The Portrait Nobody Wanted Until It Hung in a Gallery

For eleven years I photographed other people’s celebrations, and for three of those years I also photographed something nobody paid me for.

Every Saturday morning, before my first shoot, I walked through a market in Oyingbo with a secondhand film camera and a roll of black and white. I was not looking for a story. I was looking for faces. I liked the women who sold peppers and tomatoes in baskets stacked three feet high, the traders who dozed in plastic chairs between customers, the children who carried buckets of water on their heads while talking over each other.

I never sold these pictures. I never posted them online. I kept the negatives in an old biscuit tin.

The portrait

One morning in October, I noticed a woman sitting behind a pyramid of tomatoes, shelling groundnuts. She was perhaps seventy. Her face was a map of fine lines, and her eyes had the kind of calm that is earned, not given. A single beam of light was falling across her cheek through a gap in the tarpaulin overhead.

I asked if I could take her picture. She considered me for a long moment and said, “Will you give me one?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Then take it.”

I shot one frame. One. The light would not last. She looked directly into the lens without smiling, and I knew as I advanced the film that it was the best portrait I had ever taken.

I printed it a week later in a darkroom a friend rented in Yaba. The image came up slowly in the tray, first the shadows, then the cheekbone, then the eyes. I stood there in the red light, hands wet, and said “ah” out loud to no one.

True to my word, I made her a print and took it to the market the next Saturday. She held it carefully with both hands, looked at it for a long time, and said only, “That is how I look?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm,” she said, handing it back and then taking it again. “Leave it here.”

A year in a drawer

I showed the portrait to a few friends. They praised it politely. A wedding client saw it on my desk and asked why I was not shooting more like that. “People don’t want old women,” she said gently. “They want brides.”

She was probably right, commercially. I put the portrait in a drawer.

For a year, nothing happened. I kept shooting weddings. Saturdays in Oyingbo became less frequent as my bookings grew. The biscuit tin gathered dust.

The call

In the following September, an old friend named Kunle, who works with a small independent arts space on the Island, called me about something unrelated. They were mounting a group exhibition on “ordinary dignity,” and a curator had pulled out. Did I know any photographers who made documentary work?

I almost said no. Then, on impulse, I said, “I have a portrait.”

He asked me to send it. I emailed a scan that night and went to bed.

At eight the next morning he called back. “Who is she?” he said.

“A market woman in Oyingbo.”

“Can you print it large? Like, really large?”

The opening

The print was one metre by seventy centimetres. I framed it in plain black wood, no mount, and hung it myself on a Thursday afternoon, standing back and adjusting by millimetres until my friend told me to stop.

Opening night was a Friday. I arrived early and stood in front of the portrait, watching people arrive. Most walked straight past it for the bar, then drifted back an hour later. A man in a linen suit stood for ten minutes without speaking. A young woman photographed it on her phone, then stopped, and put the phone away.

At about nine, a gentle voice behind me said, “Excuse me, who made this?”

I turned. It was an older man, grey haired, in a simple jacket. He told me he collected photographs and had been looking at it for twenty minutes. He asked me whether the woman was alive. I said I thought so. He asked whether she knew where her portrait was.

I realised I had never told her.

Going back

The next morning I took a taxi to Oyingbo with a catalogue from the show. The woman was behind her tomatoes, shelling groundnuts. I crouched in front of her and said, “Madam, your picture is in a gallery.”

She looked at me without any visible change. “What is a gallery?”

I explained as best I could. A place where people go to look at pictures. A place where, last night, many people stopped for a long time in front of her face.

She was quiet. Then she said, in Yoruba, “They are looking at me?”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

I did not have a good answer. I said, “Because you are beautiful, and because you are dignified.”

She laughed, a dry bright laugh, and went back to her groundnuts. But as I left, I saw her take the printed catalogue page, fold it once, and slip it into the pocket of her wrapper.

What I think about now

The portrait has since sold, and part of the proceeds went to her, at her own request in the form of a stall refurbishment. She did not want a speech. She wanted a roof that did not leak.

I still photograph weddings. They pay my rent and I love them. But on Saturday mornings I now go back to the market with my old film camera, and I no longer treat those pictures as a hobby.

I used to think the work that mattered was the work that sold. I now think it is the work that makes somebody stop walking.