A photograph is both documentation and meditation.
Documentation of a time, a person, a place and an occurrence but more to the point, a meditation on the fidelity of frozen time. What we see in a photograph is a moment but it might well be a fallacy without any bearing on the preceding or succeeding moments. The context is reduced to that very frozen moment… These were some of my thoughts in my review of Emmanuel Iduma’s book, A Stranger’s Pose. Read here
There is, however, a difference when one contemplates a coloured and a black and white photograph. A photograph realised in colour is a smogarsord, a visual buffet with colours leaping off the photograph like mouth watering aroma wafting off a buffet table. But a black and white photograph is more like a one course meal. The chef must be good for his one meal to please as much as a feast.
The beauty and the genius of black and white photography lie often in the composition and what many photographers often refer to as “a way of seeing.”
This sense of the black and white image as lean and mean and containing multitudes, comes across forcefully in consideration of these black and white photographs by Kanmi Akande, a student at Vega, Johannesburg.
His photographs compel us to refelect on and re-imagine Lagos streets around the Marina and old quay-side
