The photographs in “The Archive of Becoming” by Karl Ohiri, presented as part of the New Photography 2023 exhibition at MoMA, are sourced from discarded film negatives of portrait studios in Lagos, Nigeria. These studios abandoned the negatives as they transitioned to digital photography or simply shut down and disappeared. This series is an extension of Karl Ohiri’s larger initiative, the Lagos Studio Archives, initiated by him in 2015. while Finish collaborator Riikka Kassinen joined the project in 2022. Through this initiative, they have in the meantime curated thousands of film negatives dating from the 1970s onwards, preserving a cultural legacy. Karl Ohiri is a London-born, British-Nigerian artist living in Finland. His drive is to explore the Human Condition. His work on “The Archive of Becoming” aims at spotlighting the contributions of unidentified commercial photographers. It showcases the personalities that the unnamed subjects projected while posing for the camera. The negatives featured in the series have suffered from deterioration due to neglect in the humid climate over many years. This decay erodes the stable self-representation that photographs typically offer. All in all, an insight into the lives and stories of these Lagos inhabitants we will never meet.
