By Ebri Kowaki

The first viewing of Medeyonmi’s photo art elicits a barrage of emotions, most of them reaching for the transcendental, all of them persuading you, for just a little longer, to abstain from that human act of articulating experience into words. It leads one to think of Luis Borges and his explorations of the artificiality and hence, limitations of words in works like his 1923 Obras Completas. Perhaps words are not mankind’s primary language, Medeyonmi takes it further, perhaps we do not need words to fully experience at all? What remains when words are no more? Feelings. German thinker, Mauthner Fritz, already decried this exercise to be grasping at straws, and even he acknowledged the insufficiency of verbal language. ‘There is no escaping from this prison {of language}’ He says in Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to the Critique of Language) ‘Knowledge of the world through language is impossible.’ Visual artists ever since have been pushing past barriers of external and internal speech to speak directly to the spirit. Appraising Medeyonmi’s images leaves such residue somewhere deep in you; the feeling of having grasped something greatly valuable, hard but necessary to articulate.

This is not to say that there are no words to describe and discuss the artist’ photographs: this essay could hardly exist were that the case. Mede Akran, as she is professionally known, situates her pieces in the thick of weighty conversations, in fact, and in acute ways. Consider her most expansive exploration of racial identity and the Black body in Eyes that See series. Mede’s manipulation of texture is the silver bullet in her arsenal; it says whatever the artist wants it to say. The header image, from Eyes that See series, is a close up of the eyes of a young boy anywhere from his teens to early twenties, heavily processed in Adobe Photoshop. HDR, double exposure, the use of deep rich tones, greens, blues, and purples, turn the skin on the face to tree barks and the eyes, burning altars that suck you in, force you to confront the subject’s perspective, questions of surveillance, memory and the politics of looking. The distortion and digital manipulation may be seen in this context to suggest an engagement with the way Blackness is perceived and represented, however Mede Akran is partially visually impaired, and this artform mirrors the dynamics of perception for the vision impaired. Distortion is a signature ethos of her work and it bestows an otherworldly halo. What is really happening is that we, the viewers, are usually robbed of detail, or a conventional composition, or some other cue we can easily turn to verbal language. The images look muted, but we can feel that they are not dumb at all, quite the opposite, most of Mede’s work is intense, even when it shouldn’t be but that is a criticism we would come to in a later paragraph. Where we have arrived at is solace for despairing Mauthner: that profound meaning can be communicated without needing a single word anywhere – aloud or within.

The Eyes that See series aren’t about race, not primarily. Mede explains that she sought to ‘reflect the truth that vision extends beyond the physical…that the beauty of the world can be felt, sensed and known in ways that transcend sight,’ Perhaps we do not need sight to fully experience as well? This kind of multi-layering is the second common theme across the photographer’s work. Perhaps we shall also declare it her masterstroke, as simple emboss and texture sliders in her palm become archives of myth, history and norm. You shall be the judge, consider one of her most doted on exhibition pieces, an image of an Igbo bride holding a palm wine gourd from Brides from the East.

For Brides of the East, Mede captures the bodies of four women from different regions in Southern Nigeria, just before one of the most important moments in the life of a Nigerian lady: when her father would bless her union with her husband into existence. In this series, her texture applications, as well as the subject’s lack of a face give the work the feel of impasto, in some frames the sculptural energy could remind us of  Ben Enwonwu’s textured figurative paintings. Whatever the projection, it immediately takes us beyond the wedding ceremony about to take place, beyond the smell of curry and cooking fires, first to the immediate past. We contemplate the gourd in her hands, how reverently she holds it, the wedding day is far from over and it is already the only symbolism that ties her to her father left in the frame. In general Igbo marriage norm, the woman carries a cup (Mede’s subject holds the gourd instead for obvious aesthetic reasons) of local palm wine from her father and walks around the gathering of groomsmen or the male folk of her husband’s family, finds where her husband is seated, and serves him the wine kneeling. Festus Onuegbu, a lecturer of history, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, writes, ‘In Igbo marriage rites, the presentation of palm-wine by the bride to the bridegroom makes the highest point of the ceremony. It is suggestive of the groom’s acceptance by the bride, a kind of ontological communion banquet that finally seals the marriage contract.’Remember Mede intends to take us beyond the simple beauty of a bride’s happy day. Leading lines from the gourd, neck and wrist beads lead to the reproductions of a roaring lion’s head on the subject’s red attire. A relatively benign sight on such clothing, the photographer is pointing us to something profound in the common (this is the third theme threading across all of Mede’s work: the profundity of common things- eyes, eggs, wedding days). Her interest here, as well as the rest of the series, is in the ways a woman becomes the pride of her husband. We would explore that interest in just a moment, but in the interests of rectifying false cultural assumptions, it should be noted that the accurate Igbo symbolism is a leopard; due to its heightened powers of perception and skill compared to most other big cats, the Igbos immortalized the creature into an icon of (masculine) power. This philosophy is embedded in the name of the attire worn by our subject; isi-agu, which translates literally to leopard head. The lion may be larger than the leopard, but it was unfamiliar to the ancient Igbo and its use in modern symbolism is a recent alteration inspired, no doubt, by the overlaying of Western sensibilities over natural ones.   Across Brides of the East, Mede discusses pride and legacy, of men, and of empires. The Benin bride, garbed in a flowing deep red gown, wears a frilled bead crown, holds a horsetail in both hands, re-enacts a pose the Oba might have assumed for a portrait a century and three decades before, one hand on his sword, horsetail in the other. Mede carries on this way; discussing the power and prestige of men through women’s bodies. Or rather, we keep imposing male lead characters into her story, as patriarchal conditioning has taught us to. Rather than confronting our notions, she subjects us to a series of images that are at once common and curious. At some point near the end of the series, the line between genders has been diluted enough to become fluid. Just like in Eyes that See, the frame suddenly shouts to you, commanding your attention, reflection. Whose power are we really discussing? Why do we think men held the power? The bride wears the ornaments on her body, it might be as well that she allocates it as well. She taught the leopard to crouch invisibly, she taught the Oba to dress regally. The source of man is a woman, indeed, and that hierarchy, the one created by Mother Nature, persists.  

II – As is the mark of every great artist, Mede’s photographs can be enjoyed for both their critical and entertainment value. Her trademark texture signature is distinct and memorable, achieved by superimposing sharpened versions of the same, or sometimes different images, on each other. Her work sits squarely within the aesthetic favored by other multi-genre artists, Muholi Zanele and German-Ghanaian textile artist, Zohra Opoku. Just like Mede, the South African visual activist, Muholi relies on texture and composition manipulation often in her work. Their black-and-white or sepia portraits employ stark contrasts and tight compositions to foreground facial expressions and textures, stripping away distractions to emphasize humanity.

The trade-off of restricting your work to a single distinct look is that it would not always fit every context. The intensity of high definition rendering inevitably shows up in Mede’s work, sometimes as a mood mismatch, sometimes as though the editing was trying to force feelings the image didn’t intend not communicate. Take Women Supporting Women, inspired by the same awe for the overlooked present in Brides from the East. One of the frames features three women in a close sisterly embrace, their backs turned to us, their faces nowhere in frame, like the intended warmth the image is meant to convey. We know this is a depiction of trust and bonding only by the photographer’s statement of intent. The photograph itself, cut away from facial expressions and colour and other cues of love and safety, invites melancholy. If we were to wonder upon the image, ignorant of its backstory, when we imagine what their story must be, we would more readily picture three sisters staring as their eldest brother rides away to seek greener pastures. The head resting on shoulder meant to communicate support mutates into the tiredness of protracted weeping, the subject in the center now appears to be consoling the other two while barely containing her own grief. In this case, the lack of even the most muted of colours may contribute to the unintended messages of grief and melancholy.

There is an appropriate way to appreciate Mede Akran’s photography; with the sort of intellectual excitement Richard Avedon’s photographs elicit. Her work mostly appears eerie and paranormal, but that metaphysicality opens up to layers of socially relevant interrogations and musing on identity and perception. Her work earns her the right to stand shoulder to shoulder among the ranks of contemporary art activists.     

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About the author

Ebri Kowaki is a culture journalist and Afrofusion commentator. His works have appeared in The Republic, Afrocritik, African Writer Magazine, Akowdee Magazine, and elsewhere. A 2025 fellow of the Ebedi International Writers Residency, he was shortlisted for the Ikenga Prize in 2024. Subscribe to his Substack: https://ebrikowaki.substack.com/.