By Yinka Olatunbosun
The first thing to learn on a journey like this is that water is never still.
It shifts with the wind, changes with the light and refuses to be rushed. It leaves salt on camera lenses, dampness in equipment bags and demands a kind of patience that few forms of photography require. For six years, three documentary photographers embraced that uncertainty, travelling by water through riverine communities along the West African coastline, documenting lives that unfold between land and tide.
From the stilt-supported settlements of Benin to the fishing communities of Togo and the historic harbours of Ghana, theirs was not a sightseeing expedition. It was an attempt to understand how entire communities have built cultures, economies and identities around water. The resulting body of work now comes together in Relational Waters, an exhibition supported by Art Audry Cognac and opening this August at Thought Pyramid Art Centre.
What makes the exhibition compelling is not simply the landscapes it presents, but the fact that three photographers stood in the same places and returned with remarkably different stories.
All three share riverine roots. Timipre Ama Willis is from Bayelsa, Emmanuel Zannou traces his heritage to both Lagos and the Benin Republic, while Kunle Ogunfuyi’s roots lie in Ondo, although he has spent much of his professional life in Lagos. Their shared familiarity with water gave them common ground, but their artistic instincts led them in very different directions.
For Timipre Ama Willis, the river is a place of quiet reflection. A multidisciplinary artist, painter, printmaker and lecturer at Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island, Bayelsa, Willis has built a practice around preserving African cultural narratives through contemporary visual language. His photographs rarely seek spectacle. Instead, they dwell on moments of stillness, where boats glide silently through narrow waterways, reflections dissolve the outlines of buildings and communities appear suspended between permanence and movement.
Working exclusively in black and white for this series, Willis turns attention to the relationship between architecture and water. Houses balanced on stilts, wooden walkways and narrow channels become more than physical structures; they become evidence of generations adapting to an environment where water is road, livelihood, boundary and memory all at once. His images are restrained yet deeply evocative, inviting viewers to slow down long enough to notice details that might otherwise disappear.
That sensitivity has defined much of his artistic career. A Fellow of the Society of Nigerian Artists (SNA) and member of both the Pan African Circle of Artists (PACA) and the Art Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), Willis has exhibited widely in Nigeria and internationally. He is also a recipient of the Boskel National Photo Contest prize and the Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Art Foundation National Photography Competition, achievements that reflect years of quietly building one of Nigeria’s most thoughtful photographic practices.
For Emmanuel Zannou, however, Relational Waters represents something different. After more than three decades behind the camera, the exhibition marks his first major documentary photography project.
Widely known within the industry as “Legend”, Zannou built his reputation through commercial portraiture, corporate photography and event documentation under his Lagos-based company, Photo Legend Limited. Studio photography rewards precision and control. Documentary work demands something else entirely. It asks photographers to surrender control, wait patiently and allow real life to unfold in front of the lens.
That shift became one of the defining experiences of the journey.
Travelling through waterways that connect communities across West Africa also became a personal rediscovery of heritage for Zannou, whose family ties span Nigeria and the Benin Republic. Rather than directing his subjects, he found himself observing fishermen preparing their nets, children navigating narrow waterways with remarkable confidence and communities whose relationship with water has shaped everyday life for generations.
His photographs examine identity through geography, revealing how rivers connect histories, families and cultures long before political borders attempt to divide them. Even after thirty years of professional photography, Relational Waters demonstrates that there are still new ways of seeing.
Kunle Ogunfuyi arrived on the project with yet another perspective.
As an award-winning photojournalist and documentary photographer, Ogunfuyi has spent years documenting some of Nigeria’s defining civic moments. His camera has captured protests, public life and the changing rhythm of Nigerian society with an honesty that has earned him widespread respect. Yet along these waterways, his attention shifted away from headline-making events towards the quieter systems that keep communities alive.
Markets operating from wooden canoes. Conversations carried across narrow channels. Goods transported entirely by water. Families whose daily routines depend less on roads than on tides.
Rather than presenting these communities as isolated or vulnerable, Ogunfuyi’s photographs reveal them as places of remarkable resilience and constant activity. The waterways become thriving public spaces where commerce, transportation and social life unfold with an ease that challenges conventional ideas of what a functioning urban environment should look like.
A member of the Society of Nigerian Artists and recipient of the Pa J.D. Ojeikere Best in Photography Award, Ogunfuyi has consistently used photography to challenge narrow narratives about Africa. His selection by the United States Department of State to represent Nigeria in the Global Moment in Time project documenting the COVID-19 pandemic further affirmed his standing as one of the country’s leading documentary photographers. He currently serves as Digital Photo Editor at THISDAY.
Although each photographer approached the journey differently, the exhibition succeeds because none attempts to overpower the others. Willis searches for poetry in stillness. Zannou explores memory and belonging. Ogunfuyi documents the rhythms of everyday life. Together, their photographs become a conversation rather than a competition.
Curated by Adeolu Tahouf, Relational Waters ultimately asks viewers to reconsider landscapes that are often overlooked. These are not simply rivers or coastlines separating one country from another. They are living corridors of culture, commerce, migration and memory, sustaining communities whose stories are rarely told beyond their immediate shores.
By the time visitors step into Thought Pyramid this August, they will encounter more than beautifully composed documentary photographs. They will see the result of six years spent moving at the pace of the river itself—observing patiently, listening carefully and discovering that some of West Africa’s richest stories have always travelled by water.
