A Place of no return

A Place of No Return continues the personal and political dialogue initiated in The Tranquillity Series, but shifts the lens inward — to a boy growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, who saw beauty not in spite of his environment, but because of it. This body of work exists as a visual counter-narrative, rejecting the often reductive Western gaze that defines Nigeria through the lens of poverty, dysfunction, and lack.

Too often, Western creatives approach Nigeria as a landscape for extraction — a place to build visual capital through images of suffering. Beauty, to them, is legible only through contrast: starving children, crumbling buildings, rural isolation. These tropes have long served as visual currency for outsiders hoping to launch their careers by aestheticizing the residue of colonial disruption.

But that is not the Nigeria I inherited.

I remember community. I remember the deep intimacy of shared routines — school uniforms pressed each morning, hair braided in weekly rituals, the sound of boys laughing by the sea, girls walking together under the heavy sky of early morning. I remember the keke napep — not just as transport, but as an emblem of collective movement through a city constantly in flux.

The photographs in A Place of No Return may be read as calm, even idyllic — but they are not naive. Beneath their surface lies a confrontation with the unspoken: a postcolonial condition marked by rupture, repression, and survival. There is a quiet violence in what has been erased from the narrative of contemporary Nigerian identity, and this work insists on reasserting that absence.

The title itself gestures toward displacement — not only geographic, but existential. We are born into a place we may never fully return to, because it changes the moment we begin to see it through the eyes of others. And yet, the emotional archive remains intact: the warmth of sunset gatherings, the collective breath of bodies in open spaces, the fragile silence that lives between memory and loss.

This is not a document of nostalgia, but a study in duality — of presence and absence, wholeness and fracture. We are never simply one thing. We are fragments, shaped by systems that have long tried to render us invisible or legible only through trauma.

A Place of No Return challenges that visibility. It reclaims the narrative, presenting Nigeria not as a place defined by what it lacks, but as a site of complexity, beauty, resistance, and interiority. It is a deeply personal archive — one that speaks not only of childhood, but of what it means to grow up in the shadow of history, yet still find joy in the everyday.