Influences and Inspirations: J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere

Johnson Donatus Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere was a Nigerian photographer who despite his very humble beginnings in a rural village in 1930, decided that he wanted to pursue a career in photography. In the year 1968, he began one of his largest and most recognisable projects where he documented various traditional Nigerian hairstyles. By the time that he had completed this incredibly large project, he had printed approximately a thousand pictures of different African womens’ hairstyles. In the February of 2012, he died at the age of 83.

 

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Influences and Inspirations: Ima Mfon

Ima Mfon is a Nigerian “Fine Art Photographer” who works mainly in Lagos, Nigeria and New York, USA. He takes a major influences from photographers such as Richard Avedon, August Sander and J.D. Okhai Ojiekere and challenges audiences to look beyond the surface, which is quite a difficult mission to undertake using a solely visually based artform.Ima-Mfon-820x432

Influences and Inspirations: Samuel Fosso

Samuel Fosso is a Cameroonian photographer who was forced to flee his home country to the Central African Republic at a young age, where he has remained for the majority of his career. He works almost exclusively in self-portraiture and often uses the medium as a form of social commentary on topics ranging from post-colonialism to ancient African history and the legends associated with this. He takes on a range personas to achieve this which are separated by their various outfits and often hand-sewn cloth backgrounds.003_samuel_fosso_theredlistA-Fosso-The-Golf-Player samuelfoss-ali

Final Piece: Home

This was a very open brief to end with which led me to have a plethora of ideas as to how to tackle it. A good thing about this is that I can use the ideas that I did not carry out this time at a later date as I feel that they would be interesting explorations to undertake. For the brief however, I decided to photograph things that either reminded me of home such as certain foods and drinks, or things that gave me a “homely comfort” such as my music equipment and my phone, which both provide comfort and an escape from reality when needed. I tried to utilise all the skills that I have accrued over this semester and also attempted to be more experimental with my use of colour and composition. This can be seen in the way that I have laid out the images in a sort of triptych format, as well as my occasional use of split toning on occasion, which I did to add a surrealist tone to the landscape of the subjects. I wanted to take all of the pictures in a similar way, attempting to get a focus on the angles of each subject as a sort of juxtaposition of architectural photography. This was interesting to me due to the fact these are minuscule items in comparison to buildings, but still have just as much if not more detail than the average skyscraper. The fact that I used an architectural tone with these images is also interesting because of the fact that a literal home is a form of architecture, which I feel gives the whole sequence a deeper contrast with the idea of a “home”. final 3 Final 1

Portraiture II

_DSC2225 _DSC2217 _DSC2220 _DSC2226The images above were created for the second part of the portraiture brief: Unfamiliar Subjects, where we had to go around looking for strangers to film. I found that many people were just as uncomfortable being photographed as I was taking the picture of them, which helped to break the ice as we had a shared feeling. A few people were very welcoming and open to being photographed, such as the lady in the Kodak Studio, who most likely enjoys the concept of photography as she has chosen to have a career in the field. An issue I faced was that I tended to rush a lot of the shots, partly because I wanted to get of the uncomfortable position of filming strangers in public and also due to the fact that I wanted to photograph a good number of people in a relatively short time-frame. This led to a few photos being slightly out of focus, but I feel this added a bit of character to the images and could be seen as a stylistic choice instead of a technical shortcoming.