Omar Victor Diop

Omar Victor Diop was born in 1980 in Dakar, Senegal, and continues to be based there. A photographer by primary identification, he has developed a practice that uses the conventions of portraiture — and in particular the historical conventions of European portraiture — to insert Black African subjects into histories from which they have been systematically excluded. His celebrated Diaspora series (2014) reconstructed portraits of African and African-descended figures who played significant but largely forgotten roles in European history, photographing himself as each subject with meticulous attention to period costume, setting, and pose, while incorporating contemporary African accessories as subtle temporal markers.

Diop's work engages with the construction of historical memory and the politics of visibility. By appropriating the visual grammar of European portrait painting, he both reclaims a tradition and exposes its exclusions. The Diaspora series was followed by the Studio of Vanities series and the Liberty series, the latter engaging with the politics of protest and dissent through restaged images of civil rights history. Throughout, his photographs have a quality of deliberate theatricality that foregrounds their construction — they are images that know themselves to be images and that invite a self-conscious and historically informed mode of looking.

Diop has exhibited at major institutions and galleries across Europe, North America, and Africa, with his work entering significant public collections internationally. He has been the subject of institutional attention at the Smithsonian and received recognition from the World Press Photo Foundation. He is represented by Galerie Magnin A in Paris.