In Sierra Leone, a Photographer Finds Beauty in Everyday Encounters

One afternoon last March, while he was walking along Lumley Beach in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Abdul Hamid Kanu Jr. decided to pray. The photographer set his equipment down, and as he reached for water to start his ablution, he was approached by three boys selling water in plastic sachets. Could they join him in prayer? Yes, Kanu replied. But first, with his camera, he immortalized a moment of the boys squatting by the unending ocean, vigorously wiping their faces with water. A folded cloth—for cushioning a vending pan—still sat on one boy’s head. Kanu led them in prayer. When they finished, he shared words of encouragement: he had fasted for the first time when he was about their age, so they could do it too; they should focus on school and do their best. “That was a really beautiful encounter for me,” Kanu told me.

The photographer has a knack for having beautiful encounters. He runs into fishermen, boxers, street cyclists, hooligans, vagrant kids. In his almost minimalist black-and-white images, Sierra Leone’s capital becomes its own universe that is poetic, even mythical. Everyday people are seen marching on valiantly on epic quests. Kanu’s images are ostensibly of the obvious things one might encounter in a city. But they also give a glimpse of a richer architecture of human relations, desires, and preoccupations that lurk just beneath the obvious. “We Sierra Leoneans are storytellers by nature,” he said. “You ask someone today how [their] day went, and they’ll tell you how they slept, what happened overnight, if they had mosquitoes, if it was really hot, but [it] turned out fine.”

Kanu was exposed to photography from a young age. His father would carry around a camera and take photos of his sister and him all the time. His mother worked as a cashier at one of the first digital-photography studios in the area, on Rawdon Street. A peaceful childhood was cut short: for him and many of his peers, the decades-long civil war in the country threw life as they knew it into disarray. Kanu’s family sought refuge in Guinea, until their return to Freetown in the early aughts. The image of Salone had by then become one of destruction and disorder, desolation, chaos, and fear—all the negative stereotypes of Africa that feed the Western imagination.

Photography took a back seat for Kanu until a stint as a student in Turkey rekindled his love for the art. In 2015 he moved to Sakarya, a town by the Black Sea just northeast of Istanbul, to pursue a degree in information-systems engineering, but he struggled and felt isolated. “I knew Turkish and was fluent in it,” he said, “but it was quite different when it came to the academics.” He also wasn’t truly passionate about his topic of study. “At some point, I got good at coding and building programs, but it wasn’t as interesting as photography.” The province is full of traditional and historical Ottoman sites and natural scenery like lakes, rivers, and springs. He ventured around town with a camera, interacting with people and breaking the bubble of loneliness that sometimes engulfed him. But the real thrill was during breaks when he traveled to Istanbul. There, he met and learned from other street photographers as he tried to explore every corner of this legendary city that charmed him.

Kanu’s photographs display a preternatural ability to be in the right place at the right time. He knows the city’s cadences, and time seems to slow down for him to observe his surroundings, so that his viewers may peer into a brief but more detailed view of things. One day, while running an errand for his dad, he came across a soccer gala organized by some neighborhood kids in the sitting room of an unfinished building. Abandoning his bike, he raced to the scene to take a photo; through his eyes, the viewer becomes part of the throng of ecstatic spectators who consume the action in the arena.

Kanu’s major influences range from old-school photographers such as Gordon Parks and James Barnor to the young, self-taught New Yorker Steve Sweatpants. He finds particular resonance in Parks’s documentation of segregation across the United States, famously portrayed in the series Segregation Story. Several of Kanu’s own photographs have echoes of Parks’s. Take one photograph of a man in a kufi and billowy caftan. The photograph captures him mid-step, neck strained as he looks in the direction of a house; in Parks’s from 1948, Leonard “Red” Jackson, seen from behind, is also mid-step, his slightly baggy suit billowing in the wind. In Parks’s photo, the tall buildings tower over the man, suggesting the scale of what a Black man has to contend with in America. In Kanu’s, the more modest building is made of zinc and wooden parts. It reminds the photographer of the Freetown of old: “Twenty years ago after the war, when you look around, you’d see places like this,” he said. “People just rebuild slowly using zinc, wood, and whatever materials they can find.” In their adornments, the men in both photographs communicate dignity in the face of a reality that looms large.

The work of Kanu and his generation represents a continuation of attempts to establish new relationships to the image and image-making in Sierra Leone. During and immediately after the war, Sierra Leoneans were subjected to the exploitative Western gaze of international journalists and organizations in search of what we now term poverty or disaster porn. Some people, tired after years of cameras being pointed at them, coined the phrase “you click you pay,” demanding recompense.

Today most people smile at Kanu and ask him to make more photos. Once, he was photographing a street celebration when a little girl waved him down. “Snap me, I’m fine,” she demanded. Recalling this beautiful encounter, he told me: “I literally just burst into tears of, like, Oh my god, the confidence. I’m always grateful to be able to capture these little moments of time, and the people.” Kanu sees his work as a way of documenting life and being in community. “Initially, one of the top goals of my work was to counter some of the narratives that were around about Sierra Leone not being safe,” he said. “And one way I feel like you can answer that is by showing daily life.”

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.