Eric Gyamfi : Reflections
Ghanaian visual artist Eric Gyamfi came to photography via three different encounters. The first was in junior secondary school, where he was a boarding student and had an older roommate with a camera, “I still distinctly remember the colour, it was silver and ultramarine blue.” the photographer reflects, “We marched to the supermarket and bought two rolls of film. We went straight home, changed into our favourite clothes and invited our friends from the neighborhood. We then took turns making photos of ourselves.” Years later, while a senior in secondary school Gyamfi’s brother gave him a camcorder, “It had malfunctioned, so the only setting that worked was night vision mode. I was very fascinated with how cameras did that, I played with it a little bit until it got completely spoiled.”
The third encounter occurred when Gyamfi was a second year student at the University of Ghana, “There was a guy, Jay, on my floor, who had a camera but he was more interested in being in front of it than behind it.” He went online and learnt how to use the camera, then made a deal with Jay, where he would make photographs and videos of him if he let Eric have the camera for a few days. “I worked with it for two more years, when I graduated I went into photography full time and I’ve never looked back since.”
These experiences culminated into an artistic practice that emphasises curiosity, empathy and connection.
“Photography allowed me to get closer to people without feeling self-conscious. There were young photographers on the internet, who were manipulating images in interesting ways. You could play, you could construct, you could build alternative realities.”
Gyamfi’s breakthrough body of work, Just Like Us, celebrates the joys, anxieties, tribulations and vision of queer life and community, woven at the peripheries of Ghana’s social fabric. In the series, the photographs meditate on the ordinary everyday of Gyamfi’s subjects whom many are friends, laying on a bed with the midday sun’s shade covering the face, in between thought, amongst laughter, reminiscing on the past or in a present state of celebration. The complexities of identity, place and belonging are revealed in the quiet of the mundane, pulling the viewer into the familial resonance of being, but perhaps that said notion is a construction?
“Even then, I think I had a level of awareness of the fictioning nature of documentary photography. I made decisions regarding what kind of colour to present the photographs in, understanding the context that I was making them. And how people read photographs made in that colour pattern.” Gyamfi says. “I realized that there was a level of distance to black and white photographs. That distance comes from not knowing exactly when the photograph was made. I felt that could be a way for people to go into the picture before realizing the subject or theme of the work. As a document speaking about specific people at a specific time, I felt even if it didn’t have a direct impact in the moment, it could exist as a reference point. That was still worth creating or inserting into the larger so-called historical records. ”
"When I look at some of the photographs now, there is still something quite tender about them,
quite ordinary and human.”
On documenting, our conversation shifts to convention and the conceptual nature of things, and how when we as a people agree on a particular notion, it can so to speak, become reality. “I think there is a level of fiction or fictioning, not only in all photography but in the way we organize ourselves.” Gyamfi says, “Once you introduce a camera to mediate and represent, or to cut a fragment from a whole, you are already fictioning. I don’t think a fact and a truth are not necessarily the same thing. We could all be positioned in a room and there is a fact of the conversation happening, but once I lift the camera from where I’m sitting, I am already fictioning. I am conceptualizing, understanding how light works and how people read certain angles. It is a conceptual exercise, [a thought Gyamfi borrowed from philosopher Vilém Flusser] to read the image also requires some kind of conceptual framework. I think once these things come together into a picture, we are looking at fiction. It doesn’t mean it’s not factual, but it also doesn’t make it universally true.”
“I think there is a level of fiction or fictioning, not only in all photography but in the way we organize ourselves.”
In 2019, Eric Gyamfi was the recipient of the Foam Paul Huf Award, and presented his mixed media body of work Fixing Shadows - Julius & I. In the work, Gyamfi blends his own image with a found portrait of African American composer, Julius Eastman. Layer upon layer of cyanotypes form a kaleidoscope. “I bought two Chimurenga booklets in Dakar, Sengal in 2017, I was interested in the tiny booklets and how they were constructed so I purchased with plans to show a publishing friend so I can make my work into booklets like this. One of them had a photograph of Julius Eastman who I didn’t know at the time.” While flying back to Accra from Bamako, there was a long layover in Morocco, “It was hours, so I decided to read the booklets. Once reading the essay by Stacy M. Hardy, I thought ‘hmm..this person is interesting.’”
He found many of Eastman’s experiences to be reflected in his own, albeit in a different geographical context - allowing him to find nodes to attach to. “When I arrived in Accra, I showed my friend the booklet and they told me they had some of his music. I thought to myself, ‘what are the odds he would have such almost niche music?’” Gyamfi went back home, and while listening to the music he says the image of Eastman stayed with him. “I found a portrait of myself from years ago that reminded me of Eastman's.” He began working with the two photographs, initially as screen prints and later on as digital negatives, through countless experiments Gyamfi began to form superimposed figures that the photographer says began to look like, ‘someone…who existed somewhere’.
“I was working and responding to the things that were coming out, and then sometimes taking advantage of it, to either exaggerate it or to complicate it.”
Like music, the photographer Eric Gyamfi is composing multidimensional realities using the act of play and experimentation.
“This has become a part of my practice, trying things, looking and responding to what I have in front of me.”