UTM alumnus Yannis Guibinga creates bold view of Africa

All photos by Yannis Guibinga.

It took moving 10,000 kilometres – from Libreville, Gabon, to the Toronto area – for Yannis Davy Guibinga (BA 2017 UTM) 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, including gigs with Apple and Adobe, and a shout-out on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Growing up in Libreville, Guibinga was obsessed with English media, especially comic books (Storm, the X-Men’s iconic African character, was his favourite). Wishing to be fluent in English, 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 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 and familiar places like Square One. While working at the school’s equity and diversity office and as an international student co-ordinator for the student union, he met young people from all over, learning about other cultures and himself in the process. Later, he attended photography school where he turned 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.

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 renowned 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Originally published by University of Toronto Mississauga