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Image-K. AddoIf you haven’t yet listened to the first two audio installments of Mr. FiFi’s Summer, they’re available on my first Substack post-located at the end of the post. The final two audio installments will be shared on Friday. And subscribe for future posts, for more stories and do leave some comments. Here is the link: |
I have been following the work of Yaprak Soysal for some time now, encountering her street portraits as they surface on my social media feed, quietly, without fanfare, yet insistently asking to be seen. Again and again, I find myself pausing. These photographs do not clamor for attention; they bear witness. They invite recognition.
Strangers No More: Street Portraits Across Cultures-Photography by Yaprak Soysal will open tomorrow, Saturday, January 17, 2026, 4-6 p.m., at Plays and Players Theater, 1714 Delancey Street.
Soysal’s portraits present something essential about who we are as a city. They remind us that the soul of a city resides in its people. The ethnic and cultural diversity so often discussed in abstract terms comes into focus here as intimate, grounded, and dignified. Each face carries a story, but Soysal resists the urge to over-narrate. Instead, she allows presence to speak.
What strikes me most is her refusal to exoticize difference. These are not images that turn cultural markers into spectacle. Rather, each subject meets the camera with agency and calm authority. The photographs suggest a moment of mutual recognition; an exchange rather than an extraction. Even when I encounter these images digitally, I sense conversation behind them: a pause, an agreement, a shared curiosity.
Street portraiture can be fraught. It carries questions of power, consent, and representation. Yet Soysal’s work consistently conveys care. The viewer is not positioned above or outside the subject, but alongside them. The portraits feel collaborative, as if shaped by trust in the brief space where two strangers meet and decide, together, to make an image.
As someone who has lived, worked, and written within multicultural communities, I am especially attuned to how easily difference can be flattened or
In sharing some of these portraits here which are images I have encountered previously through Soysal's Facebook posts, I want to honor the way her work has already been moving through the world, touching viewers one at a time. Strangers No More is not only a title; it is a proposition. It asks us to slow down, to look carefully, and to reconsider how we see those we pass every day.
I know Soysal not only through her work but personally, and she photographed me during a project we were both a part of. That experience deepened my respect for her practice and resulted in one of my most cherished photographs.
Her photographs are worth seeing in person.
Strangers No More: Street Portraits Across Cultures-Photography by Yaprak Soysal will open tomorrow, Saturday, January 17, 2026, 4-6 p.m., at Plays and Players Theater, 1714 Delancey Street.
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| Octavia McBride-Ahebee reading her work as master kora musician, Youba Cissokho, weaves sound beneath the words. |
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| 72nd-Generation Kora Musician Youba Cissokho |
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| Poet Adriann Just-the-Pen Bautista |
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My work is a kind of ode to migration not as a crisis, but an essential, enduring expression of human hope. |
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My literary work is shaped by the convergence of cultures and the many ways people move across the world be it by choice, by necessity, or by force. I write toward intimate relationships and everyday lives, even as they unfold within broader systems of global inequality. Aging, memory, and care sit at the center of this work, revealing how history quietly lives in the body and in shared spaces.
I’m deeply influenced by the West African tradition of the griot as represented by the kora player as historian, witness, and keeper of collective memory. Long before written archives, griots documented lineages, migrations, and lives through story and song. This is why master kora player, Youba Cissokho, will participate with me: he carries seventy-two generations of history, not simply as inheritance, but as living knowledge. In this collaboration, the kora does not merely accompany the poem, it remembers with it.
I invite you to join us for this poetry event.
This poem, Where My Birthmark Dances, which also lends its name to a poetry collection of mine, is voiced by a Haitian child whose mother has left both her and Haiti to seek economic opportunity in North America as a nanny. The poem directly addresses the children now in her mother’s care, inviting them to consider who she is, where she comes from, what she has left behind, and the physical journey that brought her to them.
Where My Birthmark Dances is a direct appeal from a daughter, a child herself, to those children: an invitation to know her mother, and to love her mother in the daughter’s absence. Click below to listen to an audio rendering of this poem
Kudos to creator and curator Andrea Walls of the Museum of Black Joy, who once again facilitated a powerful workshop to usher in the new year. Hosted in one of the stunning open galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this intention-setting gathering was rooted in African diasporic spiritual practices of reflection, ritual, and care.
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| Playwright and Workshop Participant Mona R. Washington with Andrea Walls |
Participants were invited to release what no longer served them-to name this- and to call into being what they desired for themselves, their families, and their communities using an amalgamation of herbs, oils, sacred objects, and spoken intention.
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| Participants Octavia McBride-Ahebee and Patricia Eads |
We were then invited into the gallery where Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit is on exhibition. Our time there unfolded as a collective conversation shaped by individual responses. The installation, which consists of nearly 300 hand-sewn, slowly decaying fruit peels, commemorates losses from the AIDS crisis and takes its title from the anti-lynching song. Intended to decompose, the stitched skins challenge traditional ideas of preservation while evoking mortality, memory, and the dehumanization of the epidemic.
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| Hand-stitched fruit peels in Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit, holding grief, memory, and endurance. |
The work asks us to bear witness to histories of endurance, grief, and presence. Like African diasporic spiritual traditions, Strange Fruit holds what is difficult without turning away and gestures toward care, survival, and transformation as collective possibilities.
Following our discussion, we returned to our workspace to create our intention jars.
We were given a sheet of paper with a line dividing it down the middle: on one side, we wrote what we did not wish to carry into the new year; on the other, what we hoped to bring forward. After tearing the paper in two, the list of what we were releasing was folded away from the body and collected to be burned later. The list of desires was folded toward the body and placed inside the mason jar.
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| The open gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, filled with light, art, and shared intention. |
We then filled our jars with chosen herbs and oils and offered prayers, each in our own way, to God, our ancestors, the natural world, or all three. The jars were sealed and taken home to be placed in our living spaces. Andrea also invited participants to consider creating additional jars for other meaningful places in their lives.
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| Poet and artist Victoria H. Peurifoy shares words of wisdom for the new year. |
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| Teddy Poneman, supporting creative programming that connects Drexel students and community neighbors. |
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| Participants hold their New Year’s desires, sealed in intention jars. |
Participants shared how deeply they enjoyed SEEDING JOY: An Intention-Setting Workshop, leaving with both a ritual object and a renewed sense of purpose for the year ahead.
*Special thanks to Teddy Poneman, Associate Director of Programs & Engagement at Drexel’s Writers Room.
I love when I am invited into unexpected gems in my city, and Unique Photo is certainly one, both for what it carries and for the building that holds it. A cornucopia of cameras, lenses, and photographic tools fills this old multi-floor space, which somehow feels contemporary against the historic backdrop of Philadelphia’s Old City.
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| Allan Steele-Dadzie, featured photographer, with writer Octavia McBride-Ahebee |
This past Friday, I attended the opening exhibition of Allan Steele-Dadzie, a photographer of deep intention and respect for his subjects. His show, Pieces of a Man, sets its tone the moment the elevator doors open onto the fourth floor. The first thing I encountered was an energetic, youthful atmosphere. A DJ, full of joyful presence and command, played early-2000s hip-hop. The music stirred long-held memories, and as I moved through that hypnotic soundscape, I found myself smiling and even dancing a little, cane and all. The rhythm seemed to guide me directly into the main exhibition space.
Inside, I entered a large, warm constellation of dynamic Black and brown creatives, gathered in support and celebration. Surrounding this vibrant group were Steele-Dadzie’s photographs: unframed, uncontained, almost bursting from the walls. Each image felt as if it was reaching for the viewer, inviting us to step into these intimate vignettes.
The exhibition title, Pieces of a Man, honors Gil Scott-Heron’s first studio album, a work Steele-Dadzie has long admired. Both men share a connection to Lincoln University, and both explore, in different mediums, the layered beauty and complexity of Black life.
Steele-Dadzie’s philosophy is grounded in humility. He recognizes that each photograph captures only a moment from a much larger story. A proud Philadelphian, he is also mindful of the city’s high poverty rate, the second highest among the ten largest American cities. Yet within this reality, his photographs reveal something essential: Black people do more than struggle. They love. They dream. They persevere. They laugh. They create.
A barber shapes a young boy’s hair with tenderness and skill, holding the child’s head with an almost protective strength. A father embraces his son in a gesture of quiet authority and tender affection. An older woman stands with a poise that feels earned and unhurried, her gray afro forming a soft halo around her. A young Black couple sits on the back of a Cadillac Fleetwood, striking a bold, self-assured pose that radiates their deep affection reminiscent of the couple in the movie Queen and Slim.
And Philadelphia’s unmistakable flair shows up in fur coats, confident stances, gleaming, gold grillz and stoopside elegance.
The exhibition also includes work by José Camacho, whose images deepen the visual conversation across the gallery. His photographs offer another lens on the lives and narratives of our communities, expanding the emotional reach of the show.
Steele-Dadzie emphasized to me that the relationship between photographer and subject is reciprocal, a shared exchange where the aim is to bring light, joy, and the grounded self-possession that lives in each portrait.
As an elder creative, it brought me real delight to witness so many young, talented artists collaborating and supporting one another. Pieces of a Man at Unique Photo is not simply an exhibition. The portraits themselves are a kind of gathering of community and a shared testament as to how art can anchor and affirm us.
For viewing times and details, contact Unique Photo, 28 S. 2nd Street, 4th Floor, Philadelphia, PA 215-608-2222
To see more of Steele-Dadzie’s work, including recent opportunities such as photographing Philadelphia Eagles star A. J. Brown for a special project, follow him on Instagram at @allan.ali_
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| *Artwork-by Nikita Vanchagov |
