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A Portrait of Creative Community in Ivory Coast
In his crisp, ecstatic photographs, Nuits Balnéaires draws from iconic West African portraiture to depict his circle of friends and family.
A slinky crease of a jacket, a streetlight lurking in the background, marbles resting in the scoop of a collarbone, flowers forming a shadow on a model’s face. These intense details of light, shape, and form heighten an atmosphere of crepuscular intimacy in the brooding and buoyant images of Nuits Balnéaires, a photographer, musician, filmmaker, poet, and set designer based in Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast.
Nuits Balnéaires’s interest in photography can be traced back to some high school modeling he did casually for friends. “In that age, it was the boom of Facebook,” he told me recently. “It was all about doing cool photos for social media.” When his mother came back from a trip with a compact Sony camera, he began to make his own pictures. This eventually led him to the fashion industry—magazines, advertising, brand photography, as well as deep admiration for the know-how of local artists and designers in Abidjan, Accra, Lagos, and Dakar. “It was a great environment to learn,” he said. “But at some point, I had that need to focus on more personal stories.”
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After moving in 2019 from his former home in Abidjan (Ivory Coast’s de facto capital) to a new-to-him scene in the small, historic town of Grand-Bassam, Nuits Balnéaires was renewed by nature. His embrace of landscape is evident in depictions of soft water bathed in twilight. After all, the moniker Nuits Balnéaires translates to “seaside nights” in English and is also meant to provoke what he refers to as an “idea of nostalgia, this melancholy of the Gulf of Guinea, this strong relationship to memory.”
In Grand-Bassam, he created a meditative series called Scent of Appolonia (2021), in which he pays homage to the land of the N’zima Kôtôkô people, an ethnic group of southwestern Ghana and southeastern Ivory Coast. “I was very interested about the link between those territories and the resilience and the sustainability of this whole culture, despite the borders that we inherited from the colonial era,” he explained. “These people still coexist, still share things, even if they exist in those two lands and are separated by these borders.”
Nuits Balnéaires, from Dreaming, Ivory Coast, 2020
Nuits Balnéaires’s interventions, then, mark a wider community. His subjects include friends, professional models, and family. “I work a lot with my sister, who is definitely my main muse,” he said. Another series stems from a partnership with a curatorial platform, Yua Hair, which focuses on textured hair in Africa and the African diaspora. These exquisitely staged photographs take their inspiration from 1960s and 1970s West African studio portraiture, where self-fashioning was understood as a political act within Africa’s postcolonial cultures. A relentless respect for fashion, tailoring, jewelry, craft, and aesthetics are, to Nuits Balnéaires, “a way to really reclaim that identity which is strongly African, but also with a lightness that equals an openness to the world, to this contemporary world, to this global world in which we exist today.”
While Nuits Balnéaires’s crisp and ecstatic images suggest an homage to iconic West African photographic practices, they also attempt to forge ahead, naming and creating a contemporary culture that is specific to his community in Ivory Coast but encouraged by friends in Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Europe, and the United States. “I feel like I’ve been so nourished and built up by the space I come from and its people,” he said with pride. “I think I’ve been lucky.”
All photographs courtesy the artist
This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads.”
