Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop has received the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography. It is a distinction granted each year to an artist in recognition of a notable personal achievement in the art of photography or moving image. It is not a lifetime award, but a prize for a group of works or for a particularly significant result. Diop combines staged portraiture, historical references and questions of identity and representation. Institutions such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Brooklyn Museum have exhibited his work in the past. After starting out in landscape and fashion, he has moved towards a line of work more closely linked to self-portraiture and art in a broader sense. His project Being There, created in collaboration with Lee Shulman, was named Book of the Year at the AP Awards. The series digitally inserts the artist himself —dressed in period clothing— into old domestic images of white American families taken during the years of segregation. The originals come from the archive of The Anonymous Project, centred on slides of the white middle class. His sudden presence in scenes of family meals, holidays and celebrations quietly subverts that imaginary by introducing a Black body where it was never allowed to be, forcing us to reconsider who appeared —and who was left out— of the visual representation of what came to be called the “American Dream”.

Beyond the news item, I am interested in a broader tendency I keep noticing in photography coming from what used to be called the Third World, or from the periphery. I see a mode of self-representation that dispenses with victimhood and with naïve epic. There is a clear will to decide how one wants to be seen, as if illustrating a self-authored mythology. Once again, the birds take part in the harmless side of the staging and at the same time seem to act as natural extensions of the multiplied body. They speak of what is delicate, rare, protected in its beauty and, of course, of fragility and of a flight held in reserve.

If there is tension here, it is almost imperceptible, somewhere between playfulness and solemnity. The mise-en-scène asks us to take the gesture seriously: the identitarian allegory, the declaration of belonging, the thread of cultural memory. The impression is of an author who knows he is being scrutinised by the cautious enthusiasm of Western art. Instead of entering someone else’s narrative, he builds his own stage and stands at its centre, calm, unhurried, asking no permission. This is the third time in two months that I encounter statements of this kind. What strikes me is that, although the work never abandons the codes of exotism —saturated colours, textiles, almost unreal birds, flowers and broad tropical leaves swollen with chlorophyll— these elements are orchestrated in a highly personal way, with a deliberately artificial touch. The result is that exotism reads more as quotation than as submission.

At the same time, the image has the aesthetic presence required by global luxury editorials. The references to “African” motifs, associated with the “Global South”, suggest a claim to the right to produce sophisticated images —using one’s own identifying elements— within the repertoire of the so-called First World. Once again, the only prerequisite is a basic, unadorned humility: to show up on equal terms, nothing more.

In the next piece, another of the award-winning artists, also very much worth watching.