Mame-Diarra Niang
Grief estranges the bereaved from the mourned and clarifies that certain emotional distances are unbridgeable. When the French artist Mame-Diarra Niang first returned to Dakar, Senegal, in 2007, it was to bury her father. Niang’s book The Citadel: a trilogy (MACK, 2022; $125, 376 pages) combines these facts of loss and image making to propose an idea larger than the sum of biography and composition. This is perhaps best represented by the spectral presence of Anchises from Virgil’s Aeneid—a figure moving through epochs, outside time and place, who points his son Aeneas to the world as it will yet become. As Niang has said, it doesn’t matter that her photographs were made in Africa: “I want to express a simple idea that my body is always somewhere else; it is always connected to somewhere else in the world.”
The Citadel constitutes a three-part examination of place. It begins with Sahel Gris, an assortment of ocher-toned images that show construction sites, stray beasts of burden, and a jumble of bricks on weedy earth. At the Wall is a closer look at what is formed on the surface: buildings incomplete yet inhabited, unattended to, or hastily finished; walls weathered by time and neglect; the occasional presence of pedestrians or laborers, who flit into view as though the city were made mostly of concrete. In Metropolis, the conclusion, no building is under construction; the photographs are glimpses of a panorama, views of a city at once grand and impossible to behold.
Portions of the are interspersed throughout , as though establishing the mythological parameters of Niang’s work. In the final excerpt, the following is said of Anchises and Aeneas: “So they wander here and there through the whole region, over the wide city plain, and gaze at everything.” Wandering, the. The vision belongs to a wanderer, whose sights, as in , are lone and hurried. Yet it is a hurry that doesn’t dispense with compressed attention, in which walls of a storied city can seem like meditations on how much a surface can hold, and how much is kept from view.
