All photos courtesy of Yannis Guibinga

Yannis Guibinga’s Bold View of Africa

The U of T alum’s photos offer a striking 21st-century take on the continent’s landscapes and people

About The Author

Author image: Stéphanie Verge

Stéphanie Verge

Writer and Editor

It took moving 10,000 kilometres – from Libreville, Gabon, to the Toronto area – for Yannis Davy Guibinga to realize that home would never be far from his mind. When he started at U of T Mississauga in 2013, Guibinga found out just how few people could locate Gabon, in central Africa, on a map. A desire to share the landscapes and people of his childhood through photography gradually transformed into a drive to showcase the diversity of African identities on the continent and across the diaspora. Since then, Guibinga’s bold lens-based work – which plays with contrast and texture in a way that recalls both fashion editorials and theatrical design – has earned him a global following, gigs with Apple and Adobe, and a shout-out on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Side profile of a short-haired Black woman wearing a white sweater against a white background
While visiting an artist friend at his studio in 2016, Guibinga, then a student at U of T Mississauga, shot this image, titled Opposition, on his Canon T31 to kill time. One of his favourite works and a key piece in his portfolio, it hints at his portraiture and silhouette work to come.

Growing up in Libreville, Guibinga was obsessed with English media, especially comic books (Storm, the X-Men’s iconic African character, was his favourite). He wanted to be fluent in English so he travelled to San Diego, California, where an uncle lived, as often as he could. More amorphous were his artistic goals. By the time he was 17, he was taking portraits of his friends in Libreville with his phone, inspired by the work of young French photographers like Alice Kong and Théo Gosselin, who took professional-grade photos of their social circle using minimal gear. When it came time for post-secondary studies, Guibinga enrolled in U of T Mississauga’s Communication, Culture, Information and Technology program hoping to end up in advertising. “I was thinking of how I could marry my interest in images and creativity with an actual job. Being a photographer didn’t seem like a realistic option; I figured it would be a hobby,” says Guibinga.

He kept shooting – landscapes, his friends, Square One. While working at the school’s equity and diversity office and then as an international student coordinator for the student union, he met young people from all over, learning about other cultures and himself in the process – and later on, when he was in photography school, turning those investigations into art. “Whenever possible, I’d use class assignments as a way of working on series of photographs that became bigger and more ambitious,” says Guibinga.

Two Black women against an orange background. One is looking off camera, the other is looking straight ahead and has white face paint and two-toned braids.
This 2016 work is part of Guibinga’s “Spectrum” series celebrating the diversity of identities and experiences within Afro-descendant communities in Toronto. It was his introduction to the power of collaboration among photographers, makeup artists and models.

By graduation, Guibinga had taken part in group shows in Lagos, Cape Town, Paris and Toronto. Suddenly, life as a photographer didn’t seem like an impossible dream. He moved to Montreal to study at the well-reputed photography school Collège Marsan and made the city his home base. His striking portraiture, which features traditional African aesthetic elements such as headwraps and body paints and plays with deeply saturated background colours, soon caught the attention of brands such as Apple, Nikon and Adobe.

Silhouette of model Atlas Hapy against a turquoise background. He is standing on one leg with the knee on his other leg bent and his arms bent in a running pose.
Shot after Guibinga moved to Montreal, this 2018 work features model Atlas Hapy, a now-frequent collaborator. Here, Guibinga begins to play with silhouettes and manipulate the colours in his backgrounds. “Silhouettes add an air of mystery to the storytelling,” he says, “and allow the audience to form their own stories and create their own characters when they see the image.”

His most high-profile collaboration to date – artwork to accompany Chance the Rapper’s 2022 track “The Highs & the Lows” – came about by, well, chance. “He worked with a friend of mine from Gabon and was looking for a photographer and she recommended me,” says Guibinga of joining forces with the hip-hop star. The piece, which centres a free-falling figure between bodies of water, brings together several Guibinga hallmarks: silhouettes, composite and collage work, and the juxtaposition of an unnatural colour palette with elements from the natural world. The overall effect is both beautiful and a little eerie.

A Black man wearing white capris is falling through the sky. A body of water reflecting the sunset appears both at the top and bottom.
Created in collaboration with the musical artist Chance the Rapper, The Highs & the Lows shares a name with the 2022 song that inspired it. It was premiered at Art Basel in Switzerland, appeared on billboards in Times Square and was featured on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the BET Awards and at The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center in Chicago.

Seeing his piece splashed across Times Square and the Tonight Show was like putting a megaphone up to a thought that had been ping-ponging around Guibinga’s mind for years: How can we get this level of visibility for more African artists? “There aren’t enough platforms or spaces that cater to how the work of African artists is circulated and shared,” he says. “We need to be able to reach audiences because our images impact the way people think about the African continent.” Exploring how photography can be a vehicle for change is both an artistic endeavour and an academic one for Guibinga: he is finishing a master’s degree in international and intercultural communications at l’Université du Québec à Montréal, where his dissertation deals with the social impact of photography.

Silhouette of a shirtless Black man wearing African jewellery against a red sky and orange sun. The man is crouched down among tall blades of leaves.
Inspired by stories of creation from different religious sources, the series “Tales of the First Sunrise” depicts gods and humans as they bear witness to the first break of day. Drawing from the aesthetic codes of Renaissance paintings and the structural compositions of traditional African sculptures, Guibinga reimagines the origin of the world.

Guibinga’s early fascination with superhero origin stories and Greek mythology has steadily morphed into an urge to see African narratives take up more space in the global imagination. Over the past couple of years, he has been refining a composite technique inspired by theatrical set design, namely that of the experimental American stage director Robert Wilson. Guibinga starts with a central idea (a creation myth from the Gabonese religion Bwiti, say) and layers in photographs (a recent portrait and an old shot of plants) to build shapes and silhouettes that tell a new story. Looking at how they contrast against the sunglasses-bright backdrops he makes by manipulating gradients in Photoshop, I’m reminded of shadow theatre: an ancient art form that foregrounds its subject – in this case, African culture – in ways that are both deceptively simple and wildly effective.

The silhouette of two people wearing wide-brimmed hats, looking at a solar eclipse in a green sky. They are standing on a forested hill overlooking water.
Part of the recent eclipse-inspired series, “The Day the Sun Turned Black,” this 2024 piece features trademark elements of Guibinga’s work, such as silhouette and shadows contrasted against hyper-colour backgrounds; composite elements drawn from older photographs; and a focus on creating environments that are reminiscent of theatre sets, moving the viewer into the position of audience member. Photo courtesy of Yannis Guibinga

Guibinga’s stories and mythologies are earthbound, tethering him to home, whether he’s in Libreville, Toronto or Montreal. Ultimately, his work examines how different people react to the same kinds of phenomenon, to what unites us. “I’m interested in the commonality of human experience,” says Guibinga. “We are more the same than we are different; we just express things in our own way.

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  1. One Response to “ Yannis Guibinga’s Bold View of Africa ”

  2. Charlene Fitzpatrick says:

    Love the work.