Aleruchi Kinika on Photography’s Cathartic Power

Minutes into our call, Aleruchi Kinika, whose photographs have the uncanny ability to evoke a stillness that can feel almost transcendental, tells me she was perpetually depressed, weird, and reclusive as a child. “There’s a reason why my work is the way it is. I was a melancholic kid growing up. I felt so alone and sad. I was a weird kid. I mean, that was when being weird was not cool, now everyone wants to be weird.” She pauses, almost abruptly, and releases a chuckle. This revelation struck me with unexpected force, not least because in that moment, the animating force behind her work, the mostly blue-tinged photographs that line her canon, became manifest to me in the way one might have an epiphany—something that had lingered in the recesses of one’s mind comes to the fore, and suddenly everything makes sense.

When she joins the call it’s raining in Port Harcourt where she lives. It’s also raining in Lagos and we immediately bond over this seemingly anodyne situation. Shameless, the TV series which features actors like Jeremy Allen White and Emmy Rossum, she tells me, is her latest fixation. The series follows Fiona, the eldest daughter in a dysfunctional family who, on account of her father’s drinking problems, is forced to become the parent to her father and her five siblings. Talking about the show she’s sanguine, as cherry as a warm summer day. She tells me she’s drawn to the complex characters especially Fiona, who the series orbits around. “My parents are not drunks or anything, but I’m the first daughter and most of my life has been taking care of my younger siblings. So, I could relate so much to that part.” 

Kinika, like her work, is at once spontaneous and reticent. Around her hangs a comforting stillness that has a way of lulling you, suffusing you with the feeling of being at the beach at dusk, watching the sprawling ocean swallow the sun as the sand beneath you shifts gently. Her voice is buttery and pliant, almost whispery. She also has a genius for weaving disparate anecdotes, pacing them carefully, and organizing them under specific themes. 

Born in Isiokpo, a rustic town in the Ikwerre Local Government Area of Rivers State, she credits Rivers State with contributing to her distinctive aesthetic. Take the blue tint that lacquers many of her pictures. It’s hard to pinpoint where it issues from, she tells me, “but you might not be wrong to say it comes from my upbringing in Rivers State.” With an average of 2000 to 4500 mm of annual rainfall, Rivers State is among the rainiest in Nigeria. As a result, for the most part, the ambience in the state maintains a glacial, brooding affect. The buses and taxis in Port Harcourt are also blue. To top it all off, Kinika attended the Nigerian Navy Military school, whose official color is blue. Growing up inundated in a tableau of cool colors, it’s hard to imagine a world in which that does not factor into her aesthetic. But ultimately, her style issues from her unique perspective of the world as an artist. “I need my pictures to look like how I perceive the world. My work isn’t always blue. Sometimes it’s warm. And that’s because I feel warm. I take pictures and edit them as I feel.” 

Growing up as a reclusive kid who was constantly shrouded in gloom meant that art was less a casual pastime than it was a useful tool for navigating the emotional morass she was perpetually steeped in. Writing and drawing came naturally to her and she’d spend the bulk of her time constructing alternate realities using her creative powers. “As a child,” she tells me “I spent most of my time alone, people would mostly talk to me to see what I had created.” Her short stories, in her telling, were so highly anticipated that her classmates would constantly prod her to complete the latest installment.

She tells me that she’s still introverted, preferring the solemnity of her artistic practice and the warmth of her family to more gregarious activities. Speaking of her introversion, she says she sometimes worries that it might stifle her career progression. “It’s very hard for me to put myself out there. I just hope my career does all the talking for me. Thankfully it does in most cases.” At this point I am reminded of Maurice Sendak’s dictum, which is that true art does not require pyrotechnics to stand out. Sendak, who was known to spend extended periods, sometimes days, working on his art in his studio, despite his hermetic tendencies, became one of the world’s most revered artists, winning a National Book Award in 1982 and a National Medal of Arts in 1996, amongst others. I share a few anecdotes from Sendak’s life and she sighs, “Maybe there’s still hope for me.”

Photography has, for as long as she remembers, been a fixture in her life. Using her mum’s cyber-shot camera, she would take pictures of things she found to be aesthetically pleasing—mostly flowers. Later down the road, her phone would become her primary photographic device and, still with the aim of recording beauty, she would take photographs of sunsets and things she found beautiful. “Then, I was just interested in things that I found beautiful. I didn’t care if other people didn’t see it, I saw it and that was all that mattered.” Photography, for Kinika, would however begin in earnest when she became her uncle’s apprentice. He was a photographer. One time, she tells me, her mum mentioned her aptitude for photography to her uncle, he took note, and not too long after, he asked if she would like to follow him to a shoot. 

During the shoot, her uncle mostly dispatched his duties without bothering her but afterwards, he offered her the camera, gave her some instructions on how to operate it, and told her to shoot. “I didn’t know much about framing. I didn’t know where to begin. It was a DSLR, a Nikon D90, if I can remember correctly. Taking a picture with a camera, it turns out, is different from shooting with a phone.” After the incident, her uncle extended to her the offer to borrow the camera whenever she wanted. She however scarcely took him up on his offer as school—she was in university at the time—was her primary focus. “I wanted to graduate well, so I really needed to focus on school.” 

In December of 2019, a cousin of hers gifted her a camera which would come in especially handy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kinika returned home but initially couldn’t shoot as much as she desired as a result of the stringent lockdown rules. To circumvent this blockade, she enlisted her siblings as her muses and began to practice. To this day, her work still maintains a charged improvisational quality. We can observe this in a photo titled Okrika, 2024. A young girl stands in a corner of what appears to be a living room. Wearing a pink shirt and a leopard print skirt, she stares directly at the viewer. She’s clearly posing for the shot, but observing the white curtain drawn open behind her, the sewing machine to her left and the couch on her right, the boundaries between reality and fiction blur. Stare long enough and you’ll find yourself in that room, maybe fiddling with the sewing machine, adjusting the curtain, or simply posing behind Kinika’s camera. 

As she tells it, her distinctive aesthetic started to take shape in 2023. Asked if she had any specific photographers who helped shape her style, she dithers, pauses to think, and then finally tells me that no one particularly comes to mind. To the extent that anyone played the role of mentor in her life, Rachel Seidu did. Seidu is a brilliant photographer whose practice orbits around documenting queer experiences and depicting marginalized groups with care and dignity. Having seen Kinika’s work, in 2022, Seidu reached out to Kinika through Twitter and they immediately struck up a friendship. She encouraged Kinika to create bodies of work and apply for grants and residencies. “I love Rachel, she’s awesome.” “What of Gabriel Moses?” I ask, their styles are somewhat similar, sharing the same cool, underexposed aesthetic. “The funny thing about Gabriel Moses is that Rachel told me that my work reminds her of him. I think that’s how I knew him.”

What’s perhaps most fascinating about Kinika’s work is how much weight she places on themes of identity. In Wrappers of Rivers, a project, published in The Republic—which straddles being a photographic essay, a profile, and a traditional essay—she delicately probes her identity as a daughter of Rivers State with affecting photographs and anecdotes that highlight the minutiae of her culture. “I’m from Ikwerre but all my life people (conflating the two distinct cultures) have called me Igbo. I see this as trying to erase my identity. It’s also really hard to find pictures that particularly spotlight Ikwerre culture. So I decided to start creating for people, who, maybe 200 years from now, will look back and find comfort in my work.” 

Her Catholic faith also occupies a central position in her work. A 2024 series entitled First Holy Communion features some of her most charged photographs. In one, a priest is draped in a resplendent cassock. He’s cut off from the waist up. We only see his hands frozen in motion, holding out with his right hand the eucharist bread—a cup of wine in his other hand—to a young boy whose mouth is wide agape, his hand clasped together holding a billowing candle. “You know the story of Athena right?” She asks me, rather abruptly, as our conversation draws to a close. “She came out of Zeus’ head after he had suffered tremendous migraines and became the goddess of Wisdom,” she continues. “My end goal with my work is really to just bring them to life so I stop having those Zeus headaches.”