Oluwarotimi Adebiyi Wahab Fani-Kayode was a Nigerian-born photographer, who moved to England at the age of 12 to escape the Nigerian Civil War.
Background
Rotimi was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in April 1955, as the second child of a prominent Yoruba family (Chief Babaremilekun Adetokunboh Fani-Kayode and Chief Mrs Adia Adunni Fani-Kayode) that moved to Brighton, England, in 1966, after the military coup and the ensuing civil war.
Education
He read Fine Arts and Economics at Georgetown University, Washington, District of Columbia, for his Bachelor, continued on for his Master of Fine Arts in Fine Arts & Photography at the Pratt Institute, New New York
Career
The main body of his work was created between 1982 and 1989. He explored the tensions created by sexuality, race and culture through stylised portraits and compositions. Rotimi went to a number of British private schools for his secondary education, including Brighton College, Seabright College and Millfield, then moved to the United States of America in 1976.
While in New York, he became friendly with Robert Mapplethorpe, admitted later that Mapplethorpe influenced his work.
Fani-Kayode returned to the United Kingdom in 1983. He died in a London hospital of a heart attack while recovering from an Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome-related illness on 12 December 1989.
Fani-Kayode admitted to being influenced by Mapplethorpe"s earlier work but he also pushed the bounds of his own art, exploring sexuality, racism, colonialism and the tensions and conflicts between his homosexuality and his Yoruba upbringing through a series of images in both colour and B/West. His work is imbued with the subtlety, irony and political and social comment that one would expect from an intelligent and observant black photographer of the late twentieth century. He also contributed much to the artistic debate surrounding Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. He started in 1984 to exhibit and was part of eight other exhibitions by the time of his death in 1989.
His work has been featured posthumously in many exhibitions and retrospectives.
His work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Italy, Nigeria, Sweden, Germany, South Africa and United States. In 1987 along with Mark Sealy, he co-founded Autograph ABP and became their first chairman He was a major influence on young black photographers in the late 1980s and 1990s. Following Hirst"s death in 1992, some controversy has persisted about works attributed to Fani-Kayode.
"My identity has been constructed from my own sense of otherness, whether cultural, racial or sexual.
The three aspects are not separate within medical Photography is the tool by which I feel most confident in expressing myself.
lieutenant is photography therefore — Black, African, homosexual photography — which I must use not just as an instrument, but as a weapon if I am to resist attacks on my integrity and, indeed, my existence on my own terms.".
Views
Quotations:
"My identity has been constructed from my own sense of otherness, whether cultural, racial or sexual. The three aspects are not separate within medical Photography is the tool by which I feel most confident in expressing myself.
lieutenant is photography therefore — Black, African, homosexual photography — which I must use not just as an instrument, but as a weapon if I am to resist attacks on my integrity and, indeed, my existence on my own terms.".
Membership
He was also an active member of the Black Audio Film Collective.