Publisher's Weekly Review
Selecting from her personal collection, curator McKinley (Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World) showcases 150 studio photographs of African girls and women (mostly from Burkina Faso, Chad, Gambia, Nigeria, and other countries in the Sahel and along the continent's Atlantic coast) in this richly detailed and immersive visual history. Spanning the 1870s to the 1970s and covering the colonial, independence, and postindependence periods, the images and McKinley's commentary--which pays special attention to the subjects' clothing, accessories, and jewelry as indicators of their identity and status--tell the story of exploitation and resistance as it played out in everyday life. Some of the colonial-era photos were printed on postcards as soft-core pornography for European men "battling the heavy spell of Empire," McKinley writes, but by the time of independence (beginning with Ghana's liberation in 1957), "dress and the camera" were "powerful decolonizing agents." The new fashions women wore to be photographed in studios "were the dramatic proof of a conscious engagement with Pan-African and other radical politics across the continent and the globe." McKinley also chronicles the importance of the sewing machine for African women's self-expression and economic agency, and highlights the emergence of female studio photographers, including Ghanaian artist Felicia Ewurasi Abban. Packed with arresting images and incisive analysis, this well-conceived survey tells a powerful story of African liberation. (Jan.)
Booklist Review
If you've ever attended a West African celebration, you may have noticed that some of the female guests were wearing the same fabric, fashioned into different styles. This is to signify the powerful idea that a woman can "tie your cloth to their cloth." In other words, they can tie your soul to theirs so that they share in your joy or your mourning on a truly profound level. This is but one example of the revelations of the visual journey that curator and author McKinley (Indigo, 2011) provides via photographs documenting 100 years, 1870--1970, of African women and their self-expression through clothes and image. From young girls in Mali wearing "hot" outfits beneath attire deemed respectable by Muslim culture to women defying Western Christianity by wearing traditional African attire to church, McKinley focuses on the ways in which fashion is a form of protest and resistance, preserving history in "more resilient and revealing" ways than any other. The African Lookbook is an exquisite collection of African photographs and stories bearing witness to the power and grace of African women.
Choice Review
McKinley's timely book weaponizes two unlikely and often assumed neutral partners--the camera and the sewing machine--to decipher one hundred years of photographic history and representation of African women (1870--1970). This brilliant book is an important contribution to the predominantly Eurocentric history of photography as it explores how identity and empowerment are constructed in front of the camera. Referring to cloth as a second skin, and including photographs that both cover and uncover women's bodies, McKinley reveals how women reclaim their selfhood, breaking down narratives of colonialism despite the fact that women were disproportionately used as subjects to ultimately reveal how the camera and clothing became tools of resistance and invention. Drawn from the author's expansive (geographically and conceptually) personal photo archive (https://themckinleycollection.com/), these 150 photographs demonstrate how the camera and the sewing machine became tools of both freedom of expression and colonialism and ownership, while dismantling Western stereotypes of African women, image by image. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Judy Natal, emeritus, Columbia College Chicago
