When She Came Into View, Memory Stood With Her, 2025

September 1, 2025 – June 30, 2026

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For her residency at SHINE Portrait Studio at Express Newark, artist Laylah Amatullah Barrayn has created an installation placed in the Main Studio, visitors are encouraged to connect with and engage the backdrop as inspiration and a resource for their own practices.

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“This installation is a meditation on the ways Senegalese and African women have been represented through the medium of photography across generations and geographies. It brings into conversation a constellation of images: colonial-era photographs; portraits by Senegalese photographers active in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s; photographs made in the United States of enslaved Africans and their descendants; a portrait of the matriarch of the home where I resided; a recent portrait of two young women created during the summer of 2025 in the city of Thies.

 

Each photograph presents a Senegalese or African woman before the lens, asserting presence in the frame. How women’s presence before the camera can be both an act of witness and of reclamation.

 

Taken together, these images create a layered visual archive that reflects the shifting conditions of Black womanhood, dignity, and representation. This backdrop is both a collage and a dialogue, revealing how photography has long served as a site of power, memory, and visibility for Senegalese women and the wider African diaspora.”

 

-Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

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Backdrop Credits

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First Row. Top, left to right:

 

Library of Congress — Daniel Murray Collection; from W.E.B. Du Bois’s Types of American Negroes album (v.2, no.196), c. 1899–1900. LOT 11930.

 

Oumar Ly, Untitled [studio portrait of a family], Studio Thioffy, Podor, Senegal, 1970s. Courtesy of Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, personal collection.

 

Adama Sylla, Untitled [young woman], Saint-Louis (Ndar), Senegal, 1970s. Courtesy of Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, personal collection.

 

Unidentified photographer, Untitled [Creoles of Gorée Island], Gorée Island, Senegal, 1910. From the family album of Capt. Thomas. Source: Senegal metis Éditions

 

Oumar Ly, Koura, Studio Thioffy, Podor, Senegal, 1970s. Courtesy of Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, personal collection.

 

Unidentified photographer, Untitled, Saint-Louis (Ndar), Senegal, 1930s–1940s. Reproduced from the publication of Fatou Niang Siga. Source: Senegal metis Éditions Facebook page

 

Doris Ulmann, Woman with Basket of Cotton on Head, Probably South Carolina, ca. 1929–31. From Roll, Jordan, Roll. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

 

Ousmane Sembène, Black Girl (La Noire de…), film still, 1966. Photograph: Ousmane Sembène / Janus Films.

 

Emile. Noal, Untitled [possibly Peulh (Fulani) woman], Senegal, early 20th century

 

Oumar Ly, Untitled [portrait of three women], Studio Thioffy, Podor, Senegal, 1980s. Courtesy of Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, personal collection. Original: chromogenic print (color); installation reproduction: digital print, monochrome (2025).

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F. Forshew, Untitled [three-quarter-length portrait of an African American woman], Hudson, New York, 1870s–1880s. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

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François-Edmond Fortier, Sénégal — Femme de Saint-Louis, photographic postcard, c. 1904. Source: Edmond Fortier Project (research site), “SÉNÉGAL – Femme de Saint-Louis,” Series FORTIER PHOTO, no. 21.

 

François-Edmond Fortier, Sénégal — Femme, type “Peulh” du Cayor [Peul (Fulani) woman, Cayor], photographic postcard, early 20th century.

 

Roland Lefèvre, Untitled [young woman with elaborate hairstyle], Kaolack, Senegal, 1948–1967. Source: VintageAfricanWomen (Instagram)

 

Unidentified photographer, possibly Youssef (Yousef) Safieddine, Untitled (Rokaya Diop), Medina (Dakar), Senegal, late 1960s.

 

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Untitled [portrait of Safie and Bintou, at the home of filmmaker Fatou Kandé Senghor], Thiès, Senegal, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.