One of the pleasures of Osborne Macharia’s photographs is that age does not set the boundary of possibility. His imagined elders are neither background witnesses nor reassuring symbols of a vanished tradition. They dress, organize, travel and command attention. In Magadi, a group of older women becomes a community that has changed its own course, leaving behind a harmful practice and using fashion to help younger girls. In NYANYE, retired women with distinguished careers form a league of extravagant grannies. These are stories written for the camera, not documentary claims about actual organizations. Their fiction makes space for lives that fashion and popular science fiction often forget to imagine.
Macharia is a Kenyan photographer and visual artist whose Afrofuturism begins with character. In a Google Arts & Culture interview, he defined the movement in his own terms as a repurposing of postcolonial African narratives through history, present experience and imagined futures. That definition refuses the idea that futurity is only a matter of advanced machines. A future can be made by changing the story assigned to a person. It can begin with a face the advertising industry would have passed over.
The premise works because Macharia’s images make these characters visually persuasive. Clothing, hair, pose, landscape and colour serve a narrative rather than merely decorate a portrait. The viewer is asked to believe in a social world beyond the frame. Who are these women to one another? What did they do before this picture, and where will they go next? Macharia’s practice supplies an invented answer and leaves the image charged with the energy of further possibility. His subjects appear to have histories even when those histories were devised for the shoot.
The Wereldmuseum’s 2018 Afrofuturism exhibition placed his work alongside Bob Mũchiri Njenga, Samuel Fosso and Kadara Enyeasi. The museum described his contribution as the invention of communities with their own future cultures. That description is a useful starting point, but the particularity of Macharia’s photographs lies in how such communities are built from people rather than diagrams. He does not offer a general plan for Africa. He gives a fictional group a reason to exist and lets its members look back at the viewer.
A story on the salt plain
Magadi imagines former female circumcisers living near Kenya’s Lake Magadi who have abandoned their previous work. In the fiction of the series, they take up fashion and shelter girls escaping early marriage, teaching skills in styling, print, design and modelling. Macharia explained this premise when he introduced the project at Design Indaba. The story addresses female genital mutilation and child marriage, but it does so through a striking transformation of role. Women associated in the fictional past with harm become adults who can protect and teach.
The distinction between fiction and reportage is ethically important. These photographs should not be presented as evidence that a real group of former circumcisers established a fashion community at Lake Magadi. Macharia’s invention works as an alternative narrative, one that imagines agency where a journalistic frame might allow only victimhood or blame. The project does not make the underlying harms less serious. It asks what change might look like if people and practices were not assumed to be fixed forever.
The older women also complicate who is permitted to be stylish. Fashion photography frequently treats youth as the condition for visual experiment. Here the women occupy the role of mentors and image makers within the story, while their own appearance carries the force of the shoot. Their age is not a before picture. It is part of their authority. Macharia has said in a WePresent interview that he wants to work with people a viewer might meet in ordinary life, broadening ideas of who can appear beautiful. The fictional conceit and the casting decision reinforce each other.
The setting matters as much as the clothes. Lake Magadi’s salt plain gives the figures a hard, spacious ground rather than a conventional studio backdrop. Macharia’s visual language is theatrical, but it is not detached from place. The landscape gives the invented community a terrain to inhabit. The tension between vivid styling and austere environment makes the women’s presence feel deliberate. They are not waiting for a future to arrive; the photographs show them already inhabiting a world reorganized by their choice.
Macharia took the Magadi characters beyond the still image in a music video for Blinky Bill’s “ATIE,” identified by Design Indaba as his directorial debut. This movement between photographic series and music video shows how robust the fictional group is as a narrative device. A photograph can establish a character through a single gesture, while moving image lets those characters enter another rhythm. The difference is not simply technical. It suggests that Macharia’s worlds are designed to support more than one encounter.
The league that retirement did not end
In NYANYE, Macharia invented the League of Extravagant Grannies, women who had once held positions in government or business and whose retirement has not reduced their appetite for experience. An OkayAfrica interview dates the editorial to 2016 and places it before Kabangu, his later series of eccentric older men. The order matters because it shows a continuing interest rather than a single stunt: older people return to the centre of his fictional photographs in different forms.
The NYANYE premise unsettles a narrow idea of retirement as withdrawal. These women have already occupied public roles in the fiction; their later lives are not an epilogue to those roles. On Macharia’s own gallery page, the portraits pair composed, direct gazes with emphatic styling. The accessories and smoking props described in a reported interview with the photographer belong to an invented culture of leisure and command. Each woman has been given more than a costume: her posture suggests that she expects to be seen. Macharia turns the person whom an age-conscious culture expects to fade into the person who controls the composition. The joke, if there is one, is on the viewer’s expectation.
The portraits also expose how often the future is imagined as a place with no elders. Popular futuristic imagery favors the new body, the young inventor, the unmarked consumer. Macharia’s older characters carry years with them. They suggest that a future worth inhabiting should have room for experience, memory and pleasure. That is not nostalgia. It is a challenge to the idea that progress requires shedding the people who came before.
This gives his work an unusual relation to time. An Afrofuturist portrait can include a character’s imaginary backstory, a present pose and the promise of further adventures. The photograph compresses those moments without flattening them. Costume and expression hint at earlier decisions; setting and pose place the person before us; the invented narrative points beyond the image. In Macharia’s hands, still photography becomes a form capable of suggesting duration.
Fiction with a public address
Macharia repeatedly explains that his series are fabricated. In the WePresent interview, he says the characters and their narratives may begin with a dream or an image that prompts an anecdote. That candour is essential to the work’s integrity. The photographs may look meticulously produced, but their purpose is not to fool a viewer into believing a fake report. They ask the viewer to enter a story and recognize why that story might be needed.
For too long, international images of African places have been organized around crisis, need or spectacle. Macharia’s answer is not to deny difficult realities. Magadi names a harmful practice and early marriage in its premise. It then places imagination in the service of transformation. The women are not presented as mute evidence of a social problem. They are given work, relationships, skill and style within the fiction. A viewer can disagree with the plausibility or politics of the invented resolution, but the project insists that representation should include the capacity to change.
There is a productive tension here. A polished fashion photograph can make hardship seem easier to resolve than it is. The series must not be treated as a policy account or a substitute for reporting by people affected by those issues. Its strength lies in a different register: it makes an alternative role imaginable. The images ask what stories would be possible if women currently defined by harm, whether as participants or those seeking escape, were granted futures with expertise and agency. That question belongs to art even though it cannot settle the underlying social conditions.
Macharia’s willingness to build fiction publicly distinguishes his work from a simple exercise in positive branding. The characters are not generic figures of uplift. They have occupations, collective identities and peculiar histories. Their details can be outlandish, but those details give the viewer something to argue with. A portrait that merely announced “the future is bright” would not ask as much of us. His photographs make the future specific enough to feel contestable.
Kenya, the diaspora and the site of making
Macharia’s work has circulated internationally, but its storytelling remains tied to Kenya. In a 2026 Africa Art News interview, he said that although he had moved to Vancouver, he continued to shoot these projects in Kenya. He described distance as changing his sense of why the stories mattered, while commercial work abroad helped fund projects at home. That is a more complicated geography than either a purely local practice or a story of leaving and returning triumphantly. Production, income, memory and location do not all coincide.
His Google Arts & Culture conversation makes a related point. Kenyan cultures are diverse, and the personal stories he builds can resonate across the continent and diaspora without pretending that all those places are the same. The route from a Kenyan salt plain to an audience in Amsterdam, London or Vancouver does not erase the first place. It changes the questions each audience may bring. A viewer familiar with the location might notice one set of details; another may first be challenged to see older African women as authors of style at all.
It is easy to market Afrofuturism as a universal aesthetic while treating the continent that grounds it as an interchangeable visual supply. Macharia’s named settings and fictional social histories resist that drift. Magadi is a story about altered communal roles beside a Kenyan salt lake; NYANYE asks what pleasure and public presence might look like after a long professional life. Each series constructs a different community with a different social claim.
At Krull, the Futuristic Dreams editorial uses fashion, portraiture and conversation to ask how the Democratic Republic of Congo’s present might have developed differently. Macharia’s photographs are more overtly fictional and rooted in Kenyan settings. The useful point of comparison is the decision to make styled images carry questions about history rather than treating fashion as a retreat from them. The projects do not share subjects or methods, but both use visual pleasure to open a serious inquiry.
Who is visible in tomorrow’s picture?
Macharia’s work is sometimes discussed through its scale of production and its connections to entertainment. Those are part of the story, but they need not eclipse the photographs’ simpler provocation. Consider the people at their centre. Older women appear as leaders in an invented social organization. A group of elders claims the right to extravagance after retirement. The bodies and faces that a conventional futuristic campaign might exclude become the reason for the future to exist.
The technical polish of the work helps that provocation land. Every chosen object, piece of clothing, gesture and background belongs to an invented account. The photographs have enough internal coherence that a viewer can begin to infer rules for the world outside their edges. This is worldbuilding at the scale of a portrait. Instead of presenting an aerial view of a new city, Macharia offers a person who might live there, govern it, teach its younger citizens or dance after a long working life.
He also reminds us that the future is a social relation. In Magadi, the crucial imagined change is not a device or an architectural marvel. It is a group of women deciding to do something different together and passing skills to girls. In NYANYE, it is a league that gives retirement a collective shape. Such futures can be playful, even flamboyant, without becoming weightless. They ask who is allowed companionship, authority and delight across the whole span of a life.
The most telling achievement of these images may be their refusal of the lonely hero. Macharia’s characters belong to named groups. Their significance lies in what they do for and with one another. A viewer can admire the styling and still be drawn toward the relationships the photographs imply. That movement from surface to society is where his Afrofuturism does its work. He makes an elder impossible to overlook, then invites us to imagine the community that knows her name.