Submission by MORGAN ENYERIBE OTAGBURUAGU
This new body of work extends the visual language established in In Bloom (Doyle Wham, 2023) into more explicitly political terrain. Where In Bloom used floral motifs to speak to life, death and renewal at the level of personal and ancestral memory, this series turns that same vocabulary toward a public health crisis: the World Health Organization’s finding that roughly 77 percent of Nigerian women use skin-lightening products, the highest rate recorded anywhere in the world. The series does not illustrate that statistic. It answers it.
Water as rebirth, not concealment. The condensation sheeting the glass in every frame is doing two jobs at once. Formally, it fractures and refracts the subjects, pulling the images toward abstraction and away from straightforward documentary portraiture, in keeping with the tonal, sculptural treatment of dark skin that runs through my practice.
Flowers plucked from the Lagos street, not the studio. The heliconia, hibiscus and roses recurring across the frames are not florist stock, they are gathered from the immediate environment the work is made in, and that sourcing is itself an argument. It insists that the material of renewal, of beauty, of what blooms, is already local, already at hand, already indigenous to Lagos, rather than imported. This runs directly against the logic of the bleaching industry, which is built on imported chemical whitening as an aspirational, foreign standard of beauty. A flower cut from a Lagos roadside held against unaltered dark skin is a compact rebuttal to that entire supply chain.
Morgan Otagburuagu
Morgan Otagburuagu
#noicemag #photography
