Many years ago, I worked as a salesperson at Hugo Boss in the Beverly Center in Los Angeles. I sold the range of things the store carried: luggage, accessories, underwear, clothing. But what I most relished selling was men’s suits, because a good suit is often transformative. A man would come into the store looking forgettable and then, after donning a well-cut two-button, single-breasted navy suit with a peak lapel, he would look accomplished, adept. Walking into the new “Africa Fashion” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, I felt that I was witnessing something wondrous, something more surprising than just an individual’s restyling. I was transported to the historical epoch when almost the entire continent was shedding its colonialist rule and the associated attire and stepping onto the world stage transformed.

Marking this wholesale change at the very outset is a wall featuring a timeline of text and documentary photography that details the consequential moments of Africa’s 20th-century liberation struggles. Video monitors offer film footage of key ceremonies, such as the 1957 formation of the Republic of Ghana. On an adjacent wall are the flags of all 54 countries in Africa, their insignia and heraldry explained. The exhibition seems quite intentionally based in the history of independence movements; Christine Checinska, the curator who led the team that organized the original exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London affirmed this, saying that for her it was crucial for viewers to understand that the clothing has “a political dimension.”

In the exhibition catalog Checinska writes that Tunisia and Morocco liberated themselves from the control of France in 1956 and then a year later Ghana freed itself from Britain. Then, in 1960, 17 African countries shook off colonial rule, to embed that time in the historical record as the “Year of Africa.” “The radical social and political reordering that took place sparked a cultural renaissance throughout the continent,” Checinska writes. “Fashion, music and the visual arts drew on formerly marginalized traditions, creating innovative forms that looked toward future self-rule.”

I think it must be acknowledged that self-governance has not always produced astute political leadership, or policies that benefited the majority of citizens, yet some countries once hobbled by colonial rule have learned to stand on their own.

This revival and re-emergence of cultural practices and forms indigenous to native Africans takes on an expanded role in the Brooklyn version of “Africa Fashion,” according to its organizers Ernestine White-Mifetu, the museum’s curator of Africa art, and Annissa Malvoisin, a postdoctoral fellow here. It now includes 300 objects — of which about 130 are garments, textiles and jewelry, and more than 50 works from the museum’s collections. The curators of this show have added more documentary footage of the four large festivals on the continent in the ’60s and ’70s: the First World Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN) in Dakar in 1966; Zaire 74 in Kinshasa, 1974; the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algeria (PANAF) in 1969; and the second World Black and African Festival of the Arts (FESTAC) in 1977 in Lagos.

Here, too, is a makeshift library with classic books examining that history and its legacy. There were framed and mural-size photos of FESTAC activities by Marilyn Nance, author of “Last Day in Lagos,” who by chance was visiting when I walked in. I was looking at a suite of four images, which included Stevie Wonder performing in a bright white suit with bell bottom trousers, in stark contrast to women in elaborately wrapped dresses of Kente cloth and men in tribal outfits that include decorative leg bands. Nance, a Brooklyn native, told me that about 200 Black Americans from New York, including her, traveled to Lagos, knowing it was going to be a hugely important event.

I could hear one of the other ways in which this iteration differs from the V & A show. Music followed me as I moved from gallery to gallery. Malvoisin explained that they carefully chose a playlist — accessible via a QR code — that echoes the hot songs for each epoch represented in the gallery space: Chaabi, Arab Pop, Hip-Hop, Afrobeat, Highlife, Jazz, Kora, and more genres. (Only a small selection is heard in the show, so use the link.) There is a theme of exuberance that threads through the music which matches the clothing and accessories on display.

It has to be said: This show is exquisitely beautiful, with textiles, accessories and clothing that are surprising and curious. Hardly an inch of this show is expected or cliché. The history lesson continues into the garment displays with vitrines featuring images of key midcentury designers: Kofi Ansah from Ghana, Chris Seydou from Mali, and Shade Thomas-Fahm from Nigeria. (Thomas-Fahm has a spectacular gold robe accentuated with black squares and dark yellow chevrons. No one who wears this can go about their business without notice.)

Beyond these displays is a monitor offering current runway shows where the innovative spirit of that time and place in Africa shines through even in collections that are seemingly drawn on European sources. There are too many designers to relate all the astonishing work here but it is worth mentioning the Kenyan designer Ami Doshi Shah, in the Adornment section, who has devised a gold and green metal choker with a long tail of leather or cloth that falls down the wearer’s back, in his Salt of the Earth collection.

In a nearby vitrine, Inzuki, a young Rwandan brand, presents a woven-basket collar necklace comprising interlocking bands of aquamarine, deep orange, hot pink and more, clearly drawn from traditional basket design. Here, the everyday is repurposed as the extravagant. This section is augmented by items in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, including gold rings from Pharaonic dynasties and early 20th-century beadwork from southern Africa.

The show doesn’t fetishize but also doesn’t avoid talking about process. There is a set of mannequins showing three stages of a dress, from cut paper pattern to toile mockup to the finished garment, by Katungulu Mwendwa, whose Katush line is designed in her home studio in Nairobi, Kenya. Artsi Ifrah, who last year won the Fashion Trust Arabia evening wear prize and is based in Morocco, makes sumptuous clothing that is all about maximalist layering, patterning, draping and material. The South African designer Lukhanyo Mdingi makes matching jackets and joggers for people of indeterminate gender out of felted mohair, wool and acrylic, with scarves that double as body shawls.

Mixed in with lavish design is street photography by artists such as Sarah Waiswa, Trevor Stuurman and Stephen Tayo, who show what the people on the street are wearing and how their outfits are no less imaginative and daring than the better-resourced fashion here. There is studio photography by the artists of legerdemain, such as the Malians Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. What would it have been like to embark on a career documenting this exploratory and upstart beauty at the start of a brand-new country? It must have been exhilarating. And all of this greeted me before I even got to the great rotunda hall that ends the show.

In this gallery about 40 mannequins are outfitted with a mesmerizing array of work by contemporary designers throughout the diaspora, such as Eilaf Osman, Papa Oppong, Brother Vellies and its founder Aurora James, Christopher John Rogers, and Studio One Eighty Nine in the section that means to show how Africa has a global footprint. According to Marisa Guthrie, writing for Women’s Wear Daily: “The contributions of African-born designers is already obvious in the fashion industry, but the exhibit is arguably the first comprehensive recognition of that legacy.”

The show is, in the words of the V & A’s Checinska, “inspired by the theater of fashion with its narrative potential: the crafting and performance of identities through props.” This potential is what drew me to fashion, the idea that I might present myself in a distinguished way, that I could embody an elegance that had previously eluded me. But with this exhibition the stakes are much higher than a mere rendition of individual identity. What unites the fashion talents represented in Brooklyn (and in London) is a clear need to exercise a political and aesthetic agency that go hand in hand.

Agency means almost nothing unless it is expressed. To have agency is to act in the world under one’s own imaginative and intellectual capacities. I never truly had that working as a salesperson for someone else’s brand, someone else’s notion of appropriate design.

At the end of the show, considering this, I walked back for a closer look at Waiswa’s photos of people on the street attending a “thrift social,” where clothes and music are exchanged. In one portrait, a woman has her hair pulled back in two coiled braids and sported a bandeau top made up of two fastened leather belts. At her midriff is a thin orange belt fastened with a gold panther buckle. In an adjacent photo three young men wear an eclectic mix of patterns and beaded jewelry. One has red-and-white striped overalls; another combines trousers with umber flowers with a red jacket. The third matched horizontal stripes with vertical stripes. When I was working in fashion retail, it never occurred to me that I could be this daring, this individual in my personal style.

That spirit of industrious innovation using whatever is at hand, and the relentless optimism in what the future might hold, are evident throughout the exhibition. What “Africa Fashion” understands deeply is that it has always been important not merely to be well dressed, but to be able to dress yourself well.

Africa Fashion

Through Oct. 22 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York; brooklynmuseum.org.

In the thought-provoking exhibition, “Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy,” at the International Center of Photography, two series of photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki face off on opposite walls.

In the first, “Sentimental Journey,” from 1971, Araki charts his honeymoon with Yoko Aoki, his young wife. The sequence includes shots of her undressed, and one image shows her in orgasm. But the most intimate portraits, with Aoki fully clothed, expose her interior life. In the most poignant, she is sitting in a train compartment and looking off to the side, with an air of resignation and foreboding. I thought of the last line of Henry James’s “The Bostonians,” where the newly betrothed heroine weeps tears and the narrator remarks, “It was to be feared that … these were not the last she was destined to shed.”

The Araki marriage, however, seems to have been happy. The tears to be shed were his. In 1994, Aoki died of ovarian cancer, an illness Araki chronicled in “Winter Journey,” from the hospital room all the way to the coffin and the household shrine constructed in her memory. The prints are time-stamped, as if each station of the journey was impressed on his soul. The couple’s beloved cat patrols in many of the pictures, and magnolia flowers are featured in others. The pet and the blooms conjure up the spirit of the departed wife.

Love and loss. The ditty that played in my head as I walked through “Love Songs” is the one that begins, “You don’t know what love is … until you’ve loved a love you had to lose.” There are 16 artists in the show, which has been adapted by the independent curator Sara Raza from an exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (M.E.P.) in Paris. Many of the photographers are charting the end of a love affair. As songwriters have recognized, the pain of a breakup is more emotionally penetrating than the joy of a happy romance. But what can be readily conveyed in music is elusive in photography, where the subjects too easily become performers, and the desired feeling of intimacy turns theatrical.

Scrolling through photos on Instagram or Facebook, you get the sense that the people smiling joyously with their arms around each other are actors. Or rather, that they have embarked on these relationships mainly to advertise them: They are impersonating themselves. Karla Hiraldo Voleau tackles the theme of simulated intimacy in “Another Love Story,” 2022. Arranged month by month, the pictures chronicle the artist’s discovery that her lover has continued a relationship that he had told her was over. The installation includes transcripts of phone calls between Hiraldo Voleau and the other woman, who was also kept in the dark.

Underscoring the unreliability both of lovers and of social media posts about love affairs, Hiraldo Voleau displays pictures she took of her ex-boyfriend where his face is not discernible and mixes them with photos made after the breakup, restaging old scenes with a hired look-alike. Tellingly, I could see no difference between the shots in which she is with her real lover and those with the man pretending to be him; in all these pictures, the subjects are acting for the camera.

Leigh Ledare in “Double Bind,” 2010, sought to show how a lover projects upon the beloved by photographing his ex-wife, five years after their divorce, in an isolated cabin in upstate New York. She had recently remarried. Two months later, Ledare persuaded her to visit the same dwelling with her new husband, Adam Fedderly, also a photographer, who portrayed her with his own camera. Ledare displays their photographs together, identifying the authorship by the color of the frames. In montages, he intermingled the photos with magazine cutouts, adding three vitrines brimming with more glossy clippings. It’s an ingenious setup that once again illustrates the inherent ambiguity of photography. I could not distinguish between the visions of the two men.

Intimacy is difficult to capture in a photo. I didn’t glean much from the posed portraits, many of them nude, that Collier Schorr made of her close collaborator, Angel Zinovieff. Nor was I so interested in the artsy shots that Lin Zhipeng took of his young male lovers. But I paused in wistful fascination before the sequence of photos by Hervé Guibert of his boyfriend, Thierry Jouno, both of them young, taken in the late ’70s and ’80s. There are nude images of Jouno, some X-rated. But the most intimate were a portrait of Jouno laying his head on a desk while cigarette smoke rises above, another of him grimacing as he looks in a mirror, and, in three posed pictures taken from different distances in a rustic room, Jouno standing, heartbreakingly handsome and obviously adored, his naked body concealed by gauzy veils. Surely some of my interest came from the knowledge that both Jouno, who directed an institute for the blind, and Guibert, who was a gifted writer as well as a photographer, would die of AIDS in their mid-30s.

The shadow of mortality also falls on “Proud Flesh,” 2003-09, by Sally Mann, her photographs of her husband, Larry, who suffers from late-onset muscular dystrophy. She made them with the 19th-century wet-plate collodion process. Back when it was the state of the art, photographers expertly overcame the pitfalls of the technique, but Mann embraces the flaws. Like her naked husband, many of the pictures are blemished and distressed. The darkness and blurring created by this archaic process add to the elegiac mood.

Ergin Cavusoglu’s “Silent Glide,” 2008, and Fouad Elkoury’s “On War and Love,” 2006, both set a romantic breakup against a landscape of decay or strife. In Cavusoglu’s staged three-channel video, a writer ends an affair with his married publisher, who is visiting him in Hereke, a Turkish seaside town once known for its production of silk rugs but dependent now, in addition to carpet manufacture, on shipping and a cement factory. Cavusoglu devotes as much attention to the degradation of the town as he does to the collapse of the affair.

Similarly, in “On War and Love,” 2006, Elkoury chronicles in a diary format the dissolution of his relationship with a younger woman, a parting that coincides with a war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. The photos are interspersed with texts, documenting the Israeli air and naval assault on Beirut and Elkoury’s emotional turmoil in Istanbul, where he travels from Lebanon in a futile attempt to persuade his lover to stay with him. Instead of resonating with each other, however, the two stories, when juxtaposed, distanced me from each of them.

“Love Songs” left me wondering if the theatricality of posing and the ambiguity of still images undercut the capacity of photography to document intimacy. Various art forms afford different advantages and limitations. Novels are best at describing the complex charms and vicissitudes of love, which is why so many of these artists resort to texts along with images. “Love Songs” is as much about what photography can’t do as about what it can.

Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy

Through Sept. 11, International Center of Photography, 79 Essex Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan, icp.org.