A portrait of Lawrence Agyei

‘It’s more of a memory thing,’ says Ghanaian portrait photographer Lawrence Agyei, reflecting on his family’s engagement with photography during his childhood. Born and raised in Italy, before moving to Chicago as a teenager, he recalls people were always documenting events, from house parties to birthdays – something he partly attributes to growing up in a dynamic immigrant community. In his own home, Agyei would frequently flip through family photo albums, observe his father’s photographic practice and collate makeshift books himself, drawn from his father’s contact sheets. Later, he began to play around with his father’s camera, taking photographs of his friends and recreating scenes from his favourite movies. 

It wasn’t until taking a photography class his senior year of high school in Chicago that Agyei says he began to take the subject more seriously. After graduating, he spent hours at local libraries and bookstores poring over photographic books and expanding his visual language. Yet however much credit Agyei gives to his high school photography course for setting him on his current course, with the conversation repeatedly turning to the influence of those childhood images, it’s hard not to see the roots of the career that followed were there in his own family archive from the start. 

In the 1960s, Agyei’s maternal grandfather would hire a photographer to come to his house in Ghana to take family portraits. One of them, a black-and-white, palm-size image features his mother aged five, alongside Agyei’s grandparents, aunts and uncles. The group is photographed against a print backdrop, which hangs askew. Agyei traces the line of this family portrait back to the work of Malick Sidibé, the Malian portrait photographer known for his black-and-white photos of stylish youth around the same time period which continue to reverberate. ‘We’re literally trying to create this same style of work,’ Agyei says of the impact of Sidibé’s practice on photography today. 

Later, Agyei speaks in detail about his serendipitous opportunity to photograph the musician Leon Bridges last fall. The photo shoot was only supposed to be 10 minutes, but after sharing similarities and affinities, Bridges and Agyei talked for almost two hours before a single shot was taken. The result of such a deep level of engagement was a series of images of Bridges rendered with tenderness washing over him. In one shot, Agyei zooms out revealing the edges of the frame, his mentor holding up one side of the backdrop. It bears a stark resemblance to that of Sidibé’s work, yes, but also of the photograph of his family in Ghana all those years ago.   

‘We all have reference points,’ Agyei says. ‘Sometimes I take it all the way back from when I was little.’ Agyei drives home the point that, as Black people from a diaspora who have looked to image-making, style and creativity to connect our present to our past, to do so is innate. ‘This is how my grandparents, my uncles and aunties used to get their photos taken,’ he says. ‘This is not a commercial, fashion thing. This is real life.’ Alongside his study of Sidibé, photographers such as Gordon Parks and Irving Penn have helped shape his practice.

Now a successful photographer with a host of notable projects in his growing oeuvre, Agyei still considers himself a young photographer, sharpening what he wants to say through his images. In addition to Bridges, he’s photographed Indya Moore, Jamila Woods and Vic Mensa for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Huck magazines, respectively. He’s also turned his lens on Chicago, and the community he’s built for himself in the city over the years, for projects for Apple and fashion brand We All We Got. 

In his most recent project, Drill, Agyei documents Chicago’s esteemed performing arts group, South Shore Drill Team. Founded in 1980, the programme now serves hundreds of youth in the city each year. Throughout 2021, Agyei spent days with the team as they prepared for their first performance since the lockdowns and travel restrictions of the pandemic saw their entire schedule cancelled the year prior. The project is the first Agyei has shot entirely in black and white, citing community-based projects such as Imperial Courts, by Dutch photographer and filmmaker Dana Lixenberg as inspiration, alongside the work of renowned street photographer Dawoud Bey and portraitist Peter Hujar. 

While these photographers shaped his art historical approach to Drill, Agyei also went back to team’s own archive, specifically black-and-white photographs between the 1970s and 1990s. It’s the longest he has worked on a project, which has resulted in portraits and candid photos of team members practicing, adorned in their glittering uniforms, staring into the photographer’s lens as he captures their perseverance, pride and beauty. 

‘The work that I’m putting out, it pretty much represents me,’ Agyei says. ‘It also represents the community that I’m in. I want to create honest work. That is my main thing. I want to be able to compose a beautiful, honest, intimate image.’