Griot, storyteller and multimedia artist, Oreoluwa Ifamodupe Akinyode, joins us as our second Research Fellow of 2025, exploring the interplay of West African studio photography and textile histories and journeys through to the present day.
Greetings, Flickr Foundation Community! My name is Oreoluwa Ifamodupe Akinyode and I am so honored to be a 2025 Flickr Foundation Research Fellow! As a griot telling and carrying stories through the language of photography, film, writing, and music, I am called to multimedia practices that allow me honor and preserve one’s legacy. With this passion I call on the prayer-filled archival practices of West African oral storytelling traditions to guide me from where I am currently based, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Fueled by my reverence for memory, I am deeply excited by the Flickr Foundation’s commitment to preserving the image-based ephemera of a person, community, space, and cultural moment through the foundation’s care for memory for the living and future generations.
As a 2025 Flickr Foundation Research Fellow I am deeply honored to be Threading Ephemeral – the tentative title of my research project – with the fibers of memory embedded within early West African photography studio portraiture and the textile history that supports this history. From the textiles portrait sitters wear to the physical backdrops seen within these early imagery, I am curious of the ways people have desired to be remembered within the photographic medium. It is in these photographic backgrounds – utilizing traditional weaving practices, batik fabrics, draped fabrics, or painted backdrops of places far away, paired with the clothes one may choose to wear within a portrait session – that these curiosities begin to unravel and reveal themselves. Each image reveals the context of a cultural moment that influences the backdrops, clothing, and sonic landscape of that time that reverberates across these photographs. These images demonstrate a call and response across the Atlantic Ocean and West Africa, as we encounter the rippling waves and echoes of these backdrops within African American photo archives, textile/quilting traditions, and the preservation of tangible and intangible ephemera through storytelling.
For my fellowship I will be using the Flickr collection as a tool to trace the types of textile changes seen in personal archives uploaded to the site, along with the shifts in early studio portraiture with the rise of digital photography that led to the dissolution of these formerly thriving photo studios in West Africa. In this rapid change I seek to find what has happened to these spaces and backdrops that once gifted people a tangible imagination, to place one outside of one’s current reality.
“I look to you” image Spread by Oreoluwa Akinyode, 2025
Through the piecing and “quilting togethering” of selected ephemera individuals have uploaded to the collection, along with oral interviews, I seek to understand what stories and cultural context exists inside and outside of the fragmented moment of an image. In this research I will embark on demystifying archival practices, through the invocation of griot traditions, the passing of a story through sound, poetry, and prose with the air that carries these stories from ear to ear.
Through this demystification of archival practices, I am guided too by indigo and the mysteries it carries. In Yoruba culture, indigo is referred to as the color of love. It is through this act of devotion to process, patience, and transformation that I find myself praising indigo. Indigo continues to show me how I can strive to show up in this world, devoted to the process of change.
In this act of demystification of institutionalized archival practices I invite my community and affirm that we are all inherently archivists and to encourage small and mighty ways of archiving in the everyday by activating archives through imagemaking, filmmaking, and tactile mediums.
Stay tuned to hear more of my curiosities and check out my website for more information on me and my practice.
Thank you deeply!
More Information on Indigo and Color of Love:
For Chief Dr Nike Davies-Okundaye, Adire fabric symbolizes empowerment, ownership, and liberation: https://colorsxstudios.com/editorials/mama-nike
Gasali Adeyemo Speaking about Yoruba Indigo: https://www.yorubaindigo.com
