A photograph of a woman in a red blouse seated on a makeshift seat in a boat inscribed with “Justice”. There is a child at her feet. In that same frame, there are other boats and people docked on the beach. This is one of the works by Kingsley Otu that calls for a focused look and then a second look until the viewer has observed the various poses of the subjects in the frame. Only Otu has an idea of why they are gathered, but the viewer is permitted to intuit.
The present for Otu is not fictitious, as he transcends boundaries in his work. At first glance, it is clear that Kingsley Otu’s eye is trained to acknowledge and document communal effort. He captures each frame with a story in mind, even as he is focused on preserving the present.
He is documenting the people in their day-to-day doings. In his observations of the fishermen’s occupation, there is a frame with a group of people assisting in moving a boat from the water, another group assists in bringing the fisherman’s net to the shore with his day’s catch unseen to the viewer, and there are different generations of men who are hard at rowing a boat filled with fishing nets. In a different scene, a woman roasts fish away from the shore.
In his practice, Otu is capturing images that can continue conversations that can drive social change. His mission is to observe what might come across as the mundaneness of the daily lives of people hard at work.