African Street Photography Gets the Anthology It Deserves

How do you select 33 artists from the hundreds of young African photographers who are working across the continent and sharing their images everywhere from museum exhibitions and fashion pop-ups to WhatsApp groups and Instagram projects, at a moment when African photography is more abundant and vibrant than ever?

First, if you’re Nadine Barth and Azu Nwagbogu, coeditors of the dynamic new anthology Street Photography Africa (Thames & Hudson, 2026), you embrace the abundance. You posit that broad access to photographic tools and the global circulation of images, far from diluting the purity of the art, has made photography more relevant than ever—as a way of documenting, but also of shaping and empowering, self-representation on the continent. You remind readers that it wasn’t so long ago that photography functioned, for most people in Africa, as an “apparatus of enclosure,” as Nwagbogu writes. It was wielded by colonial administrators, ethnographers, and, later, a certain breed of Western photojournalists parachuting into crises to control, classify, or pathologize African life.

And then you jump into the vibrant, tumultuous now, with a compilation that presents photographers as participants and actors. This is not the street photography that lurks in surreptitious wait for the candid “decisive moment” that distills pathos or paradox. It’s something overt and mutual, in which photographer, subject, and setting activate the street, the editors write, as a “laboratory of social transformation…where global influences merge with local sensibilities and where communities assert their right to be seen on their own terms.”

Divided into six thematic sections, Street Photography Africa has its share of cityscapes. Studies of Lagos, by Daniel Obasi, for example, or of Johannesburg, by Sabelo Mlangeni or Guy Tillim, convey both the congestion of city life and, more movingly, quieter moments: people gathered in doorways, or figures passing through the streets lost in thought. What develops across the 33 practices is a kind of expanded portraiture that breaks the silos of fashion, documentary, conceptual, and street photography in pursuit of an active force that traverses them: style.

Take the figures standing in front of minibuses or transport vans—a familiar sight in African cities that’s become a common trope—in two photographs: one by Hamza Rochdi, made in Casablanca, Morocco, and the other by Kenya Tay, made in Ho, a dusty regional capital in Ghana. The man in high-top dreads and extra-wide jeans with sunglasses and a carryall in Rochdi’s image, part of the series “Youth Mosaic of Casablanca” (2024), is clearly a model. The van, in a bright blue that matches his outfit, carries a mountain of boxes on a scaffold on its roof, with more visible through its side door. A subtle sociology is at work, to do with labor, commerce, and also race and immigration. The photo’s subject is either Black Moroccan or likely part of the country’s migrant population; the picture, ostensibly a style study, manifests and scrambles analysis all at once.

In contrast to Rochdi’s blues, the image by Tay, 66th Independence Day (2023), is a study in reds, vibrant over the brown earth of an unpaved bus park in Ho. Three young girls wear simple matching smock-like dresses with narrow red stripes, which might be school uniforms; behind them is a utilitarian bus typically used to transport workers at public agencies, in this case the fire department. As the title indicates, it is Independence Day, and one of them holds a small flag of Ghana to wave; another carries an umbrella against the sun. The strong sense is that Tay (who is Ghanaian-Dutch and based in Paris) has come across these teenagers and asked permission to “snap” them. It is this moment of mutuality—more than a courtesy, an energy—that turns the image into a social document even as it imbues the scene with allure.

It’s common to assert that Africa brims with style, a generalization across 54 countries and 1.5 billion humans that, when deployed without care, can slide toward fetishization. But there are certain common elements across the continent that are not only economic and ecological, structured by colonial histories and the geopolitical present, but also representational and aesthetic. Put basically, it’s hard to come away from cities like Dakar, Abidjan, or Lagos unmoved by a certain ambient fabulousness—in pattern, gesture, and poise—that transcends social barriers and manifests most vividly in the street.

For Nwagbogu, what makes African street photography so dynamic is how in these cities “the ordinary and spectacular continuously interpenetrate in public space.” He traces this effect to deep-seated, relational conceptions of identity: for instance, the Nguni Bantu philosophy of ubuntu (often rendered as “I am because we are”), or the Akan notion of “personhood as comprising multiple, fluid aspects” known as okra, sunsum, and mogya. “The street accommodates this multiplicity,” Nwagbogu writes. “One can be trader and mother and church member and fashionista simultaneously, performing different aspects of selfhood as context demands.” It’s this moral outlook that links people of the city—say, the Dakar designer and fashion maven Khadija Aisha Ba, as seen in a hyperstyled portrait by Trevor Stuurman—with the vendors and repairers in Tantolohun Ayanda’s bluesy Lagos scenes.

The intersection of African fashion and visual art is rich these days with crossover practices, notably among networks of millennial and Gen Z artists and designers connecting local and diasporic scenes. For curator and fashion historian Tosin Adeosun, who contributes an essay to Street Photography Africa, “present-day African photographers documenting through a sartorial lens are creating and steering a new archival practice.” Photographers Stephen Tayo and Sarah Waiswa, also featured in the book, appeared in the exhibition “Africa Fashion,” which originated at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2022 and traveled to the Brooklyn Museum. They and others extend a legacy that Adeosun traces back to the great studio photographers of the 1960s–70s independence era, like Seydou Keïta or Paul Kodjo, who opened space for self-expression and self-invention, and that continued through pioneering magazines of the 1990s.

African photography is the subject of deepening study and gatherings driven by African practitioners. A photo biennial has been held in Bamako, Mali, since 1994; Nwagbogu founded the LagosPhoto Festival in 2010. Other events take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Cairo, Egypt; Marrakech, and elsewhere. The London-based curators Ekow Eshun and Osei Bonsu and the New York–based Oluremi Onabanjo are among those organizing major African photo exhibitions at key Western museums. The African Gaze (2024), by the Senegalese-American scholar Amy Sall, and Tender Photos, an innovative online platform for African photography founded by writers Emmanuel Iduma and Ayòbámi Adébáyò, are important new contributions. Into this rich milieu, Street Photography Africa brings its own vital proposition: that the old boundaries of photo practices blur to especially productive effect in the cities of the continent—where, as coeditor Barth writes, “true satisfaction from real or imagined self-staging is only ever found in the streets.”

Lead image: © 2026 Alexandre Gandaho. Images excerpted from Street Photography Africa, by Nadine Barth and Azu Nwagbogu, © 2026 Thames & Hudson Ltd., London. Reprinted by permission of Thames & Hudson, Inc.