Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos - by Oluremi C Onabanjo (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A focused study on a singular African American photographer, through an archival encounter with her documentation of the landmark FESTAC'77 festival

From January 15 to February 12, 1977, more than 15,000 artists, intellectuals and performers from 55 nations worldwide gathered in Lagos, Nigeria, for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, also known as FESTAC'77. Taking place in the heyday of Nigeria's oil wealth and following the African continent's potent decade of decolonization, FESTAC'77 was the peak of Pan-Africanist expression. Among the musicians, writers, artists and cultural leaders in attendance were Ellsworth Ausby, Milford Graves, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Samella Lewis, Audre Lorde, Winnie Owens, Miriam Makeba, Valerie Maynard, Queen Mother Moore and Sun Ra.
While serving as the photographer for the US contingent of the North American delegation, Brooklyn-based photographer Marilyn Nance made more than 1,500 images throughout the course of the festival--one of the most comprehensive photographic accounts of FESTAC'77. Drawing from Nance's extensive archive, most of which has never before been published, Last Day in Lagos chronicles the exuberant intensity and sociopolitical significance of this extraordinary event.
Over the course of five decades, Marilyn Nance (born 1953) has produced images of unique moments in the cultural history of the US and the African Diaspora. Nance is a two-time finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Library of Congress, and has been published in The World History of Photography, History of Women in Photography and The Black Photographers Annual. She lives in New York.

Review Quotes

A thorough account of sociopolitical significance, beauty, and joy of the gathering.--Allison Schaller "Vanity Fair"

Each image is saturated in human connection; each photograph stirs a memory. And even across the distance of space and time, the world depicted in these pages thrums with closeness, or a need for it.--Caleb Azumah Nelson "The New York Times Book Review"

In part thanks to its collagelike form, it captures the range of intellectual discussions and political debates that normally get glossed over in favor of a single narrative of Pan-African grandeur...the intimate publication has a similarly polyphonous effect as Chimurenga's, immersing the reader in Nance's archive as though it were an unfinished sentence, an elaborate thought trailing off.--Tiana Reid "New York Review of Books"

Nance's immersive archive, woven together with writing from various contributors contextualizing the work, make this culturally significant festival accessible to a wide swath of readers.--Kim Bubello "TIME"

Nance's photography scrambles the nameless and the notable, mirroring the spirit of a festival that levelled boundaries even as it celebrated difference.--Julian Lucas "New Yorker"

An incomparable photographic essay on a landmark event.--Eugene Holley Jr. "Publishers Weekly"

It's a joy to see Marilyn's work on Festac '77 come to life in Last Day in Lagos. It goes beyond simply being a photographic archive, and cements itself as an important cultural document for years to come.--Joey Levenson "It's Nice That"

Hers is the deepest individual image archive to have emerged from FESTAC '77 -- a major contribution on those grounds alone, but also a long-overdue focus on the early work of an important Black photographer who herself has only recently earned proper institutional notice.--Siddhartha Mitter "New York Times: Arts"

Last Day in Lagos, then, is a festival of its own, a feast for the creative imagination that introduces today's generation to their artistic ancestors.--Anakwa Dwamena "Aperture"

Offer a glimpse of the radical possibilities of Pan-African unity.-- "Wall Street Journal"