J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere (1930–2014) was a photographer born in Ovbiomu, southern Nigeria. He developed his photographic skills in government offices, television, and advertising during the 1950s, and around 1968 began the long-running series Hairstyles, devoted to women’s braided hairstyles. He accumulated black-and-white views taken mainly from behind and in profile, recording the names of the styles, while also photographing Lagos architecture for Eko. Through the sequences of photographs and hairstyle names in his books, he traced changing urban culture and bodily adornment in post-independence Nigeria.
Colonial ethnographic photographs sometimes used hairstyles to identify social groups, while studio portraitists such as Seydou Keïta fashioned their subjects’ public images through clothing and pose. Ojeikere centered the sculptural forms of hairstyles that women continually renewed. His largely consistent backgrounds and camera angles, recorded on square-format black-and-white film, allow viewers to compare the direction and height of braids from one photograph to the next. By preserving names such as Brush Eko Bridge and Ogun Pari, Hairstyles reveals how hairdressers and wearers translated a bridge project and the end of the civil war into elaborate hair designs. Photographing these styles under comparable conditions for decades, though some were dismantled within a day, he made it possible to follow events in the city through changes in form and nomenclature.
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Contents · Table of Contents
Nigerian Independence and the Arts Council — From Professional Work to an Independent Project
Ojeikere acquired his first camera in 1950 and learned photographic work in a government information department’s darkroom, at WNTV, and with the advertising company West Africa Publicity. *1 He joined the Nigerian Arts Council in 1967 and, around the following year, began a self-directed, long-term project photographing festivals, dress, and hairstyles. *3 His commissioned work provided the practical foundation for independent cultural documentation that eventually became Hairstyles. After independence in 1960, Nigeria underwent a reconfiguration of urban life and national culture. Traditional dress and Western fashions coexisted on city streets, while clothing and hair became ways of presenting oneself in a new era. *2 In contrast to assignments in which clients determined both subject and purpose, Hairstyles allowed Ojeikere to decide what to preserve and to follow its transformations through skills honed in professional work. His recording of Ogun Pari (“The War Is Over”), a hairstyle named after the end of the civil war, connects an everyday design with political history. *22 Alongside his Arts Council work with festivals and clothing, he independently collected hairstyle names and braiding techniques encountered at weddings and markets. *17
West African Studio Portraiture — From the Whole Figure to the Architecture of Hair
In twentieth-century West Africa, the photographic studio became a space in which subjects shaped their desired public identities through clothing, furniture, backdrops, and pose. Compared with Seydou Keïta’s patterned fabrics and studio settings or Samuel Fosso’s self-staging, Ojeikere’s decision to concentrate on the head is especially clear. *16 He described hairstyles as sculptures made for a single day and spoke of the need to retain a memory of forms destined to disappear. At his 2000 Fondation Cartier exhibition, he also explained his preference for rear views: they revealed the structure more abstractly than frontal portraits. *8 Seen from behind, braids undone at day’s end could still be compared decades later. Colonial ethnographic photography had classified bodies from an external perspective; in the later twentieth century, West African sitters increasingly selected their own clothing, hairstyles, and postures, negotiating their appearance with the photographer. Ojeikere removed the face from the center of the image without eliminating the sitter’s agency. By recording a hairstyle she had chosen, he allowed typological repetition and individual intention to coexist. *16 The 2014 monograph edited by Bisi Silva brings together essays by Ikem Stanley Okoye, Antawan I. Byrd, and Silva, alongside Erin Haney’s account of early Nigerian photographic history, placing the hairstyle photographs within a broader history. *25 Rania Gaafar identifies formal affinities between Hairstyles, August Sander’s typologies, and ethnographic photography, while reading the series as a form of cultural self-representation in independent Nigeria. *26 Braids carrying names such as Ogun Pari or a bridge thus transform a seemingly classificatory rear view into evidence of everyday invention after independence.
Hairstyles — Post-Independence Change Written in Braids and Their Names
Begun around 1968, Hairstyles amassed more than a thousand images in its first seven years alone. By giving individual styles names, as in the museum-held Two in One Piko, Ojeikere preserved their shapes alongside the terms used at the time. *6 A Rolleiflex, square-format black-and-white film, restrained backgrounds, and mostly rear-facing views provided consistent conditions throughout the extended series. *9 That consistency makes changes in the direction, volume, and names of the braids more legible. The styles also absorbed the forms of the contemporary city. Ife Bronze invokes the sculpture of ancient Ife, while the Yoruba name Onile-Gogoro, meaning a multistory building, responds to an urban skyline transformed during the oil economy. *7 In Brush Eko Bridge, the braided lines evoke roads and bridges in Lagos: the bridge project and the coiffure belong to the same period of urban construction. *14 Ancient Ife and contemporary development converge across the sequence of heads. Each name supplies another record linking form and society. References to buildings and infrastructure, festivities, war, and social status give the apparently uniform rear views a specific history. In books and exhibitions, the accumulated images reveal the speed with which Nigerian society adapted older forms and introduced the vocabulary of a changing city into hair. *23 During the oil boom and expansion of Lagos in the 1960s and 1970s, hairdressers and wearers incorporated bridges and high-rise buildings into their own designs. *7 Nigerian writer and editor Dapo Adeniyi has explored how hairstyle names responded to events, including bridges, movie stars, and political independence, serving as witty comments on everyday life. *27 Ife Bronze, Brush Eko Bridge, and Ogun Pari consequently link their photographs to ancient sculpture, Lagos infrastructure, and the end of the civil war, respectively.
Rear Views in Hairstyles — A Camera Position Designed for Comparison
Photographing from behind shifts attention away from the facial features and expressions around which conventional portraiture often turns. In the work held by Princeton University Art Museum, Ojeikere centers the head, making the direction and rise of the braids and the balance between left and right distinctly visible. *4 Images such as Fro Fro bring silhouette and hair texture close to abstraction, yet the neck, clothing, and earrings retain the presence of the wearer’s body. *15 The procedure may look typological, but its subjects do not fall into the relatively fixed functional categories of the Bechers’ industrial buildings. Hairstyling changed rapidly through the hairdresser’s skills, the wearer’s decisions, ceremony, and fashion. A U.S. Department of State profile likewise emphasizes Ojeikere’s discovery of “sculptures for a day” in streets, workplaces, and weddings. *17 Repeated framing brings the changing pace of fashion within a single society into relief. Anonymity and individuality inhabit these rear views together. The face offers fewer clues to identity, but distinct braiding habits, earrings, necklines, and fabrics preserve individual choices. Some colonial anthropological photographs standardized frontal, profile, and rear views for bodily measurement. Ojeikere instead chose angles that best disclosed the direction and elevation of the braids, allowing older and newer styles to be compared within one framing system. *8
Making Hairstyles — Hairdressers, Wearers, and the Photographer
Three participants shaped the images in Hairstyles: the hairdresser who braided the hair, the woman who wore the style, and Ojeikere, who photographed it. Responding to events and fashion, hairstyles were temporary constructions; photography retained the techniques and tastes of a particular moment for later examination. *10 A work in the Smithsonian collection presents a hairstyle as an independent sculptural form while keeping the wearer’s body within the frame. *13 Ojeikere photographed designs made and chosen by others under repeated conditions, developing a body of material that could be compared over time. Individual portraiture thus intersects with typology and the accumulation of a serial archive. *11 The Walther Collection exhibition Events of the Self reconsidered African photography through several approaches, including self-representation, studio culture, and seriality. *12 In statements preserved by MAMCO, Ojeikere explicitly called Hairstyles a “collective work.” The hairdresser’s skill, the woman’s choice, and the photographer’s repeated recording formed separate stages whose intersection produced the finished image. *22 The invention of the design also belonged to the hairdresser and wearer; the photographer’s authorship lay in its depiction and sustained editing. His contribution was to record these one-day hairstyles and preserve decades of them as a series accompanied by their names.
Eko and the Photobook — Between the City and the Body
Alongside Hairstyles, Ojeikere photographed head adornment, cultural occasions, and cityscapes, later developing Eko through an extended study of Lagos architecture. *20 Bridges, high-rise buildings, and urban slang appear in hairstyle names, while another series depicts the architecture itself. Read together, the braids in Brush Eko Bridge and the Lagos buildings in Eko trace how construction projects supplied motifs for bodily adornment. Repetition also determines how the photographs are encountered in books and exhibitions. Viewed in sequence, Hairstyles 1968–1999 makes variations in name, viewpoint, and outline legible as changes unfolding over time. *22 His work depended as much on collecting and classifying designs across decades as on selecting a striking individual image. *18 Page-by-page comparison reveals a history of changing forms. More recently, MoMA’s Ideas of Africa presented Brush Eko Bridge at the intersection of architecture, commerce, political independence, and a revival of hairstyling. *19 Styles devalued as backward under colonial rule gained renewed attention after independence and developed in response to the construction of bridges and a new skyline. *23 The hairstyles recorded here were contemporary designs produced by urban life in a new nation. Eko gives their architectural references a material counterpart: as roads, bridges, and commercial buildings reshaped Lagos, residents adopted those forms in the names and construction of their braids. Photographing heads and buildings as separate subjects, Ojeikere preserved them as designs from a shared historical moment. *20 The spreads and page sequence in Hairstyles emphasize both formal resemblance and differences of naming, not simply chronology. Each turn of the page sets related outlines beside distinct names, encouraging readers to see the styles as a continuous field of urban design rather than isolated curiosities. MAMCO’s presentation similarly paired names with uses, keeping their social function attached to their form. *22
After Fondation Cartier — Revisiting Form and Political Time
Ojeikere’s international recognition expanded from the 1990s onward. In 2000, Fondation Cartier presented sixty-four photographs from Hairstyles in the first substantial presentation of the series outside Nigeria. *8 The foundation continued to acquire his work, helping establish its international reception. *24 Acquisition by European and American museums and collections coincided with a broader reconsideration of African photographs as works by identifiable authors, instead of anonymous ethnographic material. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s remembrance likewise recognizes his decades-long account of cultural change from within Nigerian society. *5 International attention to the sculptural appeal of the hairstyles can, however, push their deeper chronology—including civil war and urbanization—into the background. Traditional dress and Western fashion, as well as colonial values and post-independence aspirations, intersected in the everyday appearance of young people. *2 A 2024 agnès b. exhibition revisited the work’s formation during the transition to independence and its relation to social structures and creativity. *21 Such reception overlaps with an institutional reassessment of the ways African photographs entered collections as anonymous documents. Exhibitions at the Walther Collection and the Met emphasize authorship and artistic intention together with studio culture and self-representation, restoring the circumstances of image-making to the history of photography. *12 For an international audience, the names Ogun Pari and Brush Eko Bridge remain essential to reading the series alongside its sculptural silhouettes: they carry the language of postwar Nigeria and the history of construction in Lagos.
Hairstyles — Turning One-Day Designs into a Chronicle of Decades
By maintaining consistent shooting conditions in Hairstyles, Ojeikere made decades of invention available for comparison. The repeating image is at once a cultural record and a measure against which new forms become legible. *3 As he explained at Fondation Cartier, a hairstyle began disappearing almost as soon as it was completed. *8 Repeated photography allows viewers to compare the ways a society remakes its appearance over time. Where the Bechers’ typologies compared the structures of related industrial buildings, Ojeikere examined designs that people created anew each time. Drawing on elements of studio portraiture and ethnographic photography, he centered the mutable forms selected and worn by his subjects. Across the repeated rear views, techniques and urban expressions shift in response to fashion and politics. Hairstyles thus communicates the pace of changing tastes through the accumulation of photographs. *3 Under consistent conditions, its archive permits comparison between forms preserved from the past and those that emerged later. The succession of rear views made since 1968, all recorded in the same square format, became a chronicle of urban life in which a disappearing style could be examined alongside the fashion that followed it. *8
Sources — museums, archives, and specialist literature (listed individually in § SRC on this page)
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