The African Lookbook is “a community album”, as Edwidge Danticat characterises it. Beginning with her early travels to West Africa in the early 1990s, the writer and curator amassed an archive of rare vintage and contemporary images from Africa that are now housed in the McKinley Collection. McKinley’s visual novel brings together over 150 photos, respective to 150 years of African women’s use of photography and design as responses to colonial and patriarchal oppression. 

An excerpt from the book lays out these findings: “The machinery of the sewing machine and the camera carved out some of the most profound movement in the pursuit of modernity and resistance to colonialism and gender violence. The sewing machine allowed women to wield power, mediate power and usurp and upend the fashion systems driven by colonial powers and African men. The camera followed. In the right hands, it became a place for invention, a vehicle for the work cranked out of the sewing machine and its economy, largely powered by women.”

The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women is a stunning, subversive look into the lives and style of African women across generations and is the result of a collecting and archiving journey spanning over two decades. Talking to AMAKA, we learn how she honours the collectors and lay historians that made the book possible, the joys of writing and curating The African Lookbook, and why we should preserve and care for our photos. 

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Who are the artists that shape and influence your curation work and style?

I would say, of course, all of the canonical African and African African-American painters and photographers as I've been studying them all along; they've had a huge influence. When I was introduced to Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe and some unknown others, it blew the world open for me because those particular kinds of photos are very artful - and yet very intimate family, community photographs, and personal portraits. It was just mind-blowing. I've been travelling in west Africa. It's not like I hadn't seen portraits and people's houses, but I didn't know that particular work and had not seen it magnified in that way - both in size and in relation to a world stage. Studio photography is just absolutely intoxicating, especially because of its endless iterations.

Your journey of collecting African women's historical and cultural artefacts began in Ghana in the late 1990s. Do you have cherished stories from the archives? What are your favourite photos, if any? If not, do any particular photos hold memories that you hold close? 

Aunty Koramaa, who is featured in the chapter Clothes for A New Nation, is a close friend of mine. Not only do I love her, but she's also just stunning. I got to see the evolution of her fashion throughout the early independence era as a young woman. And to be able to go back to her and ask questions and access her archive was just remarkable. 

Then there are some that are just really stunning because of their age or because they capture something, some little detail. When I began collecting with intention, I realised that I don't want to just be picking up things without understanding them. I started to knit all these details together, and it's exciting to do, putting everything together like a puzzle. The book is a community album because they're telling a collective history. Many of the photos have no identifying details. They are not fixed in time or place, or we can make some guesses or identifications, but they float. A Senegalese sitter is in a studio in Madagascar in the early 1900s. An image could be from Mali as easily as Senegal. A photographer travelled along the Atlantic coast in the late 1800s. And all of these images circulated widely beyond the world of the sitter in a global trade, not so much unlike current media. We need to work more at recognising an Africanness that's much bigger than the way that we think about it. We haven't even scratched small surfaces of African history, and I enjoy doing work that invites others into the depth is very exciting.

What was the significance of collaboration within and throughout the book project? 

Collaboration is everything. I love the people that I encountered, especially all the aunties. You know, I love the fact that I relied on collectors or independent scholars, market women, who are also lay historians. I love that I could depend on them for information in ways that I didn't need to go to academia. This is a collective history, and I love being able to honour that and to honour them as historians who opened up their cloth boxes and shared their knowledge with us all. 

What brings you the most joy when thinking about The African Lookbook?

The pictures. They just give me inordinate joy. It gives me so much pleasure: the patterning, the faces, my own imagination. I could look at the picture for hours. They really feel like, these are my, this is my family. I don't think I'm going to lose that feeling. I keep waiting to see if it is going to go away, but it's not going away. 

What can we look forward to from you, in terms of new work and projects?

I truly want to do more exhibition work, but I want to do it non-traditionally. I want to bring it into the public realm and really push my own boundaries and those of exhibition space.

I haven't collected as many men's pictures, but there's an interiority of the men that hasn't been looked at very carefully. I'd like to look at men's intimacy and put that more forward. [In] my early travels to West Africa, men were so much more openly affectionate with each other. I think homophobia was much more at bay. I want to return to that and use it as a challenge because I remember men walking with their hands in each other's back pocket or sitting somewhere in public with a man's head on his friend's lap. It was never even thought about twice. I want to examine those social relationships, then and now. 

We haven't really studied the history of women photographers on the continent either; this is a big subtext of The African Lookbook. There's a lot to dig into. The archives are so rich. 

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Any final thoughts or reflections? 

I think photography is such an important tool for all of us. I suggest that even for people who aren't necessarily fixated on photography but have images in their own homes, to think about preservation and really taking care of that document, even if it's just what it means to the individuals and in one's family. I hope that people will take the images seriously. Scan them. Copy them in some way. Get a good frame. So that you can preserve and showcase your legacy. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.