An Invitation to Joy

In a series of photographs titled Anwuli: An Invitation to Joy, the Nigerian documentary photographer Amarachi Nnoli uses portraiture not only to explore the image of a person, but as a vessel of culture, memory, and representation.

Zenas Ubere’s accompanying essay contextualising the images considers the faces of the photographed community members. He observes that the camera here is there to witness a legibility that already exists communally. It doesn’t reveal anything the community didn’t already know about itself; it merely fixes what was already mutually understood. As he puts it: the photographer “employs no extra props, no objects on which social status can be attributed, so her subjects are shown as who they are, and not as what they aspire to be.”

Billie McTernan’s short story, inspired by the same set of photographs, follows a protagonist who returns home to document “the lives of the people she knew and loved, those who felt like they belonged to her.” The story is particularly haunted by an absent twin, one who has recently passed. So the story’s claim—the face as an unearned, effortless proof of belonging—becomes a wound rather than a comfort.

It’s the photographs themselves that hold this tension together. The mobile studio—portable, itinerant—confesses its own impermanence, mirroring the place it visits: not fixed but passing through. Young and old sit for the same lens, and in that symmetry history reveals itself not as narrative but as accumulation. The photograph does not explain the community but insists on it. What we see is not memory but evidence. We see time’s fingerprint, undeniable and irrecoverable.

— Olaniyi Omiwale

More images by Amarachi Nnoli

Anwuli: An Invitation to Joy is part of Tender Visions, our ongoing project supported with funding from the open society foundations. Tender Visions is a cross-disciplinary commissioning program for photographers and writers based on the African continent. Over the next one year, it will feature the work of thirteen photographers and twenty-six writers. This program will provide photographers with the opportunity to develop new, theme-based projects rooted in their local communities, while fostering collaborative engagements with writers who will produce creative and critical texts that contextualize the visual work. Our aim is to create space for deepened engagement with visual storytelling in Africa, and to bring new narratives to local and international audiences in insightful and thought-provoking ways. Read more about Tender Photos.