Once again both pictures form an association in my mind - wayfinding. And it reminds me that if Nigerians are known for one thing, it is wayfinding, we are constantly looking for ways to navigate this life. I am part Igbo and a common greeting in my language is - Ke way? In other words - 'What's up? What's happening? What's the way forward? How are you surviving? Show me the way, so I too can survive.'
The worker is often street photography’s unwilling subject. Without the worker, without, in particular, their movement, the city loses the dynamism with which it draws, in the first place, the photographer’s eye. So, I am often interested in images like this: of workers, especially those who work with their bodies, engaged in activities other than labor. The men in Shotunde’s photo appear idle, caught in casual conversation. The brilliance of the image is that the sign on the right side, ‘China Civil’, when our gaze finds it, reminds us that whatever leisure they have taken advantage of here is short lived. The calm of the scene and the ease which is expressed in their figures is disrupted, not only by the awareness that the setting is in fact noisy, but also by that shared knowledge of what must be relinquished for the sake of a wage. One may find something almost ominous about the way the sign appears in the foreground, a position from which it looms even above the two men standing, at a level with the horizon.
Once again both pictures form an association in my mind - wayfinding. And it reminds me that if Nigerians are known for one thing, it is wayfinding, we are constantly looking for ways to navigate this life. I am part Igbo and a common greeting in my language is - Ke way? In other words - 'What's up? What's happening? What's the way forward? How are you surviving? Show me the way, so I too can survive.'
The worker is often street photography’s unwilling subject. Without the worker, without, in particular, their movement, the city loses the dynamism with which it draws, in the first place, the photographer’s eye. So, I am often interested in images like this: of workers, especially those who work with their bodies, engaged in activities other than labor. The men in Shotunde’s photo appear idle, caught in casual conversation. The brilliance of the image is that the sign on the right side, ‘China Civil’, when our gaze finds it, reminds us that whatever leisure they have taken advantage of here is short lived. The calm of the scene and the ease which is expressed in their figures is disrupted, not only by the awareness that the setting is in fact noisy, but also by that shared knowledge of what must be relinquished for the sake of a wage. One may find something almost ominous about the way the sign appears in the foreground, a position from which it looms even above the two men standing, at a level with the horizon.