Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Explore about the Famous Photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, who was born in Nigeria on April 20, 1955. Analyze Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Rotimi Fani-Kayode dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Rotimi Fani-Kayode?

Rotimi Fani-Kayode Biography

Rotimi Fani-Kayode was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in April 1955, as the second child of a prominent Yoruba family (Chief Babaremilekun Adetokunboh Fani-Kayode and Chief Mrs Adia Adunni Fani-Kayode) that moved to Brighton, England, in 1966, after the military coup and the ensuing civil war. Rotimi went to a number of British private schools for his secondary education, including Brighton College, Seabright College and Millfield, then moved to the USA in 1976. He read Fine Arts and Economics at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, for his BA, continued on for his MFA in Fine Arts & Photography at the Pratt Institute, New York City. While in New York, he became friendly with Robert Mapplethorpe, who he has claimed as an influence on his work.

Oluwarotimi (Rotimi) Adebiyi Wahab Fani-Kayode (20 April 1955 – 21 December 1989) was a Nigerian-born photographer, who moved to England at the age of 12 to escape the Nigerian Civil War. The main body of his work was created between 1982 and 1989. He explored the tensions created by sexuality, race and culture through stylised portraits and compositions.

He especially referenced Esu, the messenger and crossroads deity who is often characterised with an erect penis, frequently in his images. He would engrave an erect penis in many of his images to describe his own fluid experience with sexuality. Fani-Kayode’s mid-1980s portfolio ”Black Male, White Male” intersects his racial and sexual themes with subtle displays of a devotee-deity relationship. Much of that work expresses an ambiguity that can be associated with Esu, who embodies opposing forces. Speaking on Esu, he insists, “Eshu presides here […] He is the Trickster, the Lord of the Crossroads (mediator between the genders), sometimes changing the signposts to lead us astray […] It is perhaps through that rebirth will occur.” Esu also appears in Fani-Kayode’s photography, Nothing to Lose IX. The presence of Esu is understood in the coloring of the mask; using white, red, and black stripes the mask stands as a representation of the deity Esu. Although, these colors symbolize Esu, the mask itself has no precedence in traditional African mask-making; this subtle theme is almost flattening the mask to represent an overarching “African-ness” (a critique of the notion of “primitiveness” that was widely digested by a European audience).

He started in 1984 to exhibit and was part of eight other exhibitions by the time of his death in 1989. His work has been featured posthumously in many exhibitions and retrospectives. His work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Italy, Nigeria, Sweden, Germany, South Africa and US.

Fani-Kayode’s fragmented sense of being can be examined in his 1987 ”Bronze Head”. In the photo, he crops a figure’s black body to reveal his legs and butt as he is about to sit on top of a bronze Ife sculpture. The Ife sculpture is placed on a round platter, stool, or pedestal, and is placed strategically at the center of the picture frame.Typically, the bronze head in the photograph is meant to honor the Ife king. However, in the context of Fani-Kayode’s photograph, it satirizes the Yoruba kingship institution. The photograph represents both his exile and homosexuality, two core parts of his world. The cropped body symbolises his fragmented identity, the position references his sexuality and the sculpture symbolises the ancient and lifelong social norms that he’s attempting to deconstruct.

This can be seen in his early work, specifically “Sonponnoi” (1987). Sonponnoi is one of the most powerful orishas in the Yoruba pantheon; he is the god of smallpox. As a result of his great power, he induces fear to the point where people are afraid to speak his name, and he becomes an outsider, abiding in the countryside instead of the mainland. In the image there is a headless black figure, decorated in white and black spots, holding three burning candles on his groin. Fani-Kayode adorned the figure with spots to represent a Sonponnoi’s smallpox and Yoruba tribal marks. The triple-burning candle on his groin evokes the sense that sexuality continues even in sickness/otherness. It also represents how the Christian faith replaced the Yoruba tradition while also bringing disease with it during colonialism. In a way, Fani-Kayode identified with this orisha being an outsider, but he extended the symbolic message of the image, speaking to him having a condemned sexuality while living in a Western world that clashes with his ancestral religion.

His relationship with the Yoruba religion began with his parents. Fani-Kayode stated that his parents were devotees of Ifa, the oracle orisha, and keepers of Yoruba shrines, an early experience that definitely informed his work. With this legacy he set out on the quest to fuse desire, ritual and the black male body. His religious experiences encouraged him to emulate the Yoruba technique of possession, through which Yoruba priests communicate with the gods and experience ecstasy. An example of such relations between Fani-Kayode’s photographs and the Yoruba ‘technique of ecstasy” is displayed in his work, Bronze Head (1987). His goal was to communicate with the audience’s unconscious mind and to combine Yoruba and Western ideals (specifically Christianity). This practice of fusing aesthetic and religious eroticism compelled the viewer visually and provocatively.

In 1988, Fani-Kayode with a number of other photographers – including Sunil Gupta, Monika Baker, Merle Van den Bosch, Pratibha Parmar, Ingrid Pollard, Roshini Kempadoo and Armet Francis – co-founded the Association of Black Photographers (now known as Autograph ABP) and became their first chair. He was also an active member of the Black Audio Film Collective. He was a major influence on young black photographers in the late 1980s and 1990s. Following Alex Hirst’s death in 1992, some controversy has persisted about works attributed to Fani-Kayode.

Fani-Kayode returned to the UK in 1983. He died in a London hospital of a heart attack while recovering from an AIDS-related illness on 21 December 1989. At the time of his death, he was living in Brixton, London, with his life partner and collaborator Alex Hirst.

His last project, posthumously entitled “Communion” (1995), reflects his complex relationship with Yoruba religion. It seems to emit the Yoruba concepts of coolness and power. He reflects that it is a “tranquilitiy of communion with the spiritual world.” One of the images in the series, “The Golden Phallus,” is of a man with a bird-like mask looking at the viewer, with his penis suspended on a piece of string. The image has been described as an ironic representation of how black masculinity has been burdened by the Western world. In this image (The Golden Phallus), as in Fani-Kayode’s Bronze Head, there is a focus on liminality, spirituality, political power, and cultural history—taking ideals seen as ‘ancient’ (in the display of ‘classical’ African art) and re-introducing them as a contemporary archetype.

“My identity has been constructed from my own sense of otherness, whether cultural, racial or sexual. The three aspects are not separate within me. Photography is the tool by which I feel most confident in expressing myself. It is photography therefore – Black, African, homosexual photography – which I must use not just as an instrument, but as a weapon if I am to resist attacks on my integrity and, indeed, my existence on my own terms.”

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