Rotimi Fani-Kayode Is a Pillar in Photographic History

Featuring an array of black and white prints by the late photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, ‘The Studio – Staging Desire’ at Autograph, London, presents the male body in varying states of undress. These untitled works, many of which are on public display for the first time, capture the sensuality of the male form in images at once dramatic yet understated.

As a queer, Black émigré in a largely straight, white, Euro-American artworld, Fani-Kayode operated from a place of political and sexual rebellion where, as he insisted in his 1988 essay ‘Traces of Ecstasy’, Black men ‘can desire each other’. Now memorialized by a gold plaque, Fani-Kayode’s apartment at 151 Railton Road in Brixton, south London, provided both a haven from the right-wing revanchism of the 1980s and a gateway to imagined queer utopias. It was here that the sensuous works on display in ‘The Studio – Staging Desire’ were made: images of men with muscled arms and torsos embracing, lifting each other and posing seductively in latex gear. Fani-Kayode’s photographs are, as Ian Bourland observed in Art Journal in 2022, ‘redolent of sexuality but never graphic’.

Affinities to surrealism also emerge in Fani-Kayode’s oeuvre, inviting speculation on the workings of the unconscious mind. What are we to make, for example, of the recurrent doubling in these images? A pair of scissors held aloft to teasingly obscure one of the sitter’s eyes; two glistening cheeks of an exposed rump; pairs of men wrestling, their limbs interlocking to become one; a couple leaning with backs turned to the viewer; and a peroxide-blonde Adonis doubled – or are they twins? Is this a sexual fantasy materialized (two are better than one) or does it carry the doppelganger’s threat of usurpation? The work’s frisson lies in the proximity of pleasure to danger. 

In ‘Traces of Ecstasy’, the artist described these images as having been made using ‘techniques of ecstasy’ – a phrase borrowed from Yoruba spiritual culture. The exhibition’s curator, Mark Sealy, defined this fervent state in a 2024 interview with Dazed as ‘equally about pain as it is pleasure’. What better way to characterize queer desire at the height of the AIDS crisis than with words so searing in their ambivalence? One of Fani-Kayode’s salient contributions – like other queer artists of the 1980s – was to insist on pleasure, desire and sensuality in the face of puritanical backlash and fear-mongering. But these ‘techniques of ecstasy’ were more than a riposte to the conditions of that moment: they were part of the artist’s larger personal-philosophical project to make photography the crucible in which connections between the material and the immaterial could be forged in an idiosyncratic way that spoke to his Western influences – including Robert Mapplethorpe, under whom he trained at the Pratt Institute in New York – and his Yoruba spirituality. (Fani-Kayode’s father was a chieftain of Ife, the ancestral Yoruba capital, and a keeper of sacred divination practices.) 

Now that art depicting Blackness and queerness frequently adorns the walls of museums and galleries, Fani-Kayode’s work occupies a more salutary position, appearing in sundry group shows. But there remains a UK institutional survey-shaped gap in his curriculum vitae. It’s a glaring omission: an extraordinary photographer who changed the landscape of the medium, a precursor of and influence to generations of now-celebrated photographers, including Zanele Muholi, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Ajamu X. ‘The Studio – Staging Desire’ proves that Fani-Kayode is a pillar in photographic history, and should be celebrated as such. 

‘Rotimi Fani-Kayode: The Studio – Staging Desire’ is on view at Autograph, London, until 22 March

^{Main image: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Untitled (detail), 1988, silver gelatin print, 30 × 41 cm. Courtesy: © Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Autograph, London}