Bloodflowers : Rotimi Fani-Kayode, photography, and the 1980s /

This critical study of the life and times of Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955--89) is the first release in Duke's "The Visual Arts of Africa and Its Diasporas" series. Raised in a prominent Yoruban family that fled the late-1960s chaos of postcolonial Nigeria, Fani-Kayode was educated in the UK and the US and crossed cultural boundaries to become an established and influential artistic presence in the black and queer cultures of 1980s London and New York. In his brief career he produced a range of deeply intimate, figurative photographs fueled by the sensual and erotic, the performative and ecstatic. Bourland (Georgetown Univ.) threads these photographs--including collaborative works created (both in Fani-Kayode's lifetime and posthumously) with his partner Alex Hirst (who died in 1992)--through a historical continuum in photography that includes F. Holland Day, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eikoh Hosoe, and Yasumasa Morimura, among others. A singular spirit drawn to progressive and activist communities of collaboration, Fani-Kayode worked with members of the Black Audio Film Collective and was a founder and the first director of London-based Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers), the mission of which is to support black photography and film that "highlights issues of identity, representation, human rights and social justice." Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. --Eric Baden, Warren Wilson College