Alick Phiri, Lusaka Street, 2025

Lusaka Street is an exploration of Zambia’s photographic past through the eyes of Zambian image-maker Alick Phiri. One of the few surviving black photographers that had access to the medium from the 1960s through the 1990s in Lusaka – a time when the use of the camera was restricted in the country – Phiri was trained at Lusaka’s Photo Art Studios before opening his own studio in Kanyama, making photography an integral part of his life. His unseen before photographic archive provides a rare insight into the everyday experience of people in the city. Even more importantly, his work is a document of the process of self-determination and self-representation of black Zambians at the time, recounted through situational portraits taken in the subject’s domestic sphere. A testament to the relevance of lens-based media within Zambia’s geographical, historical and social context, a tool for reimagining the past and reading the present.