Uche Okpa-Iroha
I approach photography as a civic and social tool. My images function as petitions and testimonies.
Uche Okpa-Iroha was born in 1972 in Enugu, Nigeria. A photographer, curator and art educator, he was a research fellow at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2011–2012) and is now completing a PhD in art history at Northwestern University in the United States. He twice won the Seydou Keïta Prize for best photographic creation at the Bamako Encounters (2009 and 2015) and received the Fondation Jean-Paul Blachère Prize (2009). He has been curator of the GT Bank Art 635 Gallery since 2016, and in 2022 he ran the first Lagos Portfolio Review with MoMA, New York. His photography looks at how people live within the social, economic and political structures of postcolonial Nigeria.
The Plantation Boy
The Plantation Boy was made in the final year of Okpa-Iroha’s residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. The artist took forty stills from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and digitally rebuilt them with himself in the frame: an African man among the families of an Italian-American crime world. The work questions racial power structures and the dominance of Western culture, answering how rarely Black people appear in Western cinema and how stereotyped they are when they do. The title points to the Black and African struggle for freedom and self-determination that began on the slave plantations and still shapes lives around the world.
