in gatherings, celebrations and everyday care. As he says in a statement: “Through black and white and colour images, I’ll show how Bubu creates a sense of belonging across generations. The project sees community not as one place, but as a rhythm; shared, felt, and passed on.”

If community as rhythm is the sentiment that most clearly anchors the project is, then the methodological heartbeat of the work is equally clear: rootedness, an ethnography of presence. The decision to slow the camera to the tempo of care is, in photographic terms, a moral choice. Photography has, for a long stretch of modern history, been an extractive instrument. It takes the visible and makes a commodity out of it; the small economies of representation have often been inseparable from the larger economies of conquest and spectacle. To refuse extraction is to refuse a particular kind of colonial gaze: the single decisive moment captured by a tourist who passes through and moves on. Instead, the photographer promises to linger, to let the social rhythms impose themselves on the schedule of the image-maker. The discipline of listening before photographing is here both a method and a corrective: it tempers the camera’s appetite, makes room for the event to disclose itself.

Bubu music is often associated with the Temne and other groups in northern Sierra Leone. Historically it is a communal wind-music practice built on the bamboo trumpet. Ensembles can be ad hoc and local; performances occur at ceremonies, processions, celebrations, and moments when community life requires marking. In recent years Bubu has also been reanimated in other guises—modern bands, recordings, and the global circulation of hybrid forms. But the core practice remains anchored in breath and taming the rawness of bamboo. It is music learned in the open. In this photograph of a performance, the bamboo trumpets come alive from mouth to mouth without ceremony: grown men lean forward to blow while others wait, watching the timing of breath. Children hover at the edges, close enough to feel the air move, close enough to memorize posture and grip. There is no clear line between performer and audience—only a tightening circle of bodies, sound, and attention.

Jatu dancing among a crowd of bubu players.

From this vantage, the most important subject of a photographic project on Bubu is not a star musician but the assemblage: the maker of the instrument, the vendor who cleans it, the child who will mimic its call with a rolled-up mat, the elder who remembers a melody. The camera’s work, then, is to render visible what the ear already knows—to trace the ways a tune is held in hands and in breath. Kanu’s series is built around that documentary imagination. It is not a procession of staged spectacles but a map of presence. The village is treated like a score, and each image becomes a node of participation where sound and labor, attention and accident, meet.

That same attentiveness (and its complications) can be read in the photographs produced by Northcote W. Thomas in Sierra Leone and southern Nigeria a century ago. Thomas’s archive is vast: thousands of images, wax-cylinder recordings, and an ensemble of objects that entered museum collections and have only recently been the focus of projects to retrace, restitute and re-listen. His sitters appear in many registers: some portraits made against studio cloths invoke typological display; others record objects, ceremonies and musical instruments with a forensic patience that still furnishes researchers with invaluable detail. These qualities make his work a useful foil for Kanu’s practice. Where Thomas’s photographs can read as an inventory—meticulous, often formal, freighted with the power relations of colonial fieldwork—Kanu’s images aspire to the opposite effect, to attend to enacted life rather than classify it. The camera’s job remains the same, to make visible what the ears already know. But the posture changes: from cataloguing the world as a set of specimens to mapping the village as a living, noisy score in which every photographed aspect is also a participant.

The decision to produce images in both black-and-white and colour puts two complementary photographic techniques in play. Black-and-white pares imagery down to form and tonality with a measured austerity, and points the viewer to gesture, texture and relational distance without the distractions of hue. That aesthetic has historical roots—in technical limits, in the ambitions of fine art photographers—and today carries an archival, even nostalgic air, but should not be read simplistically as a vehicle for some universal human truth. Colour, by contrast, supplies vibrance and elaboration: the patterning of cloth, the exact warmth of a skin, the sun slanting off corrugated roofs. Used together, the two registers let the project move between kinds of attention, the disciplined economy of line and shadow and the luxuriant particularity of chroma. The work can then sit simultaneously in the historical archive and in the immediacy of lived presence.

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A blurred, kinetic photograph of musicians in motion is, in many ways, a manifesto in miniature for the whole project. Blur in photography often troubles viewers trained to prize crispness and definition. Yet, blur can be truer than sharpness when the subject is movement and sound. The phasing of limbs, the pulsation of breath, the centrifugal energy of an ensemble moving through space cannot be decomposed into stillness without losing the thing that gives it life. The blur here acts like notation: the ribbons and smears are not failures of technique but attempts to render duration. Blur demands that we read photography not as a substitute for listening but as its analogue. The smeared brass and swinging tassels become, on the photographic paper, visual echoes of a trumpet’s trailing note. In this sense the camera accumulates and releases energy. The photograph both names the event and points to an impossibility: no single image can contain an entire song, but, when made with care, images can resonate with the song’s architecture.

This image also brings into view a subtle ethical terrain. To photograph musicians in the midst of their performance is to seize a moment of vulnerability. Playing is work as well as ritual. The camera’s presence can be experienced as flattering or intrusive. Kanu’s photograph, blurring breath into motion, suggests that the camera is present among the players rather than hovering above them. It is as if the camera breathes with the ensemble, and that mimicry of rhythm mitigates the extractive urge. In practical terms, such an image is likely the result of repeated exposure to the scene, of knowing where to stand, and of an ethic that refuses the “decisive moment” in favour of a series of moments.

Fatmata looks into the camera with the march behind her.

The portrait of a young woman standing in front of a line of musicians, wearing a headscarf, shows how photography can honor a musical community. Portraiture is often the place where photography’s responsibilities are most acute: to make a person legible without turning them into a cipher; to render a face as the site of history, memory, and futures. Here the woman’s steady gaze is arresting because it challenges a common dynamic in music photography: the tendency to center the performers and make all others background. She stands, in the photograph, as both witness and node. Behind her a row of instruments and plumed hats speak to the communal identity of the ensemble, but the camera chooses to give the woman her own narrative weight. The image suggests that belonging is often mediated through those who do not play, but who nevertheless sustain the music, the listeners, the cooks, the caretakers: all the guardians of tradition.

The tight framing of the photograph seats her at the center of the unfolding event. But the image unfurls further: the musicians’ hands, the curve of a bamboo horn, the worn seam of a uniform and the tilt of a hat. Yet it is the woman’s gaze that turns the photograph inward toward human interiority. The image’s attention follows her, and in that turn the private life of feeling enters the public scene. The photograph thus establishes an ethical loop: the act of looking is not one-way but reciprocal. When the photographer frames the community, the community returns the look, and the subject is reframed, not as an object of study, but as an interlocutor who also composes meaning.

A third image complicates the narrative of staged performance. It is a quietly staged composition of a man and two children. The child who brings a horn to their mouth is learning to play. We witness a rehearsal in miniature. The instrument is improvised, but the form is already established. The father’s steady presence in the frame underscores the way musical knowledge is routed through kinship. Children learn by example and mimicry. The village is a classroom with many informal tutors. From the photographer’s standpoint, such images are indispensable because they render the quotidian work of making culture visible. They are also images of hope and continuity, traces of how practices survive by being taken up in small hands and imitative mouths.

Player poses for a photo as his children imitate him.

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Taken together, Kanu’s photographs supply a vocabulary for seeing how music holds a community together. In his frames, the themes of embodiment, temporality, apprenticeship and space are not abstractions but living scenes. Embodiment appears in how closely he pictures breath and posture: a player’s bent shoulders, the way a palm cups a bamboo mouthpiece, a child’s tentative cheek pressed to a practice horn. Temporality is visible in photographs that connect practice to ceremony, that show how morning rehearsals can lead into an evening procession. Apprenticeship is palpable in a child copying a pattern of playing from an elder. Space, finally, is never merely backdrop but a co-author of sound— the courtyard where a drum’s echo is heard, the procession route that choreographs bodies and listening, the compound threshold where lessons are passed on. Each photograph in the series is part of that network: not a thesis about music, but a report from the places where it is made and remade.

Because Kanu works within the community, his method has practical consequences for the images he makes. He resists two easy moves: the temptation to freeze a practice as if it is whole and immutable, and the temptation to isolate a single irresistible moment for instant circulation. Instead his camera practices duration. He lets a sequence of frames accumulate until pattern and change both become legible. Where a one-off image might claim a truth, Kanu’s slow persistence produces a kind of testimony of how time unfolds: the ways a tune is taught, the gestures that sustain it, the routes through which it travels. The result is not theory guised as illustration, but a body of work that trusts time and shows a village as a score in which every pictured action continues after the shutter falls.

That ethical disposition has precedents in African photographic practice that are worth naming as counterpoints rather than models. Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta are perhaps the most familiar: Sidibé’s nocturnal studio portraits and Keïta’s carefully composed images of Bamako life refigure sociality into photographic form. Their work is instructive because it shows how portraiture and social photography can narrate dignity, aspiration, and the rhythms of everyday life without collapsing into exotica. Yet what the Bubu project shares with Sidibé and Keïta is a respect for the subject’s participation in the making of the photograph. Where Sidibé taught his sitters how to pose, Kanu’s project elicited performance out of life itself.

In a different key, the work of Santu Mofokeng—together with David Goldblatt’s patient portrayals of South African life—insist that photographic attention often needs to be slow and contemplative to disclose structural histories: the sediment of labor, lineage and policy that shapes a landscape and the faces within it. These practitioners offer two lessons of particular use to the Bubu series. First, portraiture can be political in the most immediate, humane sense. To hand someone a photograph made with steadiness and care is to acknowledge and restore a presence that histories have too often denied. Second, documentary work that seeks intimacy frequently renounces the spectacular for the sustained, and in that refusal it uncovers quieter, truer relations of power and belonging.

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There is also a musical lineage to consider. Bubu’s modern permutations have been carried beyond the region by figures who have remixed the music into pop-inflected forms. Here one can think of artists like Ahmed Janka Nabay, whose reinventions of Bubu took the music outside Sierra Leone. This is an important context because it shows how the practice negotiates the boundary between local and global. The photographer’s decision to document both the traditional and the everyday suggests a refusal to fetishize “authenticity” and a recognition that music changes as it circulates. A fruitful tension emerges: how to photograph a music that is both rooted and migratory, both ancestral and in motion? The series answers by giving equal space to ensembles, to children at play, and to the quiet labor that supports sonic life.

Finally, the project’s ethical center is not merely preservation but solidarity. 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. It can be returned to communities as a tool for their own remembrance and pedagogies: printed for elders, used in schools, held up at processions as a record of continuity. The images become part of the same ecology that made the music. They are instruments for communal recognition.

If these photographs offer a final provocation, it is this: to look with the ear. We can train the eye to receive timbre, cadence and the small, social echoes that a still frame carries. Tina Campt asks us to do precisely that work in Listening to Images, a book in which she proposes a counterintuitive practice of attending to photographs as if they were sonic events, tuning into the “quiet frequencies” and affective resonances that the camera often buries beneath surface description. Campt’s method is not merely metaphorical, she draws on archival “identification” photographs, studio portraits and everyday snapshots to show how stillness contains a temporal pressure—gestures that hold refusal, faces that hum with unsaid histories, and poses that register future-life potentials. To “listen” to images, for Campt, is to cultivate a mode of evidence-gathering attentive to stasis as a frequency of meaning, to touch as a temporal register, and to the ways photographs index social life beyond their immediate, visible facts.

Considered through that lens, the claim that “looking can be a form of listening” becomes a practicable ethos of Kanu’s photography. The trumpet is not only blurred, it is the photograph’s notation of a phrase, the photograph’s hint at the breath that produced the sound. The young woman’s fixed gaze is not only an expression but a gesture of listening, of memory and anticipation folded into one face. The child with the makeshift horn is not merely cute or illustrative but the audible thin place where transmission is still audible if you know how to hear it. Taken this way, the camera, when wielded by someone who knows the rhythm, becomes a collaborator in aural life. It records practices as they resonate, catches the temporal tensions of transmission, and offers images that invite communal listening, re-circulation, and repair rather than extraction.

These images by Abdul Hamid Kanu are patient, tactile, and rhythm-aware. They testify to a practice that refuses to be reduced either to nostalgia or to spectacle. They insist that cultural survival is never merely a matter of preservation but of continued use, of repetition, of a million small acts of remembering performed by mouths and hands. Photography that listens understands that. It composes its frames not to fix the world but to keep time with it. Kanu’s photographs are, therefore, invitations: to step into the spaces between notes and breaths and witness how social life is made, to watch the making of music without stealing its rhythm, and to learn that community is a breath shared across generations.

Olaniyi Omiwale was born in Lagos, Nigeria. His short stories and essays have appeared in A Long House, Saraba Magazine, Tender Photos, among other publications. Olaniyi was formerly the web editor of Saraba Magazine. He is the author of On & Of, a Substack whose essays announce themselves by where they stand: on, or of. He currently lives in the country's capital, Abuja.

In December, Tender Photos will showcase Bubu Music in Northern Sierra Leone by Sierra Leone-based photographer Abdul Hamid Kanu. This essay contextualising the images by Olaniyi Omiwale will be followed by a short story by Damilola Onwah. For press, sponsorship and other media inquiries, contact us.