MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, issue one

A journal built as a collective voice

MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora is a commemorative publication committed to establishing and representing a collective voice of women photographers of African descent. Its inaugural issue featured a hundred photographers from across the diaspora, with an introduction by Dr Deborah Willis, MacArthur fellow and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, alongside essays by women scholars, journalists and artists. Later issues were planned around a smaller number of photographers, four or five per issue, with in-depth interviews and contextualising essays.

The journal's objectives were stated plainly: to promote an international representative voice of women photographers of African descent; to fill a void by creating space for intellectual discourse around the issues those photographers represent; to build a collective of photographers, journalists and scholars able to develop their practices through solid representation within the field; and to establish the Mfon Legacy Grant, awarded to emerging Black women photographers of African descent, with subsequent annual issues featuring both new work and the work of Legacy grantees.

That last point is why the publication belongs in an archive about funding as much as one about photography. MFON did not only document a community — it built an award inside itself.

Named in memory of Mmekutmfon Essien

In keeping with the idea of my sister's keeper, the journal is named in memory of Mmekutmfon Essien, known as Mfon, who lived from 1967 to 2001. Essien exhibited at the Dakar Biennale in Senegal and received an honourable mention in American Photo magazine's annual survey of the nation's best photographers.

She died of breast cancer the day before her series The Amazon's New Clothes was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art as part of the exhibition Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers. The naming is therefore not commemorative in the ceremonial sense: the journal exists to give continuity to a career that was cut off at the point of recognition.

The founders

MFON was founded by the documentary photographer Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and the visual artist Adama Delphine Fawundu, with the Emmy-winning producer Crystal Whaley joining as deputy editor. Their goal was to create awareness of the impact women photographers of African descent have had on the field.

Barrayn is a photographer based in New York City who has been making images in analogue and digital since the late 1990s, published by the Washington Post, the New York Times, Exposure, Colorlines and others. She received the International Women's Media Foundation's Reporting Grant for Women's Stories in 2017, and her work has been supported by grants from Columbia University's Institute for Research in African-American Studies, the Research Foundation of the City University of New York, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and, four times, the Brooklyn Arts Council.

Fawundu is a photo-based multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn who, over twenty-five years of travel and research, produced several photographic archives documenting life and culture across the African diaspora. Her work appears in anthologies including Deborah Willis's Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, and has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, the Lagos Photo Festival, the Brighton Photo Biennial and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Her commissioned projects include a documentary and exhibition on gentrification at the Brooklyn Historical Society and an advocacy campaign on Black and Latina women living with HIV for the Women's Institute of GMHC. She later served on the Firecracker grant panel.

The structural choice behind the first issue repays attention. A hundred photographers in a single volume is the opposite of the usual editorial instinct, which prizes depth over breadth and would have selected five names and profiled them properly — as MFON itself planned to do from the second issue onward. But the inaugural number had a different job: to make a scale visible. A field in which women photographers of African descent were routinely described as scarce could not be corrected by another profile of an exception; it required a document that no one could read without revising the assumption of scarcity itself. The hundred-photographer issue is that document, and the planned shift to close reading afterwards shows the founders understood the two tasks — first establish the field exists, then give it critical depth — as a sequence, not a choice.