Feature on This is Africa

This is Africa, a leading online forum for African opinion, arts and music features Charles Okereke. Read an excerpt from the interview below:

Charles Okereke – Life is about beauty

African photography is on the rise. Following decades of photographic misrepresentation by observers from outside the continent, African photographers are now showing the world what they see through their lens. This is Africa spotlights them in a series of interviews.

Paradise Utopia [2011] Ⓒ Charles Okereke

"Using photography as a platform Charles also wants to seek conscientious leadership amongst the youth, because that has been the bane of their existence for the new generation of Nigerians. Together with other arts, photography has luckily been fast accepted as a medium to value. “Yet more effort is needed in a thorough and proper education of the use of it as a veritable tool in appropriating and disseminating factual information which does not distort reality,” says Okereke.

Evil Signs [2011] Ⓒ Charles Okereke

Stimulating conversation
“With my photography I try to create awareness by elevating the mundane, the ordinary and the discarded from the common place to a valuable state which thereby incites a discourse. Shooting the usual with an unusual approach which defamiliarizes the known to an artistic level which in its duality instructs and at the same time enchants.” The future for Charles is now and now is the time to create this future. For this reason he started the Alexander Academy of Art, Design and Alternative Methods, training young, talented Nigerians and other Africans in arts-related subjects and design. “They are the future and guiding them encourages me to put more effort in realizing my own objectives as well.”

To read more, see Charles Okereke: Life is About Beauty