Finding Freedom Through Self-Portraiture: The Photography of Khadija Saye

Saye first worked with the wet-plate collodion photographic process when she attended a workshop at Autograph in 2016. She had participated in events and attended exhibitions at the gallery for several years, but this would prove to be a formative experience; it was her first time using a large format camera and she spent hours in the darkroom developing plates. The workshop was held as part of The Missing Chapter - Black Chronicles, a research project that sought to unearth archival photographs of black people in nineteenth century Britain. Saye expressed a particular interest in a series of glass plates from the Hulton Archive, depicting a South African choir who toured Britain in 1891.

The African Choir portraits are compelling photographs. They represent a largely forgotten story, challenging the misconception that black presence in Britain began with the Windrush generation, who arrived in the late 1940s. The portraits embody the complexity, nuances and contradictions of the representation of black subjects in the 19th century. They were taken at the height of the ‘Scramble for Africa’, during which time dehumanising taxonomic photographs of colonised peoples were used to reinforce racial stereotypes and legitimise imperialist expansion.

However, the photographs of the African choir are not ethnographic, they are studio portraits, taken at the London Stereoscopic Company. The sitters are not presented as an object of scientific study for categorisation, but rather as elegantly refined and carefully composed individuals, in line with Victorian conventions of respectability. Yet the photographs were still entangled in a visual culture shaped by spectacle and the notion of the world offered up as exhibition. There is a lingering implication that the choir was a curiosity, a palatable presentation of an African object for an observing western subject.

Music historian Veit Erlmann has extensively documented the choir's experiences in Britain, including their conscious decision to adopt ‘native’ dress. He suggests that the portraits were designed to attract theatregoers by appealing to an exoticising colonial gaze under which the choir performed an imagined ‘Africanness’ that ignored the complexities of their identity or lived experiences.³ However, quoting Professor of Material and Visual Culture Annie Coombes, Erlmann notes the choir did not passively accept this representation, but “knowingly exploited a presentation of self and identity which reappropriated and transformed anticipated western assumptions about the African and Africa.”⁴

In posing for the camera, the choir found an opportunity to thoughtfully construct and perform their own identity. Choir member Charlotte Maxeke, who would go on to be a pioneering political activist, looks directly into the camera. Powerful and poised, her commanding gaze reinforcing her self-determined individual personhood. She emanates a sense of liberation in the agency and authorship of her own image.

Saye wanted to pay homage to these remarkable photographs when she had the opportunity to take her own portrait during the workshop. Despite the differences in composition, lighting and tone there is still a striking similarity between the two images. It feels like an act of visual reverence for those who came before; Saye’s formidable presence and her knowing expression creating an atmospheric sense of solidarity and a shared spirit that resonates through time.

It is evident that Saye’s exposure to 19th century photography, her encounter with the South African Choir, and her experience of sitting for a portrait at Autograph had a profound influence on the making of Dwelling: in this space we breathe. It inspired her to contemplate questions of representation, presence and performance. Saye shared her portrait on instagram and meditated on the experience, with the caption: “Becoming the physical subject of the image was a reflective process and led me to the #feministavantgarde exhibit [at The Photographers’ Gallery] where many of the artists became their own subjects.”⁵

In three of her earlier bodies of work, Crowned, Home.Coming and Eid, Saye remained behind the camera, delving into questions of identity through the creation of portraits of other people. Dwelling: in this space we breathe represents a departure, with Saye stepping in front of the camera to produce self-portraits, likely for the first time. In contrast to the African Choir, Saye was not a patron or sitter in a professional studio, but rather, she was simultaneously the creator producing a work of art and the subject performing her self-image, blurring the boundary between signifier and signified.

To create this work, Saye re-visited the wet plate collodion method with the help of artist and 19th century photography expert Almudena Romero. It is an unpredictable and technically challenging medium in which a plate is coated in collodion and placed in a bath of silver nitrate, making it sensitive to light. The artists would have only had a short window in which to expose the plate before it dried. By choosing this technique, Saye had to carefully plan each image and hold her pose with intention, thoughtfully considering how she wanted to be seen.

Whilst Saye had control over how she posed and how she staged her scene, this was juxtaposed by the inherent volatility of the wet collodion method; the fragility of the glass or metal plate, the precarious pouring of the chemicals and the inconsistency of the reactions are mostly beyond the creator’s control. Much of what feels integral to the images, the beautiful details that add visual interest and implicit meaning, was likely unintentional and uncontrollable. To a technical practitioner, the delicate wispy marks, the smoky haze or the intensely contrasting areas of light and dark might be considered flaws, a mistake produced while preparing the plate or resulting from a bad pour of the chemicals.

For Saye, there was a liberation that came from submitting to the process, a sense of freedom in this lack of control. As explained in the exhibition booklet for The Diaspora Pavilion: “Within this process, you surrender yourself to the unknown, similar to what is required by all spiritual higher powers: surrendering and sacrifice. Each tintype has its own unique story to tell, a metaphor for our individual human spiritual journey. The process of submerging the collodion covered plate into a tank of silver nitrate ignites memories of baptisms, the idea of purity and how we cleanse in order to be spiritually sound. The application of the collodion transcends the photographic process; it is a reflection, a physical manifestation of the artist’s subconscious relationship to traditional African spirituality.”

In each of the nine portraits, Saye presents a different object: prayer beads, amulets, animal horns and other items belonging to her parents. Saye was born in London, but her parents had immigrated to the UK from The Gambia. The family lived on the 20th floor of Grenfell Tower from the early 1990s. Growing up in Ladbroke Grove, Saye thought deeply about how spiritual practices manifested in a European context. Saye’s mother was Christian and her father Muslim. In The Gambia, Christianity and Islam have merged with indigenous animist spirituality, and many of the practices Saye explores transcend specific religions. In performing both real and imagined rituals before the camera, Saye was free to explore the complex intersections of her identity; Dwelling: in this space we breathe embodies her exploration of existing between worlds, the double consciousness of the diasporic experience.

Whilst the objects might seem familiar, Saye uses them in obscure and unorthodox ways. Her poses are unconventional, she holds a clay incense burner, anndah, to her ear or places Quranic amulets blessed by a marabout over her eyes. It is tempting to try to excavate these images, to try to unpack their ritual significance in order to reveal some hidden meaning, but the artworks are not mimetic depictions of reality, they reflect the idiosyncrasies of Saye’s personal and deep rooted urge to find solace within a higher power. They are a manifestation of the subconscious, derived from Saye’s innermost emotions, ancestral memories and imaginings that cannot be easily understood. It is this ambiguity that makes Dwelling: in this space we breathe so powerful.

Saye’s work evokes writer and poet Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity”; it subverts and reimagines a colonising gaze that demands full transparency, understanding and classification. Just as the African Choir portraits resist taxonomic categorisation, this work cannot be confined by a singular or fixed meaning. The photography studio became a liberatory space because it allowed Saye to construct and perform her identity in ways which transcend western epistemologies and limited frames of reference. Unburdened by the need to be rendered legible, she found freedom within the grey areas, the liminal spaces, the traces.

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¹ The Art Newspaper, 19 June 2017 
² X, 10 May 2017 
³ Veit Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination, South Africa and The West, 1999
⁴ Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination, 1994, p.40
⁵ Instagram, 19 November 2016