Drawing inspiration from chiaroscuro style Baroque paintings, swathed in light fabrics that suggest at his lithe figure, or traditional Yoruba attire, and resplendently laying before the viewer in all his glory, Rotimi Fani Kayode’s photography decries against a singular dogmatic conception of black queer masculinity, whilst offering reflections on the multiplicity and tensions of postcolonial diasporic identity. In his self-portraiture, he remains the visual sovereign who can caustically engage with artistic dispositions in which blackness dances along lines of legibility/illegibility, as highlighted by Kayode’s later works which make explicit European references whilst centering a historically dissonant subject.This is all the more convoluted when understood alongside Kayode’s unabashed queerness. Whilst we have well established that photography is fecund territory for exploring the tensions in identity that are relationally formed, it is shame Kayode’s name has fallen into obscurity except amongst artistically engaged esoterics, who abhor the thought of a rightfully deserving artist gaining the posthumous flowers. 

 Figure 4:Nothing left to lose XII(Bodies of experience), (Kayode,1989)

Diasporic consciousness functions as a spatiotemporal composition, in which bodies inhabit multiple spaces at once. This may be to the effect of producing a double vision that attends to the experiences of subalternity wrought on the body within the colonial spaces that artists inhabit. Kayode explores liminality within the diasporic space as a queer practitioner grappling with cultural displacement, his racialization, and his sexuality. Alterity as a black queer man is channelled into his artistic process to resist attacks on his integrity and to assert existence on his own terms . This emphasis placed on self-actualization opposes Afro-Orientalizing fantasies (Said 1978,) positioning diasporic bodies as hyper-sexualized objects of social consumption. Black male bodies have been positioned in visual culture as the phallic object of white homosexual desire, for example the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s depiction of black men in sexually compromising positions. The lust for black homosexuals does nothing to dislodge their position of abjection, in which they stand as a foil for the normative White queer subject (McIntosh,1988) Whiteness as a historically privileged criteria cannot be divorced from the formation of queer subjectivities, manifesting itself in a racializing photographic gaze. However,  Unafraid to dapple with sensuality or erotic as the chief creative director, Kayode stands in opposition to photographers such as the irreverent Mapplethorpe, whose photographs of black men prostrated and engaged in intimate acts serve the voyeuristic needs of a white audience, rendering black sexuality a mere phallic symbol of desire. 

The photograph Snapshot, dislodges a White ‘scopic regime’ seeking to produce black sexuality within racialized parameters. In the self-portrait, Kayode kneels before the camera with a camera covering his genitals. Perhaps we may argue that the camera is strategically placed to face the voyeuristic viewer, equally wanting to consume black erotica. Kayode requires a degree of introspection from his viewer to consider why they may be in a position to view his body. However, we must note the self-authorship in which his work is rooted in. The juxtaposition between the almost nude body and the camera suggests it is Kayode who is the visual sovereign, dictating the limits of public ownership over his black body.Black Studies scholars have begun to engage in conversations about non-normative sexual subjects in order to decenter theories of hypersexual pathology which produce a visceral fear of the eroticized body. A self-reflexive gaze that permeates through Kayode’s photography carefully balances, or rather synergizes, virility and tenderness. Eroticization serves as a radical praxis once it is unfettered from the colonial gaze seeking to transform bodies into fetish objects, as well as academia’s neurotic fear of privileging this form of consciousness. Situated in both British and Nigerian contexts where there is a struggle for signification over his body, Kyode enacts erotic corporeality as an intervention into colonial stigmas etched onto black queers.