At a moment when conversations around migration, identity, and cultural preservation continue to shape public discourse across the globe, Nigerian photographer Mayowa Akande offers a quietly powerful reminder that culture is not maintained through institutions alone. It survives through people. Through gestures repeated across generations, traditions performed far from home, skills passed between mentors and apprentices, and everyday acts of care that allow communities to remain connected to themselves despite displacement, uncertainty, and change.
Working between Nigeria and the United Kingdom, Akande has developed a photographic practice centred on these acts of continuity. His images move beyond conventional documentary photography, operating instead as visual studies of belonging. Whether photographing an Igbo cultural dance group in Sunderland, a young woman navigating diasporic identity on the northeastern coast of England, or automotive apprentices learning their trade in southwestern Nigeria, Akande repeatedly returns to a central concern: how people sustain themselves, their histories, and their communities within shifting social, cultural, and geographic landscapes.
The question is particularly resonant within his documentation of an Igbo cultural dance group performing in Sunderland. Created during an evening of cultural dance and drama organised by the Fedash Centre, the photographs resist the temptation to focus solely on the spectacle of performance. Instead, Akande turns his attention to the moments that precede it. The tightening of a headpiece. The adjustment of ceremonial attire. The careful arrangement of fabrics rich with cultural symbolism. These are images of preparation, but they are also images of transmission. They reveal culture not as a static inheritance but as an active process requiring participation, repetition, and collective commitment.
Throughout the series, Akande’s camera remains close to the body. Fabrics occupy the frame with a sculptural presence. The iconic Isiagu cloth appears repeatedly, its lion motifs illuminated by shifting light, while hands move across garments, straightening, adjusting, and preparing. Faces are often partially obscured or entirely absent. Rather than relying on portraiture to construct identity, Akande allows material culture itself to carry meaning. Clothing becomes a repository of memory. Gesture becomes language. The body becomes a site through which cultural knowledge is enacted and preserved.
When the dancers eventually take to the stage, the visual rhythm of the work shifts dramatically. The stillness of preparation gives way to movement, and individual figures become inseparable from the collective energy that surrounds them. Drummers, singers, and dancers occupy the same visual field, creating compositions in which performance emerges as a communal act rather than an individual display. The lead dancer frequently occupies the centre of the frame, yet Akande consistently reminds viewers that such moments are made possible by the surrounding ensemble. The resulting photographs suggest that cultural performance functions not only as celebration but also as a form of collective memory, reaffirming relationships between people, histories, and place.
While these images explore the preservation of identity through communal ritual, Akande’s series Somewhere Inbetween examines what happens when identity is carried across borders. Centred on a young woman named Lade, the project unfolds along the coastline of Sunderland, where expansive skies and open horizons become a stage for reflecting on migration, displacement, and belonging. Unlike the communal energy of the dance series, these photographs are marked by solitude. Lade appears alone against vast landscapes, suspended between multiple cultural realities and geographic locations.
The emotional force of the work lies in its ability to transform familiar objects into powerful historical and psychological markers. Most notable among these is the appearance of the “Ghana Must Go” bag, an object deeply embedded within the migration histories of West Africa. For many, the bag evokes memories of movement, uncertainty, and displacement. In Akande’s photographs, it becomes more than an accessory or prop. It functions as a visual archive, carrying within it decades of political history, personal journeys, and collective memory.
Placed against the dramatic coastline, the bag creates a striking tension between personal narrative and historical experience. Lade’s presence within the landscape becomes symbolic of broader diasporic realities experienced by countless Africans living beyond the continent. The photographs do not offer simple answers regarding identity or belonging. Instead, they linger within uncertainty, acknowledging that many diasporic lives are shaped by simultaneous attachments to multiple places, cultures, and histories.
Akande reinforces this complexity through his visual language. The vivid red of Lade’s Gele interrupts the cool blues of the surrounding landscape, creating images that feel both familiar and estranged. Later photographs abandon colour altogether, shifting into monochrome and introducing mirrors into the composition. These mirrors fracture both landscape and identity, reflecting fragments of sky, grass, and body back toward the viewer. The result is a meditation on selfhood that feels simultaneously intimate and universal. The photographs ask difficult questions: Where does belonging begin? Can identity ever be fixed? And what does it mean to carry one place within yourself while living in another?
These questions find a different but equally compelling expression in Akande’s exploration of labour and entrepreneurship within Nigeria’s informal economy. Here, the photographer follows Dare, a young man who leaves formal education to pursue opportunities within the automotive sector. Rather than framing this story through narratives of hardship or limitation, Akande approaches it through the lens of resilience, innovation, and collective learning.
The resulting images reveal workshops as complex social ecosystems where labour, mentorship, and aspiration intersect. Mechanics gather around dismantled engines. Apprentices observe experienced workers. Knowledge circulates between generations through demonstration, repetition, and practice. The workshop emerges not simply as a place of employment but as a site of education, community formation, and economic survival.
Akande’s photographs are particularly effective in revealing the social structures that underpin this environment. Dare is often positioned among others rather than isolated from them. Even when he occupies the centre of the frame, his role is defined through relationships with apprentices, colleagues, and observers. The emphasis remains on collective growth rather than individual achievement. Through these interactions, the photographer constructs a broader portrait of a generation navigating economic realities through ingenuity, adaptability, and shared knowledge.
Equally significant is Akande’s attention to the physical environment itself. Corrugated roofs, improvised workspaces, scattered tools, partially assembled engines, and weathered walls become essential components of the narrative. These spaces are not presented as sites of deficiency but as evidence of creativity and resourcefulness. They reveal how communities build systems of learning and production within conditions that often demand flexibility and innovation.
Across all three bodies of work, Akande demonstrates a remarkable ability to identify the connections between seemingly disparate subjects. The cultural performers in Sunderland, the contemplative figure standing before the North Sea, and the young mechanics working in Ogun State all participate in a shared narrative of continuity and adaptation. They are individuals navigating different circumstances, yet each is engaged in the work of sustaining something larger than themselves.
This is ultimately what gives Akande’s photography its resonance. His images are not merely documents of people, places, or events. They are reflections on the systems of care, knowledge, and participation that allow communities to endure. They remind us that culture is carried not only through grand institutions or official histories but also through everyday actions, shared labour, inherited traditions, and collective memory.
In an increasingly interconnected yet fragmented world, Mayowa Akande’s photographs offer a compelling vision of cultural custodianship. They reveal that belonging is rarely fixed, identity is never singular, and community remains one of the most powerful forces shaping how people navigate the complexities of contemporary life. Through a practice rooted in observation, empathy, and attentiveness, Akande captures not only where people are, but how they continue to carry themselves, their histories, and their cultures forward.
