Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou

One can imagine photographs looking like this 150 years ago and, had the medium existed then, one thousand years go, when masqueraders began to appear at Yoruba funerals to guide the passage of the deceased to the spirit world.

Much has changed for the Yoruba and their spiritual guides, who now find themselves in the Republic of Benin, and their costumes have probably absorbed a host of influences over the centuries, but Agbodjélou’s clever strategy of placing his subjects against mud brick walls conveys this sense of an essentially unaltered time.

Today the Egungun masqueraders fulfill multiple functions in addition to being guides to the afterworld, performing the ceremony of cleansing the community prior to the rainy season, or delighting crowds with acrobatics and magical displays. But back a century ago, and more, the photographer would have been a white man, an anthropologist or missionary set out to document ‘the primitive, superstitious practices’ of people still back in ‘the childhood of Mankind’.

He would have seen, but he would not have understood. Today, that photographer is a black man, a citizen of Benin and the son of an illustrious photographer, Joseph Moise Agbodjélou (1912-2000). His generation of photographers had been exposed to the medium while fighting for the French in World War II and returned to West Africa to set up their own studios. His son has seen, and he has understood.

Text by William A Ewing