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“I wasn’t born in Ibadan but I have spent most of my life here. My childhood was both fun and challenging. I am the first of three children. It was filled with school and church activities. I wasn’t born with a silver-spoon so I spent my childhood asking questions about why things were so hard for us while others seemed to get on well. It was from these pondering that I resolved not to be poor. Ever.
So, it was early on in my life that I became a hustler. At one time, I was cutting grasses for people. At the time when cybercafes were just beginning to be the in-thing, I worked in a cybercafé. At the heart of all of these hustle was survival.
I got into photography in secondary school and I was brought into the industry by my mother. I call her Iya Foto. She was a photographer and she had her shop at Cocoa House at the time. The time I am talk about here was the era of the analog cameras o. No digital anything yet. My mother was the one who showed me the ropes. She couldn’t teach me with all the technical names but she sure knew all the technicalities.
For example, she taught me to set the camera to 5.6 when taking a shoot indoors. She taught me to set it to 11 if the shoot was outside and it was sunny….things like that, she taught me. I was going to realize later on that all of the settings was aperture.
It was my mom who got me my first camera – a Zenith camera. When I graduated from secondary school, before I gained admission into the university, I would take my camera and snap anything that my eyes fell on; anything around me. Sometimes, I would go to the topmost floor of Cocoa House and I will take pictures of the rusty brown roofs before me.
In 2004, I gained admission into Olabisi Onabanjo University and all through school, and like I told you before, I developed a hustling spirit as young child growing up so getting into the university could not stop the hustle. While at OOU, I shuttled between Ago Iwoye and Ibadan. It was very important for me to do so because photography was how I sustained myself in school and also because I did not love to miss my role in church as an instrumentalist.
Back then, whenever I came to Ibadan to hustle, it was the one shirt that I had that I came with on Friday that I’d wear all through Sunday. At the time, I couldn’t afford to buy clothes like everyone else did so I had to maintain the few I had and rock them like they were new.
I remember one Sunday in church, the Pastor called me after the service to know why I was wearing the same dress and we had a long talk. In the end, he gave me some money to change my wardrobe – get new clothes and stuff. Guess what I did with the money, I bought some camera equipment I had been saving to buy. I knew in my heart that that phase of my life was one where I had to invest in my hand work. I knew the fine clothes would come but in that moment, I needed to focus on what mattered more – photography.”
