Humanitarian work honed my photography – Mohammed Chiroma
Daily Trust: Tell us a little about yourself Mohammed Chiroma: I was born and raised in Maiduguri. I went to Shehu Garbai Primary School. I graduated from Himma Private Secondary School in 1995 after which I did a Diploma in Law from 1998 to 2000. I then went into transportation and petroleum products haulage which saw me travelling around the country and later living for some time in Makurdi, Benue State. I went back to school in 2005 to study English in the University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID). I later changed to the Faculty of Education but left shortly after and started running a sachet water factory. Around the time when the Boko Haram insurgency was at its peak, I started a humanitarian organisation: “Borno Shall Be Free Club” with a friend, Babagana Kormi. That was before NEMA and SEMA intervention started in Borno State. Then NGOs started coming in and I joined “The Like Minds Project.” I was their first employee in Maiduguri. I recently left the NGO at the expiration of my last contract and turned my passion for photography into full time vocation.
How did you get into photography?
During my humanitarian work with the “Borno Shall Be Free Club” and “The Like Minds Project”, I was taking photos with my cell phone and posting them on social media as a way of countering the single story many media houses churn out on Borno. I was, however, not very conversant with many things on photography. Things like ethics and copyright issues weren’t familiar to me. So I kept seeing my photos in newspapers and news sites without knowing what to do. My colleague, Fati Abubakar, saw some potential in me and kept telling me to get a camera. She almost always commented with, “You need a camera” whenever I posted a photo. I later saved enough to buy a Sony 500 Holiday camera. I then got invited to participate in a photography training workshop sponsored by the North East Regional Initiative (NERI). This was followed by a social media photo campaign and a photo exhibition at the end of the campaign. I emerged the best participant and received a trophy.
You have documented the victims of the insurgency for a while. Why and how did you start?
I came across a many victims of the Boko Haram insurgency and listened to their stories. I felt that some of these stories needed to be shared with the world. But there are stories that I am careful when sharing because they can be taken and twisted to give a completely different picture from the reality on ground. As at that time, whenever you sauid something that went against a certain accepted narrative, you risked getting tagged a Boko Haram sympathiser, especially if you are from Borno State.
That was why I chose to use photography as a way of telling their stories because it is a very powerful tool that can pass a message across with little or no risk of being misinterpreted.
Are you able to detach your emotions and simply take your photographs?
It is not easy to detach my emotions because I do not only take photos, I usually also listen to the victims. There was a particular time I had to cut off my photography session, excused myself and shed tears.
So, while I try to be as professional as possible, it is impossible to always detach emotionally from the subjects I photograph because they are real people with real hearttouching experiences.
Works of painters and sculptors usually reflect their mood. Is it same with photography?
No; my mood rarely shows in my photographs; except those that are made purely for the sake of art. Example, I have a number of photos capturing sunset, river banks, night time city streets and animals. In those cases, I think
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