Self-taught photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi reveals the reality of everyday life in Lagos and other megacities. A 2016 Goethe Medal winner, he is a significant mediator between sub-Saharan Africa and Germany.
Image: Emeke Okereke
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Photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi reveals everyday reality of Lagos
He is one of three winners of this year's Goethe Prize. The Nigerian photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi portrays his hometown Lagos in his photographs.
Image: DW/U. Sommer
Lagos: most populous city on the continent
More than 18 million people live in the megacity Lagos. Hardly any other Metropolis in the world is growing so rapidly. Every day more people come from all over the country to Nigeria's capital in the hope of finding work and a better future. Colorful and impulsive, dirty and poor, aspiring and apocalyptic - it's a microcosm of the African continent.
Image: Akinbode Akinbiyi
Chronicle of change
This picture was taken around the turn of the millennium. Since then, the city has changed dramatically. Old buildings from the colonial era have made way for modern skyscrapers of glass and steel. In order to create more housing for businesses and Nigeria's wealthy class, the lagoon is currently being filled up. Akinbode Akinbiyi captures these changes neutrally as a photographer.
Image: Akinbode Akinbiyi
What is an 'urgent' photo?
Akinbode Akinbiyi often chooses fragments of reality in his photos. What the viewer doesn't see is that the sign indicates a small store for passport photos in Lagos. By just removing a few letters, the photographer poses essential questions.
Image: Akinbode Akinbiyi
'19 miles to Lagos'
Since photographer Akinbiyi took this photo in the early 2000s, the metropolis has spread and grown a lot. Lagos is now one of the most expensive cities in Africa. For the photographer, distance is also a symbol of the former British colonial power, which dictated the country while ignoring African conceptions of space and time.
Image: Akinbode Akinbiyi
Music, literature, exile
Music legend Abdullah Ibrahim left South Africa for Nigeria during apartheid. Akinbiyi photographed him in Lagos' cult bookstore Glendora. The family enterprise started the "Glendora Review" in the 1990s, which was a forum for the free exchange of ideas during the military dictatorship of Sani Abacha. Many intellectuals left Nigeria, but kept in touch with their country through the magazine.
Image: Akinbode Akinbiyi
The internal order of chaos
Even Fela Kuti, one of the most popular African pop stars, sang about the "go-slow." Traffic jams - so typical for Lagos - became a metaphor for the political and social collapse of his country. And yet, even in the middle of seemingly inextricable chaos, there is always a way forward. Akinbode Akinbiyi, in any case, is not a pessimist.
Image: Akinbode Akinbiyi
Complicated memories
Akinbode Akinbiyi studied literature and discovered photography later in life. Photography, he says, is "writing with light." His pictures are full of enigmatic poetry, like this one of the marina of Lagos. It reminds him of his childhood - a lost paradise.
Image: Akinbode Akinbiyi
Wandering and wondering
Akinbode Akinbiyi says he constantly scrutinizes himself. He almost always travel by foot. He never wants to force himself into the lives of others or violate their privacy. When he takes pictures on his old-fashioned camera he moves so unobtrusively through the streets that he often goes unnoticed.
Image: DW/U. Sommer
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Every year the Goethe-Institut honors people who have conveyed the German language and promoted international cultural relations. This year's main theme is "Migration of Cultures - Cultures of Migration."
The 2016 awardees Akin Akinbiyi from Nigeria, Yurii Andrukhovych from Ukraine and David Lordkipanidze from Georgia are three highly renowned individuals who have "rendered outstanding services to cultural exchange between their home countries and Germany - each in their own specific areas of work," says the Goethe-Institut.
Photographer Akin Akinbiyi, who has lived in Berlin since the early 1990s, is considered one of the most important artistic mediators between Germany and sub-Saharan Africa. Akinbode Akinbiyi was born in Oxford in 1946, grew up in Lagos and in England, and studied Literature and English in Nigeria, England and Germany.
In the mid-1970s he began to photograph without any prior training. He taught himself and gradually developed his skills. He is now among the most well-known African photographers and is internationally active as a curator and writer. Akinbode Akinbiyi's pictures have been shown at exhibitions worldwide, and have been published in various magazines. His focuses are reportage, architectural and cultural photography.
Passion for photography
Asked by the Goethe-Institut in 2013 what drives his passion for photography, he said, "My work is an attempt to understand cities and urban life today. Over the past years I've realized that I am looking for my childhood, that kind of innocence and childlikeness that I had growing up in London and Lagos, and which I feel is no longer there. Whenever I find such moments - fragments of this lost innocence - I take photographs."
The main focus of his work are rapidly growing and changing African megacities. A defining moment for him was when he received the 1987 reportage scholarship from the German magazine Stern. He won for his picture series on the West African cities of Dakar, Kano and Lagos that he had shot during this time that made him famous.
Akinbiyi will be showing new works at the documenta 14, which will be held in Athens and Kassel next year.
