Interview with Sharmaarke Adan

Isabella Tranter-Richards interviews Sharmaarke Adan: a photographer that has worked for Vogue Italia, and the streetwear company Peak. With the debut of his new photography book Suugonmino, he is clearly a man on the rise. At the time of this interview, Sharmaarke was a student of the MA Photography program at the RCA, and Isabella a student of the RCA/V&A MA History of Design program. 

Isabella interviewed him at the Royal College of Art in his studio. She says, “on a rare sunny day in London, I enter the RCA studio and Sharmaarke is dressed in paint-covered jeans and a t-shirt. I am wearing a preppy beige dress, a size too small. It is an understatement to say I look out of place.”

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I: How long have you been creating? 

S: I'd say five years now. I started pretty much at the beginning, around college. I think it's created a massive impact on my practice today. My practice is focused on East Africa, Somalia, my household, history and Somali society. But I think it all stems from my undergrad, learning the practices and learning from other predecessors. Other African artists  in terms of photography and image making, that has prepared me to be up here today.

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I: So your photo book is called SUUGONIMO, what does that mean?

S:  For me, you know what? I kinda made it up. But it makes sense if you put it all together. It just reminds me of what Gucci Mane has said. When you have the sauce without the sauce, you can also get lost within the sauce. But then in Somali, the language suugo means sauce, like red sauce. So I created my own definitive meaning: fashion and dress, individualism.  Allowing the subject matter to feel a form of importance. I always look back to archive images of the 1800s to modern times of Somalia. Even in the 70s and 80s when family photography became prominent within Somali society, I wanted to bring that back but in a more contemporary way. 

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I: What is the fashion industry like from the inside?

He sighs loudly while rubbing his hand across the bottom of his face. 

S: Now the way the economy is going, it's uncertain. A few years ago there was a strong movement for representation and all my peers did well because of it. But now there is uncertainty and it's hard to get the opportunity especially if you are a new designer. They care more about what sells and less about potential. BREXIT didn’t help this, that’s why other places are doing really well, Paris, New York. That’s where people are getting the opportunity, even writers. That’s why I am changing from fashion and going more into art photography. 

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I: How do you feel your disconnection and subsequent connection with other countries like England and the Netherlands have informed your work?

S: Growing up in a working-class family, I was always more of a visual captivator. I always looked at visual symbolism, for example as a kid, I got into football, not because of watching tv but because I saw two kids playing football. They were wearing the opposing team kits. There was a kid that wore the Fenerbahçe kit and the other was wearing a Galatasaray kit (two rival turkish football teams). I just started watching them. As a kid, you look at symbols, you look at certain places of community. Then automatically when I was in England it looked completely different, like school uniforms they don’t have those in Holland.

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In the Netherlands, there was a period in the 2000s where a lot of African diaspora kids that had dyslexia or couldn't memorise certain exams got kicked out. So I was kicked out of every single school, based on the fact I wasn’t progressing well. That informed my disenfranchisement from the Dutch education system. 

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They were going to move me into a disabled school, so my parents moved to England. I think that allowed me to grow as a person, because I knew that I had other skills and other qualities, and that’s how I found my practice through visual memory and nostalgia. 

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I: What advice would you give to other aspiring photographers? 

S: Be true to your craft but be open to criticism, and don’t accept too many praises, criticism is what improves your work. Be in the right spaces and the right environment, a community that appreciates and loves you, holds you up.  Enjoy life as a process. Take more photographs, send them to your mum, send them to your dad or anyone that loves you for who you are and the rest will follow. 

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Sharmaarke is an artist in transition, pulling from his love of the ‘everyday’ to create high art, his work is stunning and simplistic all at once. It seems that he is ready to break the bonds of the fashion world and brave the abstract space of art photography, even if he has to carve out that space himself.