Working with Time: Seven Photographers Share Their Creative Processes

What compels you most in your photographic practice?

The camera is always in hand, usually in a bag. So is the other equipment: the light meter, extra film, wide-angle and telescopic attachments. But these are peripheral to the essential movement of the eyes, which are constantly scanning, looking, weighing in. They work in tandem with the ears, with olfaction. The skin, too, pulsates and wants to partake in the holistic sensing. It’s a vital urge to understand.

Serendipity, happenstance, are of extreme importance, intuitively responding to the epiphany of the moment, nanoseconds of clarity that swiftly, almost imperceptibly, go by. The camera, too, has to be right there, almost an extension of the fleetingness, the soft gentleness, of time herself.

We are constantly moving through time, constantly trying to perceive her, picture her in her eternal flow. The camera’s aperture and shutter are inadequate to the task of fully taking and making, and create image fragments, imaginaries of a subjective gaze.

Ultimately, we are trying to overcome this subjectivity. We are aware of it and at the same time merge into the surroundings, striving just to be.

—Akinbode Akinbiyi

What are you trying to communicate with the material choices you make?

The materials I use are historical resources. They inform my creative process, even though most of the images I work with are unknown and vernacular. They are testaments to the fact that we are all connected to a collective past and future. I want people to see and recover lost memories through my work. I replace traditional painting with archival images, which is equivalent to a painter generating values by mixing colors on a palette. The older an image gets, the paler it becomes. With the passage of time it expresses feelings and emotions, essentially painting with time. I am excited about the new possibilities and inherent challenges that come with my choices of materials, which continuously interrogate technological developments in relation to humans, and the concept of time, as well as themes of memory and the societal role of archives.

— Kelani Abass

What aspects of photography do you work with, and work against?

I think about photography as a visual language, but also about photographs as objects. I also think about images in terms of the types of vibrations or frequencies they carry. In the sense that something is at stake, I am working against certain forces—for example generalizations and stereotypes as they pertain to the Black body and how the Black body has been historically treated in photography. My work seeks ways to address and subvert historical subjugation in photography and make it empowering.

I engage with photography and collections of photographs. These archives become a basis for interrogation, inspection, introspection, and conversation. Images carry a certain power and have been used to propagate certain ideas throughout history, so in my work I’m taking this into consideration and weighing what aspects of the image I want to work with as well as against. This can manifest in how I engage with a material in printing, or through processes such as repeated photocopying or collage, as a way to dismantle, erode, or deconstruct images (and ideas) and create fragments and new narratives that empower and protect.

My work and process also attempt to go against the conventions of the medium—for example, traditions that dictate how photographs should be made and/or composed, what constitutes a camera, which tools can be used for image-making, and what specific material photographs should be printed on. For me, being able to tell the complex stories around colonial history, land, and exploitation requires that I remove these limitations of form-making and think/act outside of the box.

— Abraham Oghobase

I work in collaboration with the people I photograph and the stories they choose to share. I believe that a good photograph is created before a camera is used. I work by waiting, watching, and talking. I work with time.

— Yagazie Emezi