Camo

Photographer Muriu debuts with an effervescent visual ode to African womanhood. Challenging "narrow and enduring ideas about Africans" that fail to reflect the Kenya of her youth, Muriu captures in her photos bright colors, patterned West African ankara fabric, and avant-garde eyewear made out of such reclaimed paraphernalia as rotary phone cords and hair rollers. As the title suggests, subjects are draped in the same vibrant fabric as their background, reflecting the ways in which "society can make a woman feel invisible." Yet the women, boldly accessorized and powerfully posed, refuse to disappear, embodying a tension between the traditional and the transgressive, the old and the new. Despite the occasional, discordant gendered aphorism ("It is an open secret that a man may be the head of the household, but the woman is its heartbeat"), Muriu's ability to mix the quotidian, the retrograde, and the traditional (she pairs the shots with African proverbs, a "dying art form") makes for a singular representation of African femininity. This dazzles. (Apr.)