There’s No Place Like Home:
Migration, Memory and Belonging
A reflective text on the Lagos Studio Archives
Karl Ohiri & Riikka Kassinen
“There’s no place like home” is something my mother would often say to me when I was growing up. Born and raised in London by my Nigerian mother, the expression would always trigger feelings of irony, curiosity and a yearning for belonging. After all, where is home, and where does one truly belong?
My mother left her home in Enugu, Nigeria, shortly after the 1967-70 Biafran War. In 1971, a refugee, she arrived in Britain, where she had to adapt to a foreign culture. Over time she made it her new home. There, she raised two children, acquired British citizenship and eventually, in London in 2012, took her last breath. The United Kingdom was her home for forty-one years, yet when she fell terminally ill she requested that her body be taken back to Nigeria and buried in her father’s village. Her burial request served as a poignant reminder of the complex relationship between home and belonging. It showed how both exist as much within our hearts and minds as the physical spaces we inhabit.
Portrait of Karl’s Mum taken by Evergreen Photographers, Lagos, 1971
This is a photograph of my mother taken at Evergreen Photographers in Lagos in 1971, just before her journey to London. Unsure of her future and what awaits her in the UK, she clutches her bag. Gazing contemplatively into the distance, she looks stylish, courageous, and yet vulnerable. The photographer’s click of the shutter has captured this “decisive moment”. The image marks the beginning of a migratory journey into the unknown that would become a full circle.
Like my mother, many migrants would have portrait photographs taken as departing gifts for their families, and the images were often reproduced, preserved and displayed in numerous homes and locations. A similar portrait of my mother from the same photoshoot is displayed at my aunt’s house in Lagos, Nigeria, and every time I visit her I go into her living room and look at it. It hangs between two other portraits, one of me as a baby and one of my sister as a small child, both taken in a photographic studio in Catford, London. The photographs serve as a record of our family history and testify to the journeys we have made. They comfort my aunt, filling the void of distance that migration has created. They remind her that although we are thousands of miles apart we are still connected.
Similar photographs hang on the walls of homes all over the world. They form part of our daily lives and evidence photography’s power as a tool of memory that bridges the past, present and future. When we look at a photograph we remember the people who have passed and the people still here, and we reflect on the people yet to come. It reminds us of who we are and where we have been and asks where our lives may take us. A photograph’s journey through space and time parallels our own, until the moment of death. When we die, the photograph lives on, suspended in time, quietly awaiting (re)discovery.
The Encounter
For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by photography and the itinerant life of images. When looking through our family albums I often wondered about the journey each photograph had taken. I was especially curious about the ones from Nigeria with hand-written notes on the back, clues to the images’ origins and the circumstances behind their creation. Exposure to these images sparked an interest in my heritage. Whenever I visited Nigeria I wanted to learn more about the culture.
In 2015 I travelled to Owerri in southern Nigeria to visit family. During my trip I encountered a local studio photographer and was immediately intrigued by his practice. In the course of a long conversation he described what it was like to run his studio and the kinds of clients he photographed. I asked if I could see his archive, but he told me he had burned it: images, negatives, documents. Shocked, I asked why. He said, simply, that he did not see the need for it anymore. I remember thinking how immensely sad it was that all those images, stories and memories had been lost forever. An archive that had taken decades to create had been turned to ashes in a few minutes.
This incident stayed with me and catalysed my desire to explore other photographic archives. On a visit to Lagos the following year I got together with a friend who runs a picture-framing business. He showed me around his studio and I saw the new frames he was working on. Their distinctive design, involving wood embedded with laminated photographs, reminded me of every house I have visited in Nigeria. They prompted a conversation about the photographer I’d met in Owerri and my sadness over the archive he had destroyed. Unfazed, my picture-framer friend told me that his own brother, a studio photographer in Lagos for many years, had also destroyed his archive after he stopped practicing. Many photographers in the local community had done the same, he added. He seemed puzzled at my asking why, and simply replied, “Why would they keep them?” He explained that on transitioning to digital photography, most photographers saw no need to keep their analogue film archives. Many felt that their previous work existed in a specific moment of time, one that had passed. The closure of film laboratories across Lagos thanks to the rise of digital technology had rendered analogue materials obsolete and inaccessible.
Following this conversation I could not help but wonder what hidden stories and narratives, urgently at risk of destruction, still existed. Out of this concern, the Lagos Studio Archives project was born.
Lagos Studio Archives: Endangered Archives and the Preservation of Memory
I was in Lagos with my partner and fellow artist Riikka Kassinen in 2016 when I received a first batch of negatives from a small number of local photographers. I went through the material with Riikka and my aunt, separating the completely ruined negatives from the ones that could be salvaged. The deteriorated state of some of the material—images that were already faded or erased—reminded me that in time all this cultural history could be lost forever.
Three photographs from the Lagos Studio Archives series Archive of Becoming.
Conversations with local photographers gave me a deeper understanding of the social and economic factors that placed photographic archives in danger. Alongside the digital transition that led to many film archives being abandoned in humid conditions and left to deteriorate, there were other contributing factors. When photographers grew older and relocated to rural areas to escape the congested city, their archives rarely moved with them; they were often simply discarded. Many of the photographers who worked with analogue media are now over seventy; some have sadly passed away and when that happens, their archives are often discarded by relatives who see no immediate use for the material or reason to keep it. These factors combine with a lack of government support for preservation initiatives relating to vernacular photography. Together, they make the survival of these archives uncertain.
I started working with photographers to acquire further archives and safeguard them, in the hope that one day these dormant resources could be reactivated as a celebration and appreciation of Nigerian culture.
Photos taken by Abi Morocco Photos (John and Funmilayo Abe)
1. Ikeja, Lagos, c. 1970s
2. John & Funmilayo Abe in their studio, Aina Street, Shogunle, Lagos, 1974
3. Aina Street, Shogunle, Lagos, 1976
4. Aina Street, Shogunle, Lagos, c. 1970s
What began as a personal art project in response to a disappearing history has now organically evolved into a collaborative initiative with my partner Riikka and the group of photographers who have entrusted us with their work. Today, the Lagos Studio Archives occupies a unique position somewhere between an artist-led project and a social entity. At the core of the project lies the belief that preserving heritage is a collective responsibility that starts from individual action and effort. The archive has now become a means to unearth the hidden narratives of a generation of Nigerian photographers who captured the style, culture and aspirations of everyday Lagosians. Giving visibility to their practices and the contributions they made to Nigerian photographic history, the project strives to address pre-existing gaps in visual representation and further expand dialogues around West African photography, culture and legacies of diaspora.
Photos courtesy of the Lagos Studio Archives.
1. Blazer Boy with Phone; 2. Two Girls in Native
Translation across Borders: The Itinerant life of Images
The Lagos Studio Archives project explores concepts of home and belonging and probes the complex relationships between public and private, translation and authenticity. The archive’s dissemination of its holdings in the form of public content involves a constant navigation of these issues. Many images within the archive were made for private consumption; they were meant for the home, but now they hang in museums and public collections. When domestic archives are relocated into the public domain they become subject to new dialogues and interpretations that will always, to some extent, be in conflict with their “original intended context”.
Nevertheless, whilst striving to show taste and respect towards the lives of the people the archive’s photographs represent, this fluidity is something we have chosen to embrace. By exploring the new dialogues that emerge through photography’s relocation, new space is opened for reimagining and reinterpretation. After all, ideas of movement and context have always been part of the discussion of the nature of photography:
“…photography can never remain in a single place or time. Like postcards, photographs are moving signs that carry any number of open secrets. They travel from one forum to another—from the family album to the museum, from books into digitised forms—and with each recontextualisation they redefine themselves and take on different and expanding meanings.” [1]
Nigeria’s analogue-era studio photography perfectly exemplifies these processes of fluid movement and recontextualisation. Studio portraits were often sent as postcards or business cards: for example, photographers would share portraits of themselves in their studios with fellow practitioners, and clients would send their studio photographs to family members, both at home and abroad, as mementos. The studio portrait of Ohiri’s Mother serves as a powerful example. Along with the rest of the archive, it has travelled from Nigeria to the UK, then (in 2023) to Finland, and now, published online, it has crossed the boundary from the private to the public domain. In each location the interpretation of the photograph has expanded, and the image’s translation through space, time and medium of transmission raises questions about home and belonging. The process sheds light on the ways that photographs, by their very nature, exist in a state of flux. Portable and endlessly reproducible, they move from place to place and as they move, their meaning, relevance and importance is determined by the people who encounter them.
All the images in the Lagos Studio Archive project share this story of migration, of borders crossed: in their case, from Lagos to London to Helsinki, where we migrated in 2023. In the process they have moved from domestic spaces to the setting of the museum, where curatorial texts have created new contexts for them and post-production, printing and framing have changed their physical form. The remaking and recontextualisation of these images inevitably influences how they are seen and interpreted, and, one could argue, have affected their perceived authenticity. When images are removed from their original context, this is unavoidable. However, the authenticity of the images in representing specific people at a specific time and place remains unquestionable. Created by Nigerians for Nigerians, these images carry their own intrinsic authenticity.
Our project has involved working directly with Lagos-based photographers and negotiating with them to find ways to give authenticity to their stories and the communities they photographed. Through site-specific research, we have engaged in conversations that offer a deeper understanding of Nigeria’s photographic history and culture. We take on an intermediary role as the guardians and curators of the archive. Our work involves preserving, “translating” and presenting the hidden narratives of a generation of photographers whose work might have otherwise been lost completely, or remained unseen by the general public and the artworld. The project is driven by a deep commitment to preserving the cultural legacy of Lagosian analogue photography for both present and future generations, while also aiming to fill the gaps in photographic history and representation.
Photos courtesy of the Lagos Studio Archives.
1. Femson Studios, Man Wearing Cap on the Side, Lagos, c. 1990s
2. Face to Face, Woman Praying in front of Mecca, Lagos, c. 1990s
3. Face to Face, Man Holding Prayer Beads, Lagos, c. 1990s
Final Destination
As the project evolves, we continue to ask who the archive serves, and where it genuinely belongs. It documents the lives of everyday Lagosians, and therefore it forms part of a heritage that belongs to all Nigerians. However, in a globalised world where many Nigerians live in diaspora, the question of where the archive belongs becomes a space for contemplation. Shared through exhibitions, printed publications and digital platforms, the archive’s journey will mirror that of Nigerian migrants and diasporans, spreading across the world while continuing to celebrate the heritage and culture of its homeland and Africa more broadly. In this way, the archive will exist everywhere. One day, it is hoped, the physical collection of negatives will return to Lagos, Nigeria—because after all, there is no place like home. But for now, it remains on a migratory journey.
Notes
[1] https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/story/depth-itinerant-languages-photography
Further Reading on Lagos Studio Archives
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/05/lagos-studio-archives/
https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/lagos-studio-archives-abi-morocco
https://www.1854.photography/2024/12/autograph-gallery-exhibition-lagos-studio-1970s/[3] [4]
https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/332/4415
https://edition.cnn.com/style/lagos-studio-archives-photos-nigeria-spc
