NIGER DELTA FOTOTALES…… A View of the Niger Delta through the Lens

Abstract

This essay attempts a reflection on the exhibition Niger Delta Fototales, a photo exhibition showcasing  PEOPLES, RELICS and ISSUES of the Niger Delta: Novotel Hotels, Port Harcourt, on the 50th anniversary  Nigeria’s Independence. I take it that at the heart of the matter of photography is “the photographic paradox”,  “the coexistence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code  (the ‘art’/the treatment; the ‘writing’/the rhetoric of the photograph)”. Beyond a mere reportage of this  momentous event, I would attempt an exploration of these tenets of modern communication by interrogating the messages encrypted in a select number of images from this show utilizing the critical tools of  contemporary scholarship in an attempt at explicating the nature of the photographic essay itself. In a reading that imbricates the value of the punctum in the analysis of the rhetoric of the studium, therefore, the  groundings of the collaborative encoded features that intuit the photograph metonymically unfolds the  contingent realms of memory and subjectivity.

Key words: - Niger Delta, Fototales, Peoples, Relics and Issues; Images and Words