Lagos Studios Archives

Lagos Studio Archives (Karl Ohiri (b. 1983, London, UK) and Riikka Kassinen (b. 1979, Kemi, Finland) is a multidisciplinary project and living archive dedicated to preserving and reactivating overlooked histories of studio photography across West Africa. Through exhibitions, research, and collaborations, the project explores the aesthetics, politics, and social worlds captured in studio portraiture from the mid-20th century to the present. With a focus on Lagos as a cultural and photographic hub, the archive situates local histories within broader diasporic and postcolonial narratives. Lagos Studio Archives is committed to centering African authorship and memory in the telling of visual histories. 

Archives of Becoming unravels the fragility and instability of both memory and time. These photographs, salvaged studio portraits whose surfaces have been transformed by chemical decay, mold, and weather seem to hover between presence and disappearance. The works are ghostly and luminous; faces blur into swirls of pigment, identities dissolve into abstraction. Yet it is precisely in this in-between space that they gain potency. They are not just documents of people once photographed, but meditations on what it means to try to hold on to something, to a history, to an image, to a life. There is tenderness in the damage, a strange kind of beauty in the entropy. They present the archive as a living thing, vulnerable to time, climate, and neglect. The decay in the photographs isn’t just physical, it’s political. It gestures toward the infrastructures that fail to protect certain histories, especially those outside of dominant Western institutions.