LagosPhoto Festival is the first international art festival of photography in Nigeria, launched in October 2010. It is organised by the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) as part of an ongoing project designed to use art in public spaces, as a medium for increasing societal awareness. The festival includes workshops and classes for professional artists, art fairs and indoor and outdoor exhibitions citywide. LagosPhoto is held annually and features emerging photographers alongside established photographers.
Azu Nwagbogu is the festival's founder and director.
Editions
No Judgement: Africa Under the Prism (2010) The inaugural edition leveraged on Nigeria's 50 years of Independence. Interested participants were required to have worked in Lagos, Nigeria or in Africa shooting works that interpreted the theme.
Exhibiting photographers
Artistic Directors and Curators: Azu Nwagbogu, Caline Chagoury, Marc Prust
Architect: Kunlé Adeyemi
What’s Next Africa? The Hidden Stories (2011) This edition was targeted at representing the hidden stories on the continent as opposed to the mis-represented, over represented, sensationalized and dramatically images commonly covered with the power of photography.
Exhibiting photographers
Artistic Directors and Curators: Azu Nwagbogu, Caline Chagoury, Marc Prust, Medina Dugger
Seven Days in the Life of Lagos (2012) This edition was aimed at capturing the energy and vibrancy that make Lagos such a unique cultural environment. A city of extreme 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 interaction.
Exhibiting photographers
Artistic Directors and Curators: Azu Nwagbogu, Caline Chagoury, Stanley Greene, Medina Dugger and Joseph Gergel.
The Mega City and the Non-City (2013) This year's theme, The Megacity and the Non-City, explores how the development of urban centers in Africa and the technical advance of photography have transformed our sense of place in a globally connected world. The 21st century has been characterised by the rise of the megacity, with cities such as Lagos transitioning and adapting to vast changes taking place at an unprecedented speed. Urban development, population explosion, environmental changes, socio-economic gaps, and the rising middle class in metropolitan centers in Africa redefine the structure of the city as it continuously evolves. At the same time, the digital revolution transforms the spatial perimeters of an individual's immediate environment, tied to the virtual connectivity between places through expanded technologies. This concept of the “non-city” is defined by displacement, fantasy, and an unstable sense of identity, where individuals reference multifarious cross-sections of cultures. The artists presented in The Megacity and the Non-City adopt photographic practices and image-based strategies to negotiate the expanding urban landscape of Africa today, with its contradictions, grey areas, and sites of dispute. By situating photography at the core of their practice, these artists investigate the circulation of images in our society, their mass consumption and capacity to document personal and collective world-views.
Exhibiting photographers
Staging Reality, Documenting Fiction (2014) This year's theme, Staging Reality, Documenting Fiction, examines contemporary photographers working in Africa who negotiate the boundaries and relationships between photography, beliefs, and truths. Incorporating conceptual and performative strategies that expand traditional photographic practice, many contemporary artists working on the continent move beyond the confines of the photojournalistic gaze. These artists produce work that considers 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. Utilizing genres such as staged narratives, performance, appropriation, self-portraiture, and still life, these artists push the temporal and spatial boundaries of the photographic medium. In doing so, 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.