Array of Passports at 10th Lagos Photo Festival

Since its launch in 2010, Lagos Photo Festival hasn’t relented in pushing the envelope; reflecting on questions about not just life and living in Nigeria but about humanity in general.

This year’s festival, from October 27 to November 15 at multiple venues including the Africa Artists’ Foundation (AAF),  Victoria Island, Nimbus Gallery, Ikoyi; Red Door Gallery, Victoria Island and the Old Federal Government Press Building on Broad Street, Lagos Island was not different from the previous editions.

For 2019, Nigeria’s biggest festival of photography examined ‘Passports’ as its theme. “It intends to delve into the constraints and prospects of the most important official document a human being holds. This year’s edition aims to bring alive, an alternative global environment in which artists of different nationalities are invited to explore options of creating a fluid and permeable world, where nationality, gender, and historical imbalances are secondary. It will open the discussion of how we can create a flexible and more equal world within the existing global restrictions. What are the options of living freely in a world that will be determined by borders?”, the curators, Azu Nwagbogu (who is also the founder), Maria Pia Bernardoni and Dr Charlotte Langhorst said in their statement.

Some of the participating photographers creatively addressed the theme.  Zimbabwe’s Dan Halter, for instance, had an image of a white man draped in plastic-weave (known in Nigeria as Ghana Must Go) made into high-end custom-woven fabric titled ‘Furry Boots ye fae?’. In the Doric language of Scotland, it means ‘whereabouts are you from?’  He continued to use the cheap Chinese made plastic weave bags and their names in different countries to explore migration in ‘Space Invader’. The bag called ‘Ghana Must Go’ in Nigeria is also known in the US as Chinatown tote; Bangladeshi bag in the UK; and Guyanese Samsonite in the Caribbean. It has become a symbol of migration worldwide.

The viewer also encounters works of the minimalist artist, Ruben Martin De Lucas whose aerial shot pictures occupied the centre of the exhibition space. Lucas took a little shot in the series documented as ‘Minimal Republics’, highlighting how man strangely thinks he possesses the earth which in reality transcends him in age.

Rahima Gambo’s ‘A Walk’ is a mix of photographs and collages inspired by her walks through the Millennium Park in Abuja. They represent moving ideas and according to the artist, “is a narrative mechanism that is mobile and open-ended, with no beginning, middle or end, that yields stills, moving images and an assemblage of found objects I sculpt together from objects I pick up on my ‘path.’

Expounding on the choice of ‘Passports’ as the theme of the festival that featured over 40 artists, Nwagbogu said “There’s a tendency towards nationalism, closing up and we want to interrogate what that means. The passport that you have is that really your identity. I think that the passport that we should all have is the human passport; an idea that we are all the same. All over the world, there’s this tendency towards populism, towards closing ranks. We feel that the theme allows us to engage with those problematics.

On what has sustained the festival for 10 years, he said, “I think it’s the audience, the people, you. Everyone has sustained it. We are  lucky and blessed to have the support of the community and people who understand what we are doing; people who believe in the power of images to spark social change.”

Apart from the people, other partners of 2019 Lagos Photo Festival were Canon Central and North Africa, Tecno, Culture at Work Africa, Wellcome Trust, Unseen Foundation, British Journal of Photography and Linke Lab.