The gaze that sees you back: A review of Silva Ndifon’s “Gaze” series

By: Molara Wood

Some portraits merely request your attention; Silva Ndifon’s Gaze insists on your reckoning.

In this hauntingly evocative fine art photographic series, Nigerian visual artist and photographer Silva Ndifon known in artistic circles as nobodyshotit constructs an unforgettable vision of Black childhood that reconsiders how presence is framed, how identity is perceived, and how dignity is performed. Gaze is not just a title; it’s a mirror held up to our collective assumptions. A provocation without needs for noise. What does it mean to witness, and to be witnessed, with nothing lost in translation?

Ndifon draws from the language of stagecraft, visual poetics, and ritual to create fine art portraits that function more like sacred performances than photographs. His young subject’s Black children positioned against mystical backdrops and dream-drenched tones do not simply sit for the camera. They occupy it. They haunt it. Each composition is deliberate. Every element from lighting to posture, colour to costume serves a visual dramaturgy that suggests a silent epic unfolding. The glowing spheres, red orbs, and lunar halos aren’t mere flourishes. They serve as visual relics, markers of cosmology, ancestry, and metaphysical inheritance. Theatrically, the effect recalls the still tension before a monologue begins a gaze that pins the audience before the first word is ever uttered.

At the core of this body of work is a visual turn: the subject is no longer objectified. The act of looking is no longer passive. These children, far from asking to be seen, assert the right to see us. There is no meekness here. No sublimation. No filtered performance of innocence for external approval. Their gaze is direct, unwavering, and whole. They neither ask for validation nor offer explanation. Instead, they confront centuries of being misread, misrepresented, and misused. Ndifon flips the lens. These children are not being captured. They are claiming space both visually and spiritually.

Ndifon’s use of light mimics the sophistication of theatrical lighting design. It signals mood shifts, emotional stakes, and even spiritual dimensions. The crimson glow behind one subject suggests a saintly aura, yet recast through an African cosmological lens. Another figure, crowned in gold light, becomes both memory and prophecy in human form.

What appears still is anything but static. The images buzz with unseen sound a hum of ancestral voices, the quiet resonance of ceremony, the soulfulness of memory made visible. It’s not silence we’re looking at; its presence distilled to its most essential frequency.

Perhaps the most daring aspect of Gaze is its recentring of Black childhood not as a sentimental motif, nor as a socio-political talking point, but as a space of command, insight, and cosmic legitimacy. Ndifon’s work refuses to flatten these children into archetypes. They are not painted as delicate, idealized, or naïve. They are deliberate. Unyielding. Profound. They carry a knowing that feels as old as time. This is not portraiture as we have known it. It engages with the legacies of Parks, Weems, and Muholi, but speaks in a vocabulary all its own. It doesn’t echo it declares.

Silva Ndifon’s Gaze is far more than a collection of compelling images, it is a ceremonial act, a philosophical shift, a visionary reframing of both subject and spectator. Through Ndifon’s lens, the camera becomes a space of reckoning not for those being captured, but for those who have long controlled the act of seeing. In Gaze, we are not passive observers; we are participants in a profound exchange, a moment of mutual witnessing that challenges historical hierarchies of perception. This is not merely an artistic triumph, it is a bold and necessary intervention in visual culture, redefining how presence, identity, and power are portrayed. Ndifon has not simply photographed faces; he has revealed truths that conventional portraiture too often overlooks. What makes this work ground breaking is his fearless use of imagination and subjects to chart new artistic territory. By breaking away from traditional modes of representation, he has created a body of work that is urgently relevant and deeply resonantqualities that have propelled the demand for his art and set him apart as a singular and generative voice in contemporary photography.