Traveling from Santa Monica, California to Lagos, Nigeria, I prepared myself for a week in a rustic, sleepy, and perhaps even primitive town. But when my plane landed, the cultural shock was greater than anything I could have expected. Sprawled before me was a immense, bustling, crowded metropolis well on its way to becoming one of the largest cities in the world. After all, Nigeria contains 170 million people - 60% of the U.S. population - in an area the size of Texas. And everybody comes to Lagos.
Leaving the airport, it took literally hours to negotiate the extraordinary tangle of ever-present traffic that clogged every street leading to our hotel, but it gave us time to absorb the city’s wonders, from its diverse ethnic districts to its vibrant nightlife, from its world-class museums to its thriving shopping districts. Taking a journey through the neighborhoods of Lagos is to experience a non-stop state of wonder.
I found to our amusement that enterprising Lagosians have learned to demand fees for the right to photograph virtually anything: even getting a a glimpse of the beach came with a price tag. We also found that Lagos resembles the world’s great cities in another way: Many of its wealthier citizens live behind barbed wire and heavy gates patrolled by armed guards; the only difference being that in Nigeria, the guards wear flip-flops. Lagos is a photographer’s dream: its dynamic growth is a story begging to be told in pictures, and I was glad for the opportunity to capture images that, in the race for progress, may never be available to a photographer again.
Here is the text for the 3 Urban Landscape images:
I love the night. Taking my camera into the streets after the bustle of the business day fades away, wandering unexpected corners of the earth under the watchful eye of the moon, I discover colors, shapes and activities not available to us in the daytime. I find myself viewing the world in the abstract, seeking to capture what I see in a luminous symphony of images that are as much about feeling as about seeing.