IDEAS OF AFRICA, portraiture and political imagination

137pp., b/w & colour illus., hardback, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2025

ISBN: 9781633451711

Published to accompany the exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 2025 - July 2026.

Ideas for Africa brings together portraits by inventive  photographers from West and Central Africa - Jean Depara, Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, and Sanlé Sory, alongside contemporary works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Samuel Fosso, and Silvia Rosi - and examines how these image-makers and their sitters helped energise the emerging sense of Pan-Africanism during the mid-twenthieth century.

Contributions include:

"Photographic Portraits, Political Imagination" by Olumeri O. Onabanjo

"Reimagining Liberation" by Momtaza Mehri and Yasmina Price

"What Idea is Africa?" by V.Y. Mudimbe

"Reading Décalage" Brent Hayes Edwards.

Olumeri O. Onabanjo is the Peter Schub Curator in The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.