Image © Yagazie Emezi. She says of the image above: “Consumption of the Black Model” is a conversation piece that questions and explores how a body can be dramatized by photographers, and how this feeds the Western gaze.
Yagazie Emezi started taking photographs professionally when she was down to her last pennies, and living on friends’ couches in Lagos, Nigeria. A recent arrival to the big city from the small town where she had grown up, Emezi was constantly taking photographs with her smartphone, but didn’t know how to transition to paid assignments until she was out of options. Her first professional assignment was shooting backstage at Lagos Fashion Week in 2015; the assignments snowballed from there. To date, Emezi’s photographs have appeared in Vogue, Time and the New York Times, and she has received a Getty Images Creative Bursary Award.
Emezi is the first photographer featured in “Voices of African Photography,” a series on The Washington Post’s photography blog, In Sight, that is devoted to highlighting the work of ten African photographers and photojournalists. The series is presented in partnership with the African Photojournalism Database, a joint project of Everyday Africa and World Press Photo.
“We’re in an industry where white and male voices have been dominant – ever since the creation of photography itself,” says Olivier Laurent, a foreign photo editor at The Washington Post. “That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been strong and important women photographers and photographers of color, but they have remained in the minority, unfortunately. As a photo editor commissioning photographers on a daily basis, I’m part of the problem.”
The decision to produce the series came, in part, from Laurent’s desire to change his hiring practices. “Earlier this year, I decided, with [the help of the African Photojournalism Database], to rethink my own decisions and delved deeply into the work of African photographers I could and should hire.”
His personal research led to the ten part series, which will be published weekly on In Sight. For more information, visit the blog. To read the first post on Emezi, follow this link.
To learn more about Emezi’s work, follow her on Instagram, or visit her website.
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