The Best of LagosPhoto

Launched in 2010, LagosPhoto is the first international arts festival of photography in Nigeria. In a month-long series of events, the festival include exhibitions, workshops, artist presentations, discussions, and large scale outdoor prints, displayed throughout the city with the aim of reclaiming public spaces and engaging the general public with multifaceted stories of Africa. LagosPhoto aims to establish a community for contemporary photography which will unite local and international artists through images that encapsulate individual experiences and identities from across all of Africa. LagosPhoto presents and educates it's global  audiences about how photography  is used as a tool to explore historical and contemporary issues, share cultural practices, and promote  social programmes.

For LagosPhoto 2011 it was our aim to show where the African continent is going with all its problems, challenges, variety, beauty, and ideas. LagosPhoto 2011 was curated by Marc Prust.

Lagos is the most populous city in Nigeria, the second fastest growing city in Africa, and the seventh fastest growing city in the world. A city of extremes and contradictions, Lagos transforms with the fast pace of urban migration and the explosion of development and technology that is dissolving barriers and leading to new types of interactions. LagosPhoto 2012 aimed to document the city of Lagos from a comprehensive and nuanced perspective, one that reveals the big picture by focusing on the minute details of social life. This edition of LagosPhoto was curated by Joseph Gergel and Medina Dugger

Curated by Joseph Gergel, The Mega city and the Non-City explores how the development of urban centres in Africa and the technical advancement of photography have transformed our sense of place in a globally connected world. Urban development, population explosion, environmental changes, socio-economic gaps, and the rising middle class in metropolitan centres in Africa redefine the structure of the city as it continuously evolves.

Curated by Azu Nwagbogu, Staging Reality, Documenting Fiction, examines contemporary photographers working in Africa and how their practices negotiate the boundaries and relationships between photography, beliefs, and truths. These artists produced pieces that torchlight the complex social and political concerns that define a new Africa in the twenty-first century, and they explore how the ubiquity of images plays a vital role in how reality is constructed and articulated. Staging Reality, Documenting Fiction considers how these artists imagine different futures and charter fictive worlds, using photography as a catalyst to investigate the changing realities of Africa today.

Curated by Cristina De Middel, Designing Futures positions the relationships between African design. Designing Futures highlights crucial aspects of ‘making’ that come into play in African signs and design dialogues. The making of image, identity, desire, ecology, and even culture are explored through advertising, textiles, portraiture, factual and conceptual photography. These offer tangible and esoteric backdrops to how we process, navigate and inhabit the realms of a future Africa. These images create a dialogue about appropriation, identity and beauty.

Curated by Cristina De Middel and Maria Pia Bernardoni, Inherent Risk: Rituals and Performance explores the role of acts of repetition that shape gender, image, identity, social agency, power and social constructs in contemporary society. Actions repeated constantly, become a ritual, its transference into other spaces of engagement becomes a performance. Each image is the direct representation of the world, a human trace on a material surface.  

Under the curatorship of the renowned fashion designer Duro Olowu, Regimes of Truth explores the various tensions between faith, reality and belief through smokescreens with ambivalence. This is represented in a dynamic intersection of photographic encounters featuring the most recent creative output and world premier of the work by renowned award-winning artist, Samuel Fosso, whose new series“Black Pope’ delves into the politics of religion in Africa and confronts its image dissimulations. 

This theme and conversation of interest is intended to explore contemporary dialogues surrounding different facets of time. Artists from around the globe have been invited to discuss, confront and wrestle with this idea of urgency. 

In the digital world, globalization appears egalitarian and desirable, however once being a cosmopolitan becomes physical, the inequity of possessing a privileged or non-privileged passport becomes evident. Traveling the world freely, without being a subject of scrutiny or suspicion is still – and maybe more than ever – impossible for a large percentage of the world population, because the "the value" of a passport is measured by calculating its "Visa-Free Score" (VFS).

Curated by Dr. Oluwatoyin Sogbesan, Dr Clementine Deliss, Azu Nwagbogu and Maria Pia Bernardoni.  LagosPhoto 2020 is a Home Museum project where all participants are to submit objects of virtue as a personal collection to the organisers.Organised by the African Artists Foundation (AAF), the festival will only take place online with the aim of restoring lost memories and evoking interest in our shared history.