"[In and Out of the Studio] presents 100 years of portrait photography in West Africa through nearly 80 photographs taken between the 1870s and the 1970s. These works, many of which are being shown for the first time, are drawn from the Metropolitan Museum’s Visual Resource Archives in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas... seeks to expand our understanding of West African portrait photography by rendering the broad variety of these practices and aesthetics."