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

Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the Yoruban photographer of Black queer lifeworlds, is coming home. Nigerian curator Bisi Silva imagined this homecoming as a solo exhibition. It would take place in 2039 as part of a queer-friendly future in the Lagos art scene. In the epilogue of his 2019 book, Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s, W. Ian Bourland reflects on Silva's speculative proposal. Bourland marks the ways in which Fani-Kayode's creative practice—bringing together homoerotic photography, Western art historical iconography, and African aesthetics—was far ahead of its time. One might read this hypothetical return as a call for historians of African art to take seriously the ongoing project of situating Rotimi Fani-Kayode's work as "in some crucial way, Yoruban" (p. 250).

Born in 1955 to an elite Yoruba family, Fani-Kayode spent the earliest years of his life in Lagos before moving to Brighton, England, in 1966, to escape the Nigerian-Biafran civil war. He earned his BA and MFA in Washington DC and New York City, respectively, before returning to England in 1983. Fani-Kayode produced an expansive archive of stunning photographs that blend West African spirituality and European art historical influences with the iconography of queer life in London during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. He classified his practice as "contemporary Yoruban art" and his medium as "Black, gay photography" (p. 7). Fani-Kayode was a founding member of Autograph: Association of Black Photographers in 1988 in London, which still exists as a photographic arts agency with exhibitions and archives. Since his death in London in 1989, Fani-Kayode's work has been shown in Okwui Enwezor's 1996 exhibition In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, a 2014 touring solo exhibition that reached the South African National Gallery, and numerous other solo and group exhibitions. Although Bourland is not the first to write about Fani-Kayode, Bloodflowers is the first monograph to truly engage with the diverse range of influences in Fani-Kayode's oeuvre, including the various social and political scenes with which Fani-Kayode was involved. Bourland invites readers to consider Fani-Kayode as "the Atlantic errant, the queer visionary, the formalist synthesizer, and the art-rock rebel" (p. 5). This is captured in the book's evocative title, Bloodflowers, which is drawn from lyrics byBritish rock band The Cure:

never fadenever dieyou give me flowers of lovealways fadealways dieI let fall flowers of blood

(p. 6).

The title alludes to the postpunk scene in 1980s London, the concurrent HIV/AIDS crisis, as well as the floral accoutrements that appear in many of Fani-Kayode's photographs. Bloodflowers is a poetic synecdoche, encompassing themes of death, beauty, and decay. It is exemplary of the complex range of concerns that Fani-Kayode brought to his art, as well as the creativity with which Bourland treats Fani-Kayode's work.

Bloodflowers is organized into six "exposures," named both for the technical language of photography and the various communities to which Fani-Kayode was exposed. In the first three exposures, Bourland charts a cultural studies reading of Fani-Kayode's oeuvre and its significance to the 1980s and beyond. The first half of the book is particularly useful in presenting Fani-Kayode's role in the Black British art scene, sonic forces (punk rock, Afro-Caribbean, urban dance clubs) influential to avant-garde visual culture, and queer politics. The second half of Bloodflowers explores the aesthetic signifiers and formal qualities of the photographs, with a primary focus on romanticism and surrealism, Yoruba spiritualities, and theatricality. Powerfully, Bourland historicizes Fani-Kayode's aesthetic, political, and social affinities with other Black queer figures such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, George Platt Lynes, and Isaac Julien. Bourland's formal and cultural analyses are rigorous—he insightfully recognizes both the Baroque performance of the photographs and their invocations of...