Photographer Andrew Dosunmu Brings Worlds Together in His New Book

The beauty of Monograph—a new art book by acclaimed Nigerian and New Yorker photographer, filmmaker, stylist, and creative director Andrew Dosunmu—lies in the uncanny juxtapositions of distinct realms. Wholly separate images shown side-by-side form their own dynamic relationships. Two people in different portraits appear to size each other up across facing pages; on the road in Lagos, a young girl flashes a smile in the direction of a portrait of a man, pausing briefly, his mesh shirt resting on his head. They may never have crossed each other’s paths, but here they do.

“I love both that seamlessness of brothers and the dissimilarities—that’s what I’m attracted to when I’m photographing,” Dosunmu, who grew up in Nigeria and England, says in a café in his Crown Heights neighborhood. A prime example is a spread of two facing pictures from Jamaica. It’s as if Dosonmu’s camera peels away the walls, so that two interior spaces are suddenly joined, like mirror reflections. Famous and familiar faces, most not credited by name, slip into these pages discreetly—a portrait of André 3000 pops up as surprisingly as the Outkast musician himself and his flute might, in random airports and settings all over the world. Even when working on fashion commissions, Dosunmu prefers to find models on location. “It was always about real people,” he says. “Going to India, Senegal, Vietnam, wherever, and casting people off the streets.”

منبع Andrew Dosunmu

In Monograph, collages from Dosunmu’s work as a stylist casually bump up against his work as a fashion photographer, and stills from his films (including Beauty and Mother of George) and music videos (among the musicians he’s worked with: Isaac Hayes, Bob Marley, Aaron Neville, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu). They all naturally blend into the images that are at the book’s core: pictures that span roughly 20 years, from the early 2000s to the present, a roving eye that remaps the world. Page to page, we jump in quick succession between Quito and Accra, Chicha and the Port of Spain, Manila and Sudan.