By Japhet Alakam & Prisca Sam-Duru

Nigeria’s art community and indeed, Africa, were thrown into mourning when the nation’s first Photographer and one of  Africa’s most prominent photographers, JD ‘Okhai Ojeikere, was announced dead on Sunday in Lagos, after a brief illness.

The family of the late photography icon, who transversed all over the world with his magic lens, best known for his work with unique African hairstyles, confirmed his  passing at the age of 83.

The veteran portrait and documentary photographer, J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere who had two exhibitions within two months period last year in Lagos, was best known for his series of about 1,000 black and white photos of African hairstyles.

A selection of the works were shown at the Venice Biennale last year as well as earlier in 2007, and in many galleries and museums.

Galleries and museums

Ojeikere was born in Western Nigeria in 1930 and began taking pictures when he was 20 years old. He was trained by a local photographer, Albert Anieke in Abakaliki, Enugu.

Pa Ojeikere will be remem

bered as a man who pursued a future in photography, which was out of the ordinary for people in Nigeria, especially those in his village when cameras were not of high demand and were of low priority as they were considered a luxury. However, ‘Okhai Ojeikere was passionate about photography and in 1950, bought a modest Brownie D camera without flash, and had a friend teach him the fundamentals of photography.

In 1954 he began working as a darkroom assistant in the photographic department of Ibadan’s Ministry of Information. Five years later, shortly after Nigeria gained independence, he became a photographer for the Western Nigerian Broadcasting Services, and in 1963, moved to Lagos.

He started working on his Hairstyle series in the late 1960s after he joined the Nigerian Arts Council and began documenting the country’s culture.

In 1967, as a staff of Nigerian Arts Council, and during their festival the following year, he began to take series of photographs dedicated to Nigerian culture. “This body of work, now consisting of thousands of images, has become a unique anthropological, ethnographic, and documentary national treasure.” Most African photographers of his generation only worked on commission; this project, unique in its genre, flourished without any commercial support. The Hairstyle series, which consists of close to a thousand photographs, is the largest and the most thorough segment of Ojeikere’s archive.

“To watch a ‘hair artist’ going through his precise gestures, like an artist making a sculpture, is fascinating. Hairstyles are an art form,” Ojeikere has commented.

“He photographs hairstyles every day in the street, in offices, at parties. He records each subject systematically: from the rear, sometimes in profile, and occasionally head-on. Those from the rear are almost abstract and best reveal the sculptural aspect of the hairstyles. For Ojeikere, this is a never ending project as hairstyles evolve with fashion: “All these hairstyles are ephemeral. I want my photographs to be noteworthy traces of them. I always wanted to record moments of beauty, moments of knowledge. Art is life. Without art, life would be frozen.”

The icon has in over 30 solo and group exhibitions around the world, showed the diversity of his themes but his last two exhibitions, Networks and Voids held at Omenka Gallery, Lagos in October and Voyage Retour, at the  Federal Government Press building,also in Lagos, in December, seemed to have summarised the photographer’s adventurous lens as a parting gift to his admirers.

Parting gift to admirers

At the Voyage Retour,

Ojeikere’s work was described by the Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Michael Derus, as the star presentation. Apart from the fact that his works on display at the event were “never seen before in public space anywhere in the world,” the exhibition also provided a 30 minutes video documentary fresh from the cutting room as produced by Tam Fiofori. It captured the photographer’s over 50 years career in brief.  Though the exhibitions featured other artists, the contents, thematically, were vintage Ojeikere.

In the two-man show, Networks and Voids that featured American painter Gary Stephens, the theme was headdress. Indeed, one of the most pronounced themes of Ojeikere is lady’s headdress, particularly the gele and woven African native hairstyles.