Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s by W. Ian Bourland (review)

W. Ian Bourland's Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s is that book that delivers on every item proposed in its title. It is a history of an artist whose work has long deserved the broad and sustained treatment that Bourland gives it. It is also a book that retheorizes the nature and the possibilities of photography, exploring the ways that Fani-Kayode bent the medium for vernacular and nonnormative intentions. The book is finally an engagement with the vast cultural, social, and political terrains that are crowded into the 1980s, a decade that defies easy summation. Most powerful of all is how the book models a truly interdisciplinary art criticism, one that is as adept at interpreting the formal properties of Fani-Kayode's work as it is at putting his work in conversation with the dynamic and transnational social milieu that surrounded him.

Fani-Kayode was born in Nigeria to a prominent Yoruba family, indeed members of the Ifa priesthood, those who keep and extend Yoruba cosmology. His family intended him to lead a respectable and elite life in the United Kingdom and the United States. Instead, he became an artist who would use race and sexuality to make work that would push the boundaries of respectability and of photography as well.

Bourland's chapters are written and imagined as photographic exposures, proposing arguments that are at once distinct and provisional, yielding a book in which the reader/spectator can only fully appreciate the cumulative effect and meaning of those exposures by book's end. Initially, the reader is exposed to the spatial resonances of Fani-Kayode's work and the ways that they invoke the real and constructed worlds of West Africa, London, New York, and Washington, DC. The book then considers how musical and aesthetic formations produced the social and ideological contexts for Fani-Kayode's transgressive art. Ever attentive to social context, Bourland introduces the reader to brilliant interpretations of how Fani-Kayode's photography blended various queer and aesthetic cultures. Through this blending, the book demonstrates how Fani-Kayode's work translated across black diasporic settings in the United States and the United Kingdom. Delving further into the citational universe that Fani-Kayode produced, Bloodflowers then analyzes how the work engaged and revised traditions of romanticism, surrealism, and Yoruba spirituality. The book ends poignantly by uncovering Fani-Kayode's attempts to mobilize the ecstatic potentials of photography to meet the historic and personal challenge of HIV/AIDS.

Courtesy Duke University Press

As an art historian, Bourland is attentive to the formal properties of Fani-Kayode's oeuvre and its historical evocations. In the history and hermeneutic that Bourland produces, the reader is presented with not only the visual genealogies of Fani-Kayode's work, but also the musical, dance, and social cultures that shaped his art as well. As a result, Bourland illustrates how Fani-Kayode's work can be read alongside such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe, Eddie Chambers, Man Ray, Alvin Baltrop, Ajamu, Ana Mendieta, Eikoh Hosoe, and so on. He also shows how the artist's work emerged from the house and punk scenes and how the aural imprints of those scenes are legible on the work itself. The reader, hence, comes away with an appreciation not only for Bourland's erudition, but for Fani-Kayode's also.

As Bourland carefully shows, part of Fani-Kayode's aesthetic erudition comes via the relational quality of his work, a relationality that was very much part of the intellectual cultures of the United Kingdom in the 1980s. These were intellectual cultures put in place by the growth of immigrant and queer communities in Britain and by the rise of cultural studies via the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies. Perhaps no one was able to theorize those connections more powerfully than Stuart Hall. In Hall's 1989 article "New Ethnicities," he argued that because of the changing demographics in the...