I have so far published only one essay on photography, “The Lessons of Hue Editing,” where I tried to understand what it means to edit photography using filters without making it soulless. I had written another essay before this, titled “Sunkisses” (which never got published) on the intersection of iPhones and the natural sunlight filter, which was becoming a kind of photography subgenre at the time; there, I had made my strong points against manipulating photography, basing my argument on the subject of Walter Benjamin’s “aura” in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a principle I have adopted not just in art, but mostly all things, as man gradually and daily leaves the cathedral of his original self. Nonetheless, I have, for a time, taken interest in photography, but as an observer, or one who comes to it by virtue of reading about it or by certain writers I admire (Sebald, Iduma, Cole), ritualists in the art of blending photography and writing.
On 8th October, a photographer, Ugochukwu Emebiriodo (@Hitchoflife), posted on 𝕏 a photograph he captioned “Third mainland.” I’d first seen it on someone’s WhatsApp status before I saw it on 𝕏. It was widely shared that I repeatedly saw it on my 𝕏 timeline. I was at the time deep into editing a voluminous manuscript and was mentally drained, so I only appreciated the photograph passively. And my engagement with it would have stayed that way if not for a curious stroller who tagged me, asking if I’d seen the photograph. Apparently, they think I am “at the intersection of photojournalism and creative writing” and wanted to know my thoughts on what qualities make Emebiriodo’s photograph “Third mainland” stand out.
I have had to wonder, however, why this person imagined I could say something about the photograph. I only seriously began writing about photography last year, in an adventure that was surprising even to me, which resulted in a book-length project. I recall showing excerpts from the book to a fellow Obongjayar fan who is a bookseller, and his comment about why I was over-intellectualising a photograph. The photograph in question was a view of concrete columns in the front of a block of shops, and the stems of umbrella trees opposite them, whose branches had been cut down. I wrote that the photograph splits “into green and concrete, accentuating a marriage and tension at the same time”—that sort of thinking about the in-betweenness of things. Yet I wasn’t entirely ignorant of his sentiment; excessive intellectualism has its bubble. But I know this laziness too, the unwillingness of the mind to be patient with an idea that is too much labour to engage with. And one cannot think like this with photography, for it demands the ways of looking at things to change, and that to arrive at such new ways of thought is to think with deliberate labour.
What is interesting about Emebiriodo’s “Third Mainland” is that it isn’t so derivative as certain photographs are, made out of the ritual of the trite, in how you may say all street photography are similar. Although it relies on the capture-friendly and spectacle aesthetics of architecture which easily confers some sense of grandeur on a photographer’s work. But this is only partly true, for we are not invited to feast our eyes with an architectural marvel, but rather an inversion of the idea. And what do we feel? We are intimidated and inspired by its gothic aura as we subconsciously compare our smallness to it, this massive underbelly of concrete. Is this the road to some celestial crypt? Oneiric. I feel a great sense of the utopic here, and of the celestial too. These are grand rectangular columns diminishing into perspective as sunlight pours in from starboard. It is like a passage. It is like a place I might find myself in in a dream—the sort you return to in another dream years later. The photograph has what I like to call the “deep call” effect. In this case, the deep-call pulls you into a walk down the passage. And that when you get to the end, you may come face-to-face with an extra-terrestrial encounter. Or that at the end of the passage is some kind of escape at last, the dual portals of light beckoning you.
I have ignored the more obvious things in the photograph: that this is an under bridge in Lagos, glaringly scant of life as it is a bridge over a lagoon; that there are human figures, one in the foreground, three in the background; or the photograph’s perfect Euclidean symmetry of things in the squared shapes, and arcs, their sequential and angular distribution. The dominance of light, or its great perspective. They appear as the randomly coincidental, less effectual, and hardly communicate any immediate importance to me, which can be one of the paradoxes of photography sometimes, that although it wants you to see something, you may end up seeing nothing. As Sartre said, the content of a photograph can simply “drift between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either.”
Looking repeatedly at Emebiriodo’s “Third Mainland,” however, I realise that my idea of its deep-call is because, while it is now a photograph, it is a sight that calls to the photographer, or any person at all deeply appreciative of inanimate beauties. Sights that make you pause; that attract the eye. “What is in a landscape that expresses itself through photographic work?” Teju Cole asks; a way of looking at photography he expanded in the essay “Take A Photograph Here.” In a short lecture at the Creative Time Summit in New York, in 2015, Cole tells us that such sights are not necessarily the singular genius of the photographer, that instead, “there’s something the landscape wants that ends up being expressed through the photographer, against his or her will,” in what he calls “the affordances of terrain.” I was thinking of this too, studying Emebiriodo’s photograph, if this was the case. So I used the Google Lens feature to scan it, and to pleasant confirmation, there were similar pictures, too many, taken of the under of bridges. His photograph was somewhere in the continuum of the affordances of terrain.
I return to one aspect of the obvious things earlier ignored in the photograph. Who are these small men under the bridge? Do they belong to the lagoon as the bridge? Can they own the lagoon as the bridge owns the lagoon and as the lagoon owns the bridge? In this frozen moment the photo was taken, they partake in a history, of place, where a story emerges, of place, Lagos, this beast of a city which this photograph captures in deceitful innocence, in its calmness, men under the Third Mainland Bridge, small men, like us, violated by the photographer’s camera in that Sontag pedagogy, “to photograph someone is a sublimated murder,” especially in the context we see here, “seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have.” This is their small history, a short film, so that if we don’t pay too much attention we easily miss them, compensated by the monstrosity of the bridge. But the reality of the convergence of man and concrete here is even grimmer: These small men will soon no longer be here, but the bridge will, its testament outliving theirs. They, like us, will pass away, and the bridge will still be here and will no longer be ours.♦
Carl Terver has a BA English from BSU Makurdi. He was longlisted for the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. 𝕏