[b. 1975] Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian
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Images make us think of other images. Photographs remind us of other photographs, and perhaps only the earliest photographs had a chance to evade this fate.
A picture of something terrible will always be caught between two worlds: the world of “something terrible,” which might shock us or move us to a moral response, and the world of “a picture,” which generates an aesthetic response. The dazzle of art and the bitterness of life are yoked to each other. There is no escape.
All images, regardless of the date of their creation, exist simultaneously and are pressed into service to help us make sense of other images.
My essays are not political in the main, but they are trying to advance a humanist argument. Likewise, my photographs are complex, but I hope, rewarding. If you spend time with them, I hope their nuances and formal rhythms will reveal themselves.
Most photographs are not interesting. Then a strange one turns up, a real winner, and it is difficult to pin its strangeness down.
A photograph can’t help taming what it shows.
In each place I have travelled, I have used my camera as an extension of my memory.
My camera is like an invisibility cloak. It makes me more free.
