The beauty of Monograph—a new art book by acclaimed Nigerian and New York photographer, filmmaker, stylist, and creative director Andrew Dosunmu—lies in the uncanny juxtapositions of distinct realms. Wholly separate images shown side by side form their own dynamic relationships. Two people in different portraits appear to size each other up across facing pages; on the road in Lagos, a young girl flashes a smile in the direction of a portrait of a man, pausing briefly, his mesh shirt resting on his head. They may never have crossed each other’s paths, but here they do.
In Monograph, collages from Dosunmu’s work as a stylist casually bump up against his work as a fashion photographer and stills from his films (including Beauty and Mother of George) and music videos (among the musicians he’s worked with: Isaac Hayes, Bob Marley, Aaron Neville, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu). They all naturally blend into the images that are at the book’s core: pictures that span roughly 20 years, from the early 2000s to the present, a roving eye that remaps the world. Page to page, we jump in quick succession between Quito and Accra, Chicha and Port of Spain, Manila and Sudan.
“I love both that seamlessness of brothers and the dissimilarities—that’s what I’m attracted to when I’m photographing,” Dosunmu, who grew up in Nigeria and England, says in a café in his Crown Heights neighborhood. A prime example is a spread of two facing pictures from Jamaica. It’s as if Dosonmu’s camera peels away the walls so that two interior spaces are suddenly joined, like mirror reflections. Famous and familiar faces, most not credited by name, slip into these pages discreetly—a portrait of André 3000 pops up as surprisingly as the Outkast musician himself and his flute might, in random airports and settings all over the world. Even when working on fashion commissions, Dosunmu prefers to find models on location. “It was always about real people,” he says, “going to India, Senegal, Vietnam, wherever, and casting people off the streets.”
Dosunmu’s own style icons are his relatives who reflect an intersection of influences: traditional, religious, Western, Yoruba. An uncle wearing traditional Nigerian fashion and a baseball cap, say. “This woman I see in the temple when I go to consult my deities…. That’s the beauty of it, everything’s always coexisting,” Dosunmu says.
Monograph is Dosunmu’s first retrospective book, bringing together the threads of his career in independent cinema, music videos, photography, and fashion. Arriving in the wake of pandemic isolation, it simultaneously celebrates individuality and connections across time and geography. It’s particularly resonant among people whose ancestors were forced to migrate away from home and the visual markers of their culture—architecture, art. “The absence of that is striking, right?” says Arthur Jafa, Dosunmu’s longtime friend and erstwhile collaborator, in a conversation that prefaces the book. Both in their details of shared material expression and as photographs that simply depict ways of being, Dosunmu’s pictures summon a reunion.
Dosunmu is reluctant to talk about fashion, but it was the gateway. Starting out in 1990s Paris as a design assistant for Yves Saint Laurent, he then pivoted to do work for magazines like i-D, Paper, Vibe, and The Face. These days, he’s reluctant to assign himself to any one creative mode: “Fashion tries to pin you down and put you in categories,” he says. “What I think fashion did for me was expose me to other art forms.”
Young and broke in Paris, he learned to speak French by going to any of the city’s hundreds of theaters in the mornings and watching art and independent films from all over the world subtitled or dubbed in French, which also awakened him as a budding filmmaker. Growing up in Nigeria and England, he’d mainly had access to Hollywood blockbusters as far as Western films went. “I didn’t see Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep or Cassavetes for years,” he says. He picked up the language of film, making Super 8s with friends. (“If I can tell a story with as little dialogue as possible, then all the better: I don’t want my films to be lost in translation,” Dosunmu says.)
In the archives at Yves Saint Laurent, Dosunmu steeped himself in fashion history and thrived on the “pleasure of researching,” whether it was the precise details of materials worn by people in 18th-century Mali or at the Moulin Rouge. Meanwhile, he also self-educated himself at the extensive art and photography libraries of the Centre Pompidou.
“I often talk about an example of Walker Evans’s portrait of the man in a white suit in Cuba,” Dosunmu says. “I’m curious about who this guy is, what’s his life like, what kind of job does he do, what is his story? As a photographer I want to ignite that kind of curiosity in you about the people in my images, the things that are just outside the frame.”
A chance early on to work with the great Malian photographer Malick Sidibé proved liberating. Like Dosunmu, Sidibé’s milieu was of the people—locals dressed up in their party looks, the elegance of the everyday. “When you come from a world where [photographers] go into a shoot with two trucks outside and a whole crew, and then instead here comes the master, with no big production, just his camera, no assistant, no extra gear, very stripped down—that was beautiful,” Dosunmu says. “What that made me realize was you don’t need all those things getting in the way.”
Looking through Monograph feels like a cinematic experience, not unlike that of watching the stunningly lyrical and peripatetic Restless City, Dosunmu’s breakout fictional feature film, which premiered at Sundance in 2011. Borrowing its title from the Nigerian short-story writer Cyprian Ekwenzu, it’s about a Senegalese musician living in New York City, shot through with lonesome metropolitan grays and blues and browns but also flashes of golden light that feel instantly nostalgic. Texture is a word that Dosunmu repeats again and again in conversation—a dynamic layering of influences and forms, experiences and geographies. “What I’m interested in is visual culture,” he says. It’s a spark, a flare, an ignition. “I want to create an interaction between all these things.”
