A story about seeking twos

I want to tell you a story about seeking twos. About duplicity and finding Ying for Yang, tits and tats, looking at the world for doubles, doing my best Jay-Z rendition. Now that the dirt is off my shoulder in this cipher, let’s get down to business.

Can I kick it? Yes but instead I shoot. When I’m out shooting, one of the things I am looking out for is Reflections. By definition, a rich word with varying but interesting meanings which have served as pallet for curating some of my favorite images for the Monochrome Lagos project.

Looking is a political act just like rap and words and images cosign to open us up to more, either in the erudite opinions of Berger and Sontag or the eloquence of Mr Sean Carter but neither of the Carters (read as photographer Carter Bresson) has roamed my city seeking decisive moments and the only other Berger around here is Julius Berger whose eyes are set in stones and concrete building the new city.

The new city is pushing her waters farther like the proverb and many worry for the future and many worry more when the water occasionally acts stubborn and erodes.

Water in my visual arsenal helps for a reflection on things, how I see things and the duality therein when you scratch beneath the obvious surface. The multiple meaning of the word in itself is a visual guide of some sort.

The new BRT buses are neat and comfortable for the tiring inner city commute and the TBS bus stops have undergone a makeover. I like observing human action at after-work hours around the zones as the queuing system humbles an otherwise aggressive crowd allowing for closer observations.

In the image below, I am drawn to the reflections on the windows of the bus and how dreamy it all feels with the motion like roof coverings almost suggestive of the flow of the crowd and possibly even highlighting the fluctuating decibels of the place — the surreal touch was added with the eye staring at me at the left hand side of the image.

Seeking this other with amused eyes — by other I mean something special beyond the frontal result of a documentary approach, something with a spike that my floating self of a paper can get stuck on.

Another one of such is the image below. Minimal in execution yet ominous and beautiful in design. Patterns made by a roadside puddle looking like lightning strikes tearing through a marked earth with the limbs of the person to the right and torso of the reflecting human at the left sticking out boldly like cupids in a renaissance painting pointing to nothing and in this simple nothing, there lies everything. After all, all of beauty came from void? Or is this an exercise to evaluate the poignancy of the siamese — the duality between images and words. By breathing analysis to the image, have I given it life that would have been ordinarily bland?

We are all in the gutters , staring intently at the stars. Literally what the image above suggests, pictured here is an audience watching a performative art expression. FOD Gang had a pop up display in celebration of Segun Adefila’s birthday. These extremely talented kids were dancing in the muddy waters that fills up the middle of the street somewhere in Bariga.

Stuck between awe and questioning the sanity of the teenagers the audience documents their experience while reflecting beautifully in the dirt. Such a jewel of an image. Ironically there is a gesture resemblance of the subjects like the 2015 World Press Photo of the Year by John Stanmeyer (Look it up).

The vein stretched across his face navigating a stress map of dealing with the persistent illusion that life has proven to be. I watch people and impose a tale, an evaluation of possible guesses or indirect criticism. A reflection on his character and whom he might be.

A reflective surface is a canvass and though what you see is what you should get but how we see is where the thrill is and then the suggestive power of imagination and accumulated reserves. A visual bank takes over, validating individual sentiments or premises and offering not just an idea but also an invitation to see and know the world differently. A consideration of some subject matter, idea, or purpose and like that spirals into an odyssey of inexhaustible narratives.

Thank you for reading and sharing as always, let me know your thoughts in the comments.

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