The thirty-year-old photographer Joshua Woods grew up in Harlem’s Le Petit Sénégal, a small enclave along West 116th Street, where, as a child, he heard fly, gold-chain-rocking, elder male émigrés speak gloriously of easy black living and independence in Senegalese cities like Dakar or Pikine. Woods dreamed of seeing it for himself and, like many African-Americans, of tracing his roots back to Africa. In early October of last year, he finally embarked, with his Pentax 6x7 film camera, on his first trip to the country. The pictures he made are diary-like reflections that celebrate black life in Senegal.
On his twelve-day journey, Woods, who got his start in downtown New York shooting dazzling snapshots of models for magazines like Vogue and W, captured a series of images that mix social reportage with an eye for style. On Gorée Island’s sandy coast, he captured the skeptical expression of a young black boy wearing a plain white Senegalese boubou (a flowy cotton shirt and trousers) and matching sandals, and the steps of the House of Slaves, a stunning pink building that serves as a memorial to the millions of captive Africans who were transported to the Americas and Europe during the transatlantic slave trade. Walking through Dakar, Woods took pictures of shoes neatly lined up on rutted pavement, colorful towels strung up to dry, men gathered on stoops, and the Olympic inline-skating team, fearlessly high jumping while wearing their roller skates over a steel rod hoisted nearly six feet into the air. Woods told me that the pictures are meant to highlight how black urban communities, whether in Harlem or Dakar, create, against the odds, their own distinct style of fashionable living.
At Lake Retba, a lush body of water located some thirty kilometres northeast of Dakar, Woods met the Senegalese male wrestler Mor Ndiaye. After a tour of the narrow white-sand dunes surrounding the lake, the photographer asked Ndiaye if he would pose for a portrait. Ndiaye waded into the lake’s salty pink water until it coalesced around his waist. He held up his muscular arms in a fighting stance and peered, with a daunting expression, directly at Woods’s lens. The image is one of sublime beauty, a search for strength and a search for self.
*An earlier version of this post misdescribed the Senegalese boubou.
