"Countless arrivals make their way to Lagos every day with little money, finding places to live in shantytowns and hastily built tenements, or, sometimes, on the street. It is a challenging city, one that doesn't welcome newcomers as much as it eventually makes room for them, daring them to make a home and earn their keep in an environment without much of a social safety net, and with little opportunity for formal employment."
"The British Nigerian photographer Ollie Babajide Tikare took note of those aspects, capturing daily Lagos in his recent book, " Èkó," a collage of scenes and portraits from the city, taken from 2023 to 2025. Several of the photos are taken in media res: people walking in a market, venders moving through traffic with their wares, a man wading into the blue-green waters of Tarkwa Bay,"
Ollie Babajide Tikare photographs daily life across Lagos, producing a collage of scenes and portraits made between 2023 and 2025. The city stretches from a populous mainland across lagoon islands to the Atlantic, containing roughly twenty million residents. Many newcomers arrive with little money and live in shantytowns, hastily built tenements, or on the street. Formal employment is limited and social safety nets are scarce, while housing, health care, and electricity are often unreliable. Daily life nonetheless teems with entrepreneurial hustle, inventive survival strategies, intimate communal ties, and striking public moments in markets and on the waterfront.
Read at The New Yorker
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