The personal works of Brad Ogbonna are at once universal, and culturally distinct. The photographer has spent years illuminating the vibrancy and flair throughout West Africa and the Caribbean; from Île-à-Vache in Haiti to Lome, Togo, Stone Town, Zanzibar, and Cuba, where he captures the performance, mundanity and the human relationship to land. His series – which are always titled after the city or state they’re based in – don’t typically read as sentimental, but there’s always a feeling that the photographer is being guided by the subjects, to a different way of life.
Brad was born and raised in Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul), Minnesota, in a tight-knit community of Nigerians and West Africans who emigrated from the 80s to early aughts. Immersed in the diaspora, he would spend a lot of weekends visiting family and attending cultural events around town. “My dad and uncle were an integral part of the community,” he tells us. “And they’d always carry cameras with them everywhere we’d go,” he adds. Also, noticing photo albums throughout people’s homes, the photographer developed a sense of the importance of documenting from an early age, “and once I got to junior high school, picking up a camera and taking pictures felt like a natural progression from there”.
When it comes to Brad’s work, it is hard to deny the fact that it is synonymous with locales throughout Africa and the Caribbean. It all started in 2011, after the death of his father in Nigeria, where he decided to stay behind for a few months. After some time, he began documenting the people and surroundings, before casting his net wider throughout the region. Travelling to Dakar some years later, his eponymous series gives us a sense of the interior and exterior attributes of the neighbourhoods, with an almost destined captured connectivity between people and their surroundings through colour. The red of the kids’ beloved Jordan jersey and the distant balconies’ base; the blue of a toddler’s shirt and white of his shorts complementing the surrounding tiles; and the shirts of three figures in the distance somehow matching the window frames in a building even farther away. “One of the defining characteristics of the regions is the amount of colour on display. From the home exteriors and interior decor to the clothing people wear,” Brad says. “That’s what I’m looking for when I’m creating imagery. The love of colour and warmth that I don’t often find stateside.”
