Erika Nimis

Photographer, historian of Africa (graduate of ÉNSP/Arles and Université Paris 1) and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQÀM), Érika Nimis lives and works in Montreal. She is a member of the artist’s cooperative Cercle Carré and Cabinet, a space of photographic production which in 2016 became L’Imprimerie, an artist’s centre. 

Her artistic practice consists of taking coloured photographs of peripheral places, on the margins, rejected and abandoned nooks, pausing on the details that are not visible at first sight. She is also known for her works on the history of photography in West Africa and her research into re-readings of African history done by contemporary visual artists through their use of photographic archives. Author of three books on the history of West African photography (one of which was born from her doctoral thesis; Photographers of West Africa. The Yoruba Experience, Paris, Karthala, 2005) she leads a variety of research, publication and exhibition projects in parallel, all the while collaborating with several reviews including Ciel Variable. In 2013 Érika founded Fotota with Marian Nur Goni, a blog dedicated to research on photography in Africa.