Lagos

The photographer Abraham Oghobase who lives in Mende-village in Lagos lies on a square manhole cover, throws his head backwards, stretches his legs through and takes off. Exactly in this fraction of a second, as he seems to be suspended the in air, just as if he were part of the bright red frontage of his parents' house like a satellite dish fixed skyward, he brings out his camera. Click! A flying Nigerian in a completely normal Nigerian street scenery, a peculiar sight in everyday life - that is the central theme of the work of Abraham Oghobase.

The 29 year old photographer called his series on self portraits in weightlessness „Esctatics “. He photographs himself flying in his neighbourhood, flying at the beach, flying on the roof of a minibus in a ‘go-slow'. “I like to work, consistently and systematically”, says Oghobase.

On this Wednesday however the systematics of his photographs is broken. This time around the renowned Cologne photographer Albrecht Fuchs, who is presently taking shots of the self portraits of Abraham Oghobase is also at the picture margin of the self portraits on the manhole cover. Fox is presently leading the Photography Workshop Pride at the Goethe Institute in Lagos. Oghobase is one of the participants and it is that meta-level of the photographer, who illustrates the photographer that constitutes the special attraction of this event.

Albrecht Fuchs, 44, has made a name which extends far beyond Germany with his Portraits of artists of all kinds such as Isabella Rosselini, Ennio Morricone, Raymond Pettibon, Martin Kippenberger and Damon Albarn. His works for the magazines of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as well as the weekly newspaper Die Zeit belong to the showpieces of German contemporary portrait photography.

An exhibition of the works of Albrecht Fuchs will be on as from this weekend at the Goethe Institute in Victoria Island. The pictures of Fuchs, in their dramatic naturalness, somehow give a feeling of oil painting. He gets into the private surroundings of his protagonists and nevertheless always keeps a respectful distance. In this way he establishes an intimacy, which sometimes seems oppressive but never intrusive. “From a certain point I was less occupied with photography than with art”, says Fuchs. It is exactly on this sharp edge between a photography, which wants to show how the world is and art, which wants to show how the world could be, that Fuchs is trying to walk along with his Workshop participants drawn from Lagos.

The aim is not to impose a European approach on the Nigerian photographers but to identify conventions and to make room for reciprocal questions. “I am satisfied with my work here, if I can encourage some reflections on portrait photography,” says Fuchs. That is humbly worded since he is also working with his course on an exhibition which is to be shown at the Goethe-Institut from January. The ten Nigerian participants are asked to create – in the course of this week – portraits that deal in one way or the other with the term “Pride”. Fuchs deliberately chose a vague topic in order not to limit the photographers’ rights from the outset. “Most pictures that Europeans bring from Africa are full of waste, violence and poverty. We wanted to do something self-confident,” explains Fuchs.

Akintunde Akinleye, an accredited photo journalist with Reuters, chooses the sand of Kuramo-Beach as scenery for the topic “Pride”. He portrays a young woman who finances her academic studies with a side job as a prostitute. His colleague Andrew Esiebo photographs the traffic-jam vendors in the streets of Lagos, the documentary photographer Mina Jane travels especially to the Delta area to capture her family on film. In one way, even workshop coordinator Albrecht Fuchs has put his name on the list of workshop participants. For the Pride exhibition, he portrays ten self-confident Nigerian photographers at work.

Among the most self-confident of them is Abraham Oghobase, who recently lived in Berlin for two months and there created the likewise impressive and melancholy self-portrait series Lost in Transit. His pictures from Lagos are more colourful, bright, fantastic. The portrait of his levitating self-portrait with Albrecht Fuchs looks like an optical illusion. Still, pictures do not lie – the German and the Nigerian photographers already on that.