On Your Own: The Street Photographers of Lagos

I stumbled upon this fantastic article in Stanford’s design magazine, Ambidextrous, about “deliberate wandering” through an unknown city as a tool for unlocking creativity.

When I was in Lagos recently, the constant, tortuous traffic that clogs this crumbling megacity didn’t leave me much time for wandering. When you go somewhere in Lagos, you never know if it will take you twenty minutes or two hours to get there. More often, it’s the latter.

Instead, I found that as I sat in traffic, the carnivalesque street life came to me. Fresh new tides of job-seeking humans wash constantly from across West Africa into this city of sixteen million and counting — most of them desperate for work. The gridlock presents many an opportunity to eke out a living, selling to a captive audience. 

Need to recharge your phone? No problem. Shout out the window, and somebody runs up to your car with airtime cards at the ready. Same goes for bread, socks, belts, oranges or perhaps even some nice mudfish, spoiling in the sun in a plastic tub atop some school-age girl’s head. 

The roads are choked with tumbling moving chaos: bright bobbing umbrellas, and battered yellow taxi buses so rusted their doors are falling off. Hand-painted trucks adorned with slogans like “Envy No One” and “Life is Good” always remind me of Fela Kuti’s song “Suffering and Smiling.” Deformed beggars crawl through the mud, the moving car wheels skirting around them. And always, messy thickets of electrical wire loom overhead.