NOLLYWOOD (2009)
I became aware of Nigeria's remarkable film industry while working on The Hyena & Other Men series. Everywhere I travelled, out of the corner of my eye I would see people watching these locally produced films: in bars, hotel lobbies, anywhere there was a television. Production values at the time were really low, especially the sound quality, which is perhaps why the films irritated me so much at first. But then, at some point, I became more interested in the industry itself, the third largest in the world after the United States and India. It was not the economics of releasing between 500 and 1,000 films each year that interested me so much as the cultural issues encoded in a cinema made by local producers for local audiences. Here was a local entertainment industry allowing mass self-representation through popular culture. I do not want to overstate it: the Nigerian film industry diligently produces a mixture of banal, strange, interesting and occasionally profound films. What intrigued me was the authenticity at play and, thinking a little further, how this exercise in authenticity challenges Western preconceptions about Africa.
With these big ideas in mind, I began photographing on film sets. It was an unproductive avenue. I was not interested in making a documentary project showing the puppet strings: the film cameras, booms, microphones and countless operators behind the scenes. I was more interested in the cinematic ideas and stereotypes being manufactured for mass consumption. One evening I met a make-up artist who showed me his portfolio: photographs of actors in make-up. He worked in Enugu, which is much easier to work in than Lagos, and had many connections. We reached an agreement whereby he would help me with my portrait series; the collaboration would showcase his skills with make-up and costume as much as mine with the camera.
The portraits were made over four trips. The individual shoots were not formal events on a film set; I prefer to think of them as theatrical happenings that sometimes came together quite informally. Of course, I directed the final compositions; they were not spontaneous events as such. I think it is important to acknowledge that my photographs offer a selective engagement with Nollywood's ideas and visual culture. I chose not to engage with the soap-opera genre, which is very popular in Nigeria and generally takes place in upper-class homes. I had no interest in that. My taste tends more towards the macabre; I loved horror films as a child. There is still an element of that in the subterranean parts of my mind.
The project's trajectory involved imagining a series of portraits, inventing them with actors and then documenting these fictional subjects. In my development as an artist, this project marked the first time I truly questioned the truthfulness of portraiture. I realised how one can play with portraiture, how it can be much more than a simple surface description of a subject. For example, the portrait of the three enslaved women is easy to misinterpret. In reality, however, it is a photograph of three paid actors wearing costumes and chains. While working on this series and then reading the responses, I became more aware of what the viewer brings to the image, which often exceeds what is depicted.
