Encountering Mudi Yahaya’s Nina Fischer-Stephan’s Respectful Gaze in Lagos

ABSTRACT

Mudi Yahaya’s film Nina Fischer-Stephan’s Respectful Gaze (2022) is a reconstruction of Nigerian history presented through a meta-representational forcefield of images. The film is a documentary work that explores the resurgent vitality of the German photographer’s archive from the early 1960s. In the Nigerian context, this film explores how forms of historical mediality are conditioned by a multiplicity of aesthetic and creative modes that strengthen the power of moving images to document historical memory. Drawing on social media archives such as the Nigerian Nostalgia Project, a Facebook account where Fischer-Stephan’s historical photographs circulate, I examine the ways in which the film engages the critic in reading a film derived from photographic texts that have been mediated in multiple ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Photography
• social media
• historical memory
• intermediality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article is the outcome of research conducted within the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy (EXC 2052/1-390713894).