Photography in its most common forms is basically drawing with light, it is in breaking down the simplicity of this definition that photography really gets its thunder, its moment of truth if you might say. Photography is a collection of moments that will last forever, it’s here that all genres of photography collide; from editorial photography to the good ol’ documentary photography genre.
We love to separate and give labels to the type of photography that we all do; I identify as an editorial, fashion, and portrait photographer. I have friends who identify differently (with some going as far as calling themselves Conceptual photographers. I’ve never understood that ‘concept’ but now is not the time). While we carry various labels, at the core of what we do is documenting various moments in time… the person we photograph today is never the same person we photograph a week or ten years later because while they might still occupy the same physical frame, so many changes every time we photograph them which begets the questions… Where do all these stories go?
Between 1960 and 1990, a photographer by the name of Peter Oyeyemi Obe was Nigeria’s leading photojournalist. Working with press organisations like Daily Trust Newspaper and Agence France Presse (AFP), Peter Obe was at the fore of photojournalism for over three decades, documenting the entirety of the Nigerian Civil War and at the end, compiling a coffee table book in January of 1971 titled “Nigeria; A Decade of Crisis in Pictures” that sadly isn’t available anywhere these days.
Post Peter Obe, the documentary culture in Nigeria is coming on quite well with photographers like Uche James Iroha, Bernard Kalu, Tolani Alli, Bayo Omoboriowo, and many others leading the charge but the stories of how we got here are all but lost. In 2018, Works by Jonathan Adagogo Green, Nigeria’s first photographer was published (click here to read about that) but outside that, there are very few indigenous books or photographs that tell the Nigeria evolution story and that is sad and problematic. Museums that should tell these stories are either underfunded or lack maintenance.
Social media has given so many the chance to tell stories and the internet has created a “safe” storage for these stories but if care isn’t taken, the lack of identity that we suffer today due to lack of reference materials to look back on will plague the coming generation.
It was Marc Riboud who said; “Photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it changes.” For a better understanding of where we are headed, we must first see and understand where we come from and photography, especially documentary photography plays a huge role in that.
