From the very limited time and moment shared with Deborah Abosede Ibeme, it is
distinguishable the kind of artists who make work, and the ones who hold positions.
Deborah is firmly, uncompromisingly the second kind. The Nigerian fine art
photographer whose solo exhibition “Rituals of Presence” is currently showing at the
African Centre, London does not simply produce images of African women. She has
built, over five years of deliberate and philosophically rigorous practice, an entire
framework for what photography is, what it owes its subjects, and what it demands of
the people who look at it. We sat with her to go inside that framework and to understand
the beliefs that are driving one of the most serious fine art practices in contemporary
African photography.
La Mode : There is a question that finds every serious artist eventually, not what is
the work about, but what is it for. Have you answered that question for yourself?
Deborah: I did answer it before I could make anything worth making.
Photography, for me, is a vessel. Not a medium. A vessel. The distinction matters. A
medium is something you work with. A vessel is something that exists to carry
something else, something that derives its significance entirely from what it holds and
where it delivers it. When I pick up a camera, I am not picking up a tool for making
images. I am picking up something that I am responsible for filling with the right contents
and delivering to the right place.
The contents, in my case, are three things: memory, dignity, and transformation. Those
are not casual words. They are the specific obligations the work carries. Memory,
because the cultural knowledge I am working with, the cosmological traditions of the
Niger Delta, the specific symbolic vocabulary of Ijaw and Urhobo spiritual life, lives in
the body and in practice before it exists anywhere else. When the body stops and the
practice ceases, the memory goes with it unless someone has held it in another form.
Dignity, because the women I photograph have not always been photographed with it.
The history of the camera in Africa is complicated in ways that I carry consciously every
time I set up a frame. And transformation, because the photograph that holds memory
and restores dignity does not leave its viewer unchanged. It asks something of them. It
requires them to see differently. That asking and that requirement, is the transformation.
La Mode: You have said that you don’t photograph women. You photograph what
women carry. Can you unpack that?
Deborah: It is a rejection of the portrait tradition in its conventional sense, where the
subject is the endpoint, the thing the photograph is “of”. In my framework, the subject is
not the end but the beginning. The woman in the frame is not the subject in the
photographic sense but the carrier. She is the living repository of something the image
is trying to reach, something older and deeper and more important than any individual
face.
What women carry, in the specific context of my practice, is the accumulated weight of a
culture’s deepest knowledge. The memory of how things were done. The rituals, the
ceremonies, the forms of adornment and communication and spiritual practice that
constitute a community’s self-understanding across generations. They carry the grief of
what has been lost and the resilience of what has survived. They carry, in their postures
and their gestures and their faces, evidence of everything they have endured and
everything they have maintained despite the endurance.
To photograph this carrying, to make it visible with the full technical and conceptual
authority I can bring to the work, is what the work owes its subjects. Not flattery. Not
even beauty, though beauty is present. The work owes them accuracy. The accurate
rendering of what they carry, in a quality of light that makes the carrying look like what it
is: a form of strength so complete it has become invisible to the culture that depends on
it.
La Mode: And what does the work not owe them?
Deborah: Comfort. The work does not owe its subjects the version of themselves that is
easiest to receive. It does not owe them the performed grace of women who know they
are being watched and have learned to manage the watch. It does not owe them the
flattering surface.
The work owes them truth. And truth, in my practice, is more demanding and more
honoring than any of the alternatives. When a woman stands in front of my camera and
what emerges is the full, unmanaged reality of who she is and what she carries, then
that is a more profound form of respect than any beautiful lie I could ever construct.
La Mode: The quality of stillness in your images is something every serious viewer
notices immediately. But it reads as something more than a compositional choice.
Deborah: Much more even. Stillness, for me, is not the absence of movement or the
absence of expression. It is the presence of concentration. The stillness of a container
holding something under pressure. The stillness of water before it floods.
When people say my photographs are still, I hear a compliment they don’t know they’re
giving. Because stillness is not absence. Stillness is the whole conversation.
In the contemplative traditions of West African spiritual life that inform my work, stillness
is the form of activity. The state in which the most important things become audible
because the noise has been removed. The great portrait, whether painted or
photographed, is the one in which the subject appears to be thinking, in which the
stillness contains an interior life so palpable it makes the viewer lean forward. I have
made the creation of that quality the central technical and philosophical ambition of my
practice.
La Mode: Which is why the silence on your sets is deliberate.
Deborah: The silence I create on set is not a working preference. It is an instruction to
everyone in the room, including the subject. It says: what is happening here is
significant. It deserves this quality of attention. Nothing is incidental. The subject does
not need to perform for me. She does not need to give me anything. I am here to find
what is already true about her and make it visible. The silence is the condition in which it
becomes possible to find.
La Mode: You have spoken about beauty and its obligations in terms that most
photographers wouldn’t use. You’ve said you want work that costs the viewer
something.
Deborah: I am not interested in beauty that asks nothing of you. Beauty that exists
solely for its own sake and that settles into a room and simply decorates it. That is not
what I am building. I want work that costs the viewer something, and not discomfort for
its own sake. That is a different and lesser ambition. The cost I mean is the cost of
genuine encounter. Of being required to look carefully enough that you see something
you were not expecting to see. Something that rearranges a small piece of how you
understand the world.
The cost of recognition. The cost of being changed, even slightly, by something you
cannot quite name but cannot quite put down.
La Mode: And you’ve said very directly that a photograph that only shows you what
you already believe isn’t art but reassurance.
Deborah: The art world is full of reassurance. Work that confirms existing tastes,
satisfies existing expectations, makes the viewer feel sophisticated for recognising
quality without requiring them to encounter anything genuinely new. I am explicitly and
deliberately opposed to this. My work does not reassure. It reveals. And revelation, by
definition, shows you something that was not previously visible. Something that could
not have been assembled from what you already knew.
That is a high standard. I know it is a high standard. But I don’t know how to make work
to a lower one without feeling that I have betrayed the subjects inside it.
La Mode: Let’s talk about the ancestral dimension of your work, because this runs
deeper than theme. It reads more like a cosmological position.
Deborah: Because it is one.
The relationship between the living and the ancestral is the philosophical territory that
runs deepest through my practice. And my position on it is not mystical in the escapist
sense, not a romanticisation of the past or a refusal of the present. It is a specific
ontological claim: that the boundary between the living and the ancestral is more
permeable than Western secular culture generally acknowledges. And this permeability
is not a metaphor, but a reality that the Niger Delta communities whose traditions I work
within have understood and practiced for centuries.
The body remembers what history forgets. And that is the entry point into everything I
make.
La Mode: Can you explain what you mean by that?
Deborah: History, the official record, the documented account, the written archive,
forgets constantly and selectively. It forgets what was not considered worth recording. It
forgets in the systematic way that power structures always forget: by directing attention
toward certain things and away from others until the things turned away from seem not
to have existed.
The body does not forget in this way. The body carries its history in its posture, and
gestures, in its reflexes and the specific forms of knowledge embedded in its practices.
The woman who ties her wrapper in a particular way is not performing a historical
reenactment. She is living a continuity, embodying a practice that links her, through
every woman who made the same gesture before her, back to the origin of that practice
in her cultural tradition. The body is the archive that does not require institutional
maintenance. It is self-maintaining, transmitted through practice, imitation, and the
unconscious absorption of living inside a culture.
My practice is built on the belief that the camera, when used with sufficient care and
sufficient knowledge, can make this bodily archive visible. Can hold the living continuity
in a frame that will outlast the particular body carrying it.
La Mode: That leads directly to something you’ve said about who the work is
actually for, and the answer is more expansive than most artists give.
Deborah: I don’t create to explain. I create to hold space, for the women who came
before, for the ones watching now, for the ones who haven’t been born yet but will need
to know they were anticipated.
Three temporal registers, simultaneously. That is the space I am trying to hold.
La Mode: The phrase “they were anticipated” is unusual. What does it carry for
you?
Deborah: To anticipate someone is to think ahead to them. To act, in the present, with
their arrival in mind. It is a form of care that operates across time. It’s a form of love
directed not at someone who exists yet but at someone whose existence you are
helping to prepare for.
When I create work that holds space for the unborn daughters of the Niger Delta, the
girls who will grow up and need to know what they come from, what their grandmothers
carried, what their culture understood about the world before the world tried to make it
forget. I am performing this anticipatory care. I am telling them, in advance, that their
inheritance is real, and that it is beautiful. That it has been held for them in this quality of
light so that when they arrive they will know what they come from and what it is worth.
This is not a sentimental position, but the most political one I hold. Because the future of
any culture depends entirely on whether the present generation considers the future
generation worth preparing for.
La Mode: You’ve also spoken about leadership and responsibility in ways that
extend well beyond your own practice, the mentorship, the workshops, the
emerging photographers you are training. Where does that obligation come
from?
Deborah: From the logic of the work itself. If I am making a practice built on the belief
that representation matters, that the visibility of the Niger Delta woman, held in this
quality of light, with this level of philosophical seriousness, is necessary rather than
optional, then I cannot make that argument solely on behalf of myself. The argument
only holds if it is reproductive. It needs to produce more visibility, more photographers,
and more eyes turning on this material with the same care and the same refusal to
accept flatness.
A practice built on the belief that representation matters cannot be solely about your
own representation. That would be a contradiction I couldn’t live inside.
So the fifty-plus photographers I have mentored, the workshops in Delta State, the
one-on-one training relationships I sustain alongside a full production and exhibition
schedule. All these are not separate from my practice. They are its most direct
expression. I am building the capacity to see in other people, so that when I move on to
the next series, the next territory of the work, there are more voices speaking a similar
grammar. More eyes turning on the Niger Delta and the African woman with the same
refusal to accept the almost-right in place of the true.
La Mode: Finally, what do you want someone to feel when they stand in front of one
of your images?
Deborah: I want them to feel that they have encountered something that was already
true before they arrived, something that did not need them to understand it in order to
exist, but that becomes slightly more fully itself in the presence of someone paying
close enough attention.
Like I have already said, I want them to feel the specific discomfort of recognition.
Seeing something they have always known but never seen made visible in this form.
I want them to leave the room slightly different from how they entered it.
And I want them not to be entirely sure what changed.
That uncertainty and a sense of being altered by something you cannot fully name is the
sign that the work did what it was built to do.