Sometime a Clear Light

Sometime a Clear Light: A Photographer’s Journey Through Alaska, Nigeria, and Life Aylette Jenness, writer, photographer, adventurer, looks back at her life to find insight into the past as she is losing her physical sight due to macular degeneration. Aylette reflects on living with her husband and two small children in a tiny Yu’pik village in Alaska in the early 1960s, and on the time they spent in Africa from 1966 to 1969, three of the most terrible years of the Nigerian Civil War (the Nigerian-Biafran War). It was a tumultuous time for Aylette, as well, as she split from her husband, an anthropologist, who had been sent to Nigeria to study resettlement caused by the construction the Kainji Dam. She follows her evolution as a single mother, an author of eleven children’s books on diverse cultural groups, and as a self-taught photographer. Her photographs of the Fulani, Sarkawa, Kamberi, and Hausa people of Yelwa, Kainji, and Ibadan, which capture a lost way of life, are now are housed in the ＂Aylette Jenness Collection＂ at the Smithsonian’s National Musuem of African Art. Aylette Jenness, now 87, looks back into her past in an attempt to find insight - trying to find a clear light.