Reviews

Nance’s immersive archive, woven together with writing from various contributors contextualizing the work, make this culturally significant festival accessible to a wide swath of readers.
*TIME*

Each image is saturated in human connection; each photograph stirs a memory. And even across the distance of space and time, the world depicted in these pages thrums with closeness, or a need for it.
*The New York Times Book Review*

In part thanks to its collagelike form, it captures the range of intellectual discussions and political debates that normally get glossed over in favor of a single narrative of Pan-African grandeur…the intimate publication has a similarly polyphonous effect as Chimurenga’s, immersing the reader in Nance’s archive as though it were an unfinished sentence, an elaborate thought trailing off.
*New York Review of Books*

A thorough account of sociopolitical significance, beauty, and joy of the gathering.
*Vanity Fair*

Nance’s photography scrambles the nameless and the notable, mirroring the spirit of a festival that levelled boundaries even as it celebrated difference.
*New Yorker*

It’s a joy to see Marilyn’s work on Festac ‘77 come to life in Last Day in Lagos. It goes beyond simply being a photographic archive, and cements itself as an important cultural document for years to come.
*It's Nice That*

An incomparable photographic essay on a landmark event.
*Publishers Weekly*

Offer a glimpse of the radical possibilities of Pan-African unity.
*Wall Street Journal*

Hers is the deepest individual image archive to have emerged from FESTAC ’77 — a major contribution on those grounds alone, but also a long-overdue focus on the early work of an important Black photographer who herself has only recently earned proper institutional notice.
*New York Times: Arts*

Last Day in Lagos, then, is a festival of its own, a feast for the creative imagination that introduces today’s generation to their artistic ancestors.
*Aperture*