W. Ian Bourland's Bloodflowers is a rich and detailed study of the photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode through his short career, before he died suddenly in 1989 at the age of thirty-four. Fani-Kayode was an important participant in the photographic cultural scene of the 1980s, a fertile period for new thinking on the relations between photography, theory, and politics. His carefully performed portraits and constructed studio tableaux centered on the black male body explore themes of race, desire, queerness, and spirituality, drawing on Yoruba and Christian iconography and the gay subcultures of New York and London. Fani-Kayode's work represents a distinctive photographic legacy of that decade, reflective of his personal trajectory as a young, black, gay photographer displaced from the Nigeria of his early childhood and living through a charged sexual-political moment. He also played a part in the photographic institutions of the period, as one of the founders of Autograph—The Association of Black Photographers in 1988, where an archive of his work is now held.

The book has two parts: the first oriented spatially in relation to the locations that shaped the politics and aesthetics of Fani-Kayode's photography; the second attending to “the far-reaching citations and appropriations” (21) evident in the work. Born in Nigeria in 1955, Fani-Kayode arrived in Brighton, England in 1966, when his family sought refuge from political turbulence at home. He came from a prominent Yoruba family, and his father was a significant political figure in the post-independence Nigerian government until the military coup of 1966. Privately educated in England, he then moved to the United States, initially to study economics and fine art at Georgetown University, and then photography at the Pratt Institute, New York. He returned to London in 1983. This Atlantic triangle—West Africa, New York, London—and its negotiation through photography provides a central thematic thread, as the text seeks to disclose the layers of meaning in Fani-Kayode's images through a methodology Bourland refers to as “the logic of the multiple exposure” (20), with interpretations overlaid in an additive process as one moves through the text. One of the strengths of the book is the range of interpretive resources Bourland brings to Fani-Kayode's work, providing multiple avenues of inquiry for those wishing to think about its production and significance. It deals with contemporary connections, such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Derek Jarman, and some which are more surprising, such as the late nineteenth and early twentieth century photographer F. Holland Day. Bourland also discusses Fani-Kayode's engagements with Romanticism, Dutch still life painting, and Surrealism. (I was surprised not to see a specific reference to the 1986 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on photography and surrealism, which presumably would have been an important influence.) It considers, too, Fani-Kayode's employment of artifacts and signifiers from African traditions as a means of reconnecting to a heritage from which he felt separated through exile. Bourland's interpretations are often precise and compelling; for example, the discussion of the relationship between Fani-Kayode's photographs and those of Mapplethorpe convincingly articulates the negotiation of a critical and artistic position through the medium. At some points in the text, however, the distinction between Fani-Kayode's critical engagement through his practice and the subsequent interpretations brought to bear by Bourland become blurred, or to put it another way, too much layering of meaning risks over-burdening the photographs. Fani-Kayode's images themselves often display a lightness of touch in the engagement with a diverse range of cultural references and genres.

Setting Fani-Kayode's career in the photographic and cultural scenes of London, New York, and Washington, DC, is an important dimension of the book, not least the response in these locations to the HIV/AIDS crisis as it unfolded and became politicized. However, Bourland's rendering of social and political context is not always as confident as he draws a wider picture, at least as far as the wider British setting is concerned. For example, it is not accurate to suggest that racism entered everyday discourse as a result of a decade of Tory rule (29); the rise of the National Front was a notable phenomenon of the 1970s. Margaret Thatcher's reference to (white) British citizens feeling “swamped” dates from 1978 and should be seen as an attempt to harness that sentiment in the pursuit of power, rather than its result. And nor can one really claim that Martin Parr “emerged” out of Manchester, even if he did attend college there (156). I would also have welcomed more on the “photography and the 1980s” promised by the title. It is easy to forget that in spite of Thatcherism and all that it meant for the arts in terms of political context and funding, the 1980s were a vibrant period for photography, still relatively well supported by the Arts Council and local authorities, with a network of organizations active across the country, not just in London, engaged in cultural, political and educational work around class, race, gender and sexuality, through photography. I was intrigued to learn that Fani-Kayode worked for the Inner London Education Authority and tutored in places like Tower Hamlets, not least because that connects him closely to a history of the medium that might easily be lost if the work is treated solely as an artistic oeuvre. Bourland does more than that for sure, but the wider networks and structures that informed and sustained photographers such as Fani-Kayode are dimensions of the story of this transitional decade that could be elaborated further.

The issues at stake in returning to Fani-Kayode's photographs are not only historical of course. In his epilogue, Bourland notes the relatively recent display of Fani-Kayode's photographs in Africa, though not yet Nigeria; and one might productively revisit this work in relation to the contemporary African photography of Zanele Muholi for example, or even Santu Mofokeng's “Chasing Shadows” series. Moreover, if, as Bourland suggests, Fani-Kayode was “working without a map” (255), in the light of what has been written on African photographies in the three decades since his death (very little of which is cited here aside from a brief mention the Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibe), it might be interesting to revisit his self-description as “an African artist working in a western medium” (211) and ask whether the opposition can still hold. Rather than attempt to debate this question here, I close with the reflections of Robert Taylor, one of Bourland's interviewees, on his experience of working with and being photographed by Fani-Kayode. The quotation is worth reading in full, but referring to the “strange little world” Fani-Kayode created in the studio, Taylor says, “I trusted him and would have done pretty much anything he asked, pretty secure in the knowledge that it would very likely be fascinating, challenging and beautiful” (243). Bourland’s book provides much that will be of interest to students of photography and visual culture, but this moment of insight into Fani-Kayode's photographic practice was, for this reader at least, a high point.