'How I won IDiaspora photo contest'

• Published date: 08 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

PHOTOGRAPHY has come to dominate world attention in recent times. Of all the genres of the visual arts, photographs tell stories in a hurry, drawing attention in millions of ways to situations that exist within communities. For a photo documentary, for instance, to fully tell the story it needs the efforts of an expert to tell it well. This is exactly what Ajao Ganiu Olaitan aka Olaitan Ganiu of The Nation Newspapers has been able to accomplish in a photo-documentary competition organized by The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and IBER-RUTAS.

Ganiu is a creative designer with The Nation. A graduate of Lagos State University, Lagos he is a self-thought reporter, street photographer, and fashion entrepreneur. He has come to see the need to use this medium to reach out to the world. Recently, he took part in a photography competition tagged IDiaspora Photo Contest, involving photographers from all over the world. Not only that he emerged third position in the show, but in the professional category, he used this opportunity to tell the story of how the journey began for him.

He recounted his experiences with nostalgia. He said, 'I got to know about it through a Non-governmental organization (NGO) I joined sometime ago, here in Lagos. The group takes delight in helping the needy, the deprived. At Makoko area of Yaba, Lagos, where we visited them to distribute relief materials to the poor, I discovered the deplorable conditions of the Diaspora community there'.

After this first ugly impression, Ganiu was moved to pity to visit the place a second time. It was in the cause of that return visit that he took several snapshots of the squalor and squalid life and social conditions of the children, the poor, the community generally. 'I got home that day thinking about how to help this slum community, especially the children...