Public Programs @ the Institute

Series: Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture

Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Peter Schub Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art
Photographic Portraits, Political Imagination

Tuesday, October 21, 2025, 6:00pm

RSVP forthcoming

Can making a photographic portrait be a creative act and a political gesture? This lecture grapples with the implications of this question, offering a prelude to a forthcoming exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art entitled Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination (December 14, 2025–July 25, 2026). Conceptually influenced by The Idea of Africa (1994), a landmark publication by the late philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe (1941–2025), Ideas of Africa considers the construction of Africa as a political idea, and the tools that inventive photographers used to forge it. The exhibition features dazzling portraits by Jean Depara, Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, and Sanlé Sory, who portrayed residents across Bamako, Bobo-Dioulasso, and Kinshasa at a time when the winds of decolonial change swept the African continent in tandem with the burgeoning US Civil Rights movement. Through striking images of everyday subjects, dynamic music scenes, and potent manifestations of youth culture, these photographers reflected emerging political realities and beckoned in new worlds. Instigating a trans-Atlantic call and response, images by James Barnor and Kwame Brathwaite illuminate Pan-African modes of image-making across the African diaspora, while works by contemporary artists of African descent such as Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby demonstrate the enduring significance of these themes. Brimming with possibility and attuned to histories of transnational solidarity and subjectivity, this lecture demonstrates the continued relevance and increasing necessity of looking closely and thinking deeply with photographic portraiture on the African continent.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo is The Peter Schub Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art. Responsible for managing MoMA’s holdings of over 35,000 photographs, she is deeply involved in the ongoing reinstallation of the Museum’s collection. Her research engages internationalist histories of photography in the Atlantic world, resulting in key acquisitions for MoMA’s collection and contributions to its program. Recent exhibitions and collaborations include Visual Vernaculars (2023–25), Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage (2023–24), Projects: Ming Smith (2023), and New Photography 2023 (2023). Onabanjo was the inaugural recipient of the Vilcek Foundation Prize for Curatorial Work (2025), a 2024 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, and sits on the Photography Advisory Board of the Istanbul Modern. She is the author of Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere Everywhere (2023) and the editor of Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022). Onabanjo holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University.