Lagos Photo

[2] With a strong focus on presenting historical and contemporary stories from the African continent, the month-long festival takes place at various indoor and outdoor venues and includes exhibitions, events, workshops, residencies, talks and digital programs.

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.

By situating photography at the core of their practice, the artists investigated the circulation of images in our society, their mass consumption and capacity to document personal and collective world-views.

The artists looked at alternative futures and how to construct fictive worlds, employing photography as a catalyst to probe the evolving realities of contemporary Africa.

[13] The central theme of the seventh edition, "Inherent Risk; Rituals and Performance," explored the constructed notions of gender, image, identity, social agency and power dynamics in contemporary society.

The 2017 iteration of the LagosPhoto Festival prompted artists to contemplate the prevailing systems of truths and beliefs, questioning the diminishing significance of the pursuit of reality in our era.

[14] In contemporary times, photography has emerged as the modern repository for this fading quest for reality, not merely due to its perceived freedom, but rather because it encapsulates the synthesis and exposes the contradictions inherent in the knowledge society and its imperative for creativity.

Special Programmes For its eleventh edition, the festival focused on the theme ‘Rapid Response Restitution’, looking at the prospect of a decolonial "citizens' history.

"[18] Utilizing the democratic medium of photography, LagosPhoto established a Home Museum featuring over two hundred participants from the African Continent, the US, South America, China, and Europe.

The Home Museum served as a prototype for a citizens' institution, where every member of society actively could contribute to the communal understanding of cultural values and directly engage with questions of restitution, eliminating delays in the process.