Creating harmony

The LagosPhoto Festival brings together 22 photographers from 18 countries to expand the scope and role of photography on the continent

Somewhere between the phrases “Africa, your time is now” and “the Dark Continent” lie stories of nuance and complexity. How do we start to tell these stories in voices that defy both Afro-optimism or Afropessimism? As a kind of voice, photography is often a medium for projecting moments rooted in emotion that communicate meaning beyond binaries.

This work permeates gatherings such as the LagosPhoto Festival, the ninth edition of which takes place from October 27 to November 15.

This year, the festival is curated by Eva Barois de Caevel, Wunika Mukan, Charlotte Langhorst and Valentine Umansky, with the theme Time Has Gone, bringing a sense of bittersweet nostalgia.

Time Has Gone explores the configurations by which the past, the present and the future interact.

The hope is for time to be approached from different angles, highlighting matters of momentum, documentation and preservation, taking into consideration the intimacy of stories, as well as the breadth of the concept of time itself.

The LagosPhoto Festival allows us the opportunity to meditate on our relationship with linear narratives of time, as well as the positionality of objects and subjects in these stories. How do we discern differences between art as a form of activism, a form of documentation of our collective consciousness or as personal archives, and how do these possibilities allow us to bargain with photography in relation to our ethics and morals across time?

Medium of our time: Nigeria’s Olu Olatunde’s work is one of nearly 20 photographers from around the world included in this year’s festival