Homosexual men in Nigeria, as far as I can surmise, are constrained to practice double lives. They are men who, for the sake of survival, despite their real desires, that of being in love with fellow men, sometimes have to flirt with women, show facetious attraction to women. This duplicity is similar to facing the camera with one’s back; of being shamed by law and morality; shamed to the extent that the camera bears the reflection of something monstrous, not to be seen.
A writer clears his path through incessant questioning—seeking more than anything else an honest evaluation of his position and place in the subject’s affairs. Devoid of any irrelevancy and unpretentiousness, a piece of writing will consequently function as honest, and as intimate. Hence there is a sense in which “intimacy” means “clarity.”
“It’s possible that a novelist begins a novel in an attempt to open up a photograph, or several photographs. I will like to write such a novel. It’s this sort of future I wish to imagine for photographs—a world in which they are bound up with novels.”
Victor Ehikhamenor grew up seeing symbolic paintings and drawings on shrine-walls in the village of his birth. Upon maturity, after he received a drawing book for school, he began to imitate the wall drawings on paper. Four decades later, some of those walls have crumbled; the artist retains, however, a copy of that drawing book. He carries it in his memory.
“Absence, in the making of the photographs, seemed like a metaphor for presence, a way to affirm the continued relevance of the girls. By standing in place of portraits of the missing girls, the still life pictures of their possessions carry the same power of recognition that portraits would have carried.”
Emmanuel Iduma on the representation of the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram.