Lagos is a city that resists silence. It moves, always, and its restlessness has made it irresistible to artists, writers, filmmakers, and photographers. How does one contain Lagos? How does one take a city so vast, so layered, and press it into the shape of a story, a frame, a moment? Many have tried. Lagos has been written about, theorized, mythologized, aestheticized: Chibundu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos, Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief, Eloghosa Osunde’s Vagabonds!, the Karen King Aribisola-edited anthology International Sisi Eko and Other Stories, Damilare Kuku’s All the Men in Lagos Are Mad, Chris Abani’s Lagos Noir, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún’s Edwardsville by Heart, which carries Lagos in its margins, Wale Lawal’s essays on how the city is becoming something new, something cold.

I think about how Lagos demands to be seen, how it is never neutral. Photography, like literature, has become one of the ways Lagos is held in place — however briefly — before it shifts again. The city is always under construction, always disappearing and reappearing in different forms. In books, the city sprawls in layered narratives, shifting between voices, between moods. In photographs, it is frozen for a moment, before it moves again, before it rearranges itself into something slightly different from what was just captured. There is an urgency to Lagos street photography, the need to preserve something before it disappears. Not just because the city is in flux, though it is, constantly, but because to document Lagos is to acknowledge its multiplicity. To photograph Lagos is to attempt to understand it. But Lagos does not lend itself easily to understanding. It is a city of gentrification and ruin, of aspiration and exhaustion, of yellow danfos careening down roads that seem to buckle under their weight.

Who owns the image of Lagos? Who decides which version of the city is worth preserving? The history of African photography has long been shaped by outsiders — colonial-era photographers who captured Lagos through a lens of exoticism, foreign correspondents who reduce the city to a set of clichés. Contemporary Lagos photographers reclaim this gaze, turning their cameras on the city not as spectators, but as participants. In Double Negative, Ivan Vladislavic writes of a photographer who captures Johannesburg without ever explaining it, allowing the images to speak for themselves. Lagos street photographers operate in a similar way: they do not interpret, they do not impose narrative, they simply witness.

Photography is the art of simultaneity, of layering different stories within a single frozen moment. A street scene in Lagos is never just one thing, it is a collision of movement, expression, tension, and time. Everyone in Lagos carries a story, whether they realize it or not. A photograph, then, is an intersection of lives, a fragment of history caught before it disappears. A single flick of the camera shutter is enough to make one sink into these stories, to wonder about the unseen threads connecting them. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, describes photography as a medium that always contains a “punctum”, an element that pricks the viewer, that disrupts the mere recording of a scene and introduces something deeper, something unknowable. In Lagos, the punctum is everywhere: in the contrast between wealth and poverty, in the gestures of urgency and fatigue, in the silent negotiations happening, on street corners, at bus stops.

 

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There is something inherently extractive about photography, about the way a camera claims its subject. Lagos, ever suspicious of intrusion, often battle this claim. Photographers here must be careful, must negotiate their gaze. To point a lens at a street vendor, at a market woman, is to enter a conversation, sometimes unspoken, sometimes explicit. “What will you do with this image?” the subject asks, even if the question is only in their eyes. “Will you return it to me, or will you take it away?”

untitled | Lagos ‘24 pic.twitter.com/ICnHpKxwLu

— sankofa films (@snkfafilms) March 12, 2025

It is a question that haunts even the most well-intentioned photographer. The balance between documentation and intrusion is a precarious one. This is why the best Lagos street photography feels reciprocal; it is not merely about taking, but about witnessing with responsibility. About making images that honor, rather than exploit.

The witness

"Made in Lagos". pic.twitter.com/aLQRyJIHFq

— Godiva Omoruyi (@gdvomo) March 11, 2025

There is something of an obsession with black-and-white photography when it comes to street photography, an aesthetic choice, certainly, but also, perhaps, a kind of nostalgia, a desire to lend the city a gravitas that color might seem to compromise. Black-and-white street photography has its adherents, those who believe that stripping away color reveals something essential—the play of light and shadow, the stark drama of the streets. But there is a loss, too.

 

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Lagos is not a city of muted tones. It is a city of deep browns: the churned-up mud after the first rains, the ochre dust that clings to feet and trouser hems. It is a city of burning oranges and yellows: the danfo in motion, its rusted flanks gleaming under the weight of the sun. The blues and greens of painted signboards, promising miracles, advertising cures for ailments of the body and the spirit alike. To strip Lagos of its color is, in some ways, to strip it of its essence. The photographer has the right to choose, of course. But what does it mean to choose?

My favorite photograph is one with many layers—layers with many stories. This type of composition can be complex or elementary. Street Photography is beautiful.

"Made in Lagos". pic.twitter.com/KMmu0TVgWb

— Godiva Omoruyi (@gdvomo) March 5, 2025

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes that photographs preserve moments “as if they still exist.” But in Lagos, street photography does something more complicated: it makes visible what is no longer there. Lagos Studio Archives, a project by Karl Ohiri and Riikka Kassinnen, has spent the last decade salvaging the work of forgotten photographers, images from defunct studios, negatives discarded by their owners, whole lifetimes of Lagosians who posed in front of hand-painted backdrops, dressed in styles that marked the passing of decades. The portraits of Abi Morocco Studios, taken in the 1970s and ’80s, now exist only in these recovered negatives, their subjects frozen in a Lagos that no longer resembles itself. The urgency of this preservation is clear. What happens to a city when its past is no longer visible?

Walter Benjamin, in his Little History of Photography, reminds us that photography’s power lies in its ability to arrest time while simultaneously implying what came before and what will come after. Lagos is not a city that lends itself easily to stillness but to photograph it is to engage in that complex but necessary task, to try to hold something that struggles to be held. Perhaps this is why the best Lagos street photography feels like a defiant but artistic refusal to let the city slip entirely through one’s fingers. You take a photo of a street today; by tomorrow, the street has changed. The market stalls have moved. The graffiti has been painted over. The danfo that idled on the curb is gone. And so, the photographer returns, camera in hand, chasing a city that barely stands still long enough to be caught.