A Photographer's 10-Year Study of Ceremony and Color in West Africa
By Sana Kovač
Ten years of return visits, the same three villages, the same week of the year, and a slowly changing cast.
Shows like this one tend to be remembered for a single room, and the argument about whether the rest earned it starts on the second weekend.
Sana Kovač, who wrote the book's afterword, has been close to it from the start.
What changed
The photographs are not arranged by year. They are arranged by colour, so a 2016 procession sits beside one from 2023 because both are carrying the same blue.
Two of the people who started the project had left by the time it finished, and the handover notes are now part of the studio's standard kit.
The decision to sequence by colour cost the book its chronology, which two editors argued against.
I stopped photographing the ceremony and started photographing the return.
the photographer
How it works
The final section prints the same nine people in the same order across a decade, one page per year, with nothing else on the spread.
The measure will be whether anything changes afterwards, in the collection or the programme, rather than in the press release.
Peers have been generous in public and more pointed in private, mostly about cost.
They are careful about what they claim. Two of the decisions that look deliberate now were, by their own account, the only option left by the time anyone noticed.
What happens next
It is out this month in an edition of 1,500.
