Home – The Journey

From Home, an essay that considers the theme of belonging in Eric Gyamfi and Mimi Cherono Ng’ok’s restless photographs.

Home is included in The Journey: New Positions in African Photography (2020) edited by Sean O’Toole and Simon Njami, and published by Kerber Verlag.

“Neither Ng’ok nor Gyamfi’s photographic projects are concerned with narrative; they are nonlinear in form, follow no sequence of events, each image a beginning with no end in sight. Home – the absent denouement – is never reached, only suggested. Time and place, the particulars of each space photographed, are not given. Instead, an impression of movement, of a figure adrift in the world, uprooted and homeless, without a home. The photographers’ liminal lives, however, are perhaps not exceptional but commonplace. ‘Wilful modernity,’ art critic Peter Schjendahl suggests, amounts to ‘finding, or inventing, a home in nomadic rootlessness.’ To be an outsider: conspicuous everywhere and everywhere unseen. 

‘The idea of erasure,’ Gyamfi said in a 2017 interview, ‘is scary.’ And so he takes photographs that he might be seen, that he might see himself in the places he has been, see the traces of his unsettled life. As Jacques Derrida, giving to the archive the simplest epigraph, writes, ‘if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know tomorrow.’ Both Ng’ok and Gyamfi compile and collage the fragments reflected in their photographs that they might, in hindsight, piece together an imagined whole, an image of a home, however insubstantial, its rudiments composed of – as much proposed by – an unmade bed, a suburban window, a stack of old magazines. But then, perhaps,  home is not a place, as James Balwin writes in Giovanni’s Room (1956), ‘but simply an irrevocable condition.’ I have no choice, but to choose to belong.”