Not just some passing foreign journalist

Lawyer and writer Elnathan John interviewed U.S. photographer Glenna Gordon. Listen.

A wedding photographer snaps a northern bride with her husband and brother at a ceremony in Kano, Nigeria (Glenna Gordon).

Glenna Gordon is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. She takes evocative pictures of everyday life in Nigeria, showing a special interest in Northern Nigeria. In this interview, Glenna opens up on misconceptions of the north, what drives her as a photographer and storyteller, the ways in which she captures intimate moments and her most recent project: photographing belongings from the abducted Chibok school girls.  She shows, in her words and in her work how invested she is in the lives of her subjects- not just some passing foreign journalist looking for a third world photo. Elnathan speaks to her in Abuja. Here.

Image from Glenna Gordon’s “Nigeria Ever After” Series.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.