The Self-Portrait Project, 2020- ongoing
The Self-Portrait Project is an ongoing photographic series by Mallory Lowe Mpoka that explores self-portraiture as a site for reimagining diasporic identity, cultural inheritance, and collective memory.
Raised in a culturally eclectic household by Cameroonian and Belgian parents, Mpoka was drawn early on to the visual language of family archives. At age 15, she began working in the darkroom, cultivating a practice rooted in the materiality of image-making. Over the past three years, in close collaboration with her grandmother Deborah, she has undertaken the meticulous process of gathering and cataloguing surviving family photographs and documents—many of which were lost or destroyed during the Bamileke genocide (1950–1970). Before her passing in March 2023, Deborah named Mpoka her successor and matriarch of the family, entrusting her with a personal archive of post-independence portrait photographs.
This intergenerational exchange lies at the heart of The Self-Portrait Project. Developed using her first medium-format camera and processed in the university darkroom where she began her training, the photographs depict the artist inhabiting both her own identity and that of her grandmother. Through a series of carefully staged gestures—using inherited clothing, personal objects, and symbolic props—Mpoka enacts what she calls a ritual of reimagining: a space where memory, fiction, and magic realism intertwine.
“While exploring the notions of re-enactment and family-ness,” Mpoka reflects, “the process of image-making became a ritual in itself—a place to reimagine oneself, and where dreams might be forged out of remnants.”
This series was first presented in 2023 as part of the exhibition Re-Mixing African Photography, curated by Julie Crooks at the Art Gallery of Ontario. A second iteration was exhibited during Art Toronto in 2024.
The project draws on the rich lineage of West and Central African studio portraiture, while also interrogating its limits. The artist’s body becomes both subject and conduit—simultaneously embodying and mourning lost narratives, and generating new visual lineages. Her self-portraits blur temporal and familial boundaries, inviting the viewer into a layered, intimate archive. Some images serve as self-portraits of her grandmother; others occupy a liminal space where neither identity is fully distinguishable.
Through this work, Mpoka begins to articulate the dissociative experiences that have shaped her life across cultures and continents. Her photographs operate as photo-objects—diasporic traces that carry meaning beyond their frame—testaments to survival, transformation, and the imaginative power of the archive. “I am intrigued by how the past and present co-exist,” she notes. “Photographs migrate; they are passed between people and families, acquiring new meaning, significance, and value along the way.”
In The Self-Portrait Project, abandoned places and lost images become generative sites—gaps where something unexpected may emerge. A personal history becomes a collective invocation. Memory becomes ritual. And the artist becomes, at once, herself and someone else.
