From the late 1960s until his death in 2014, Johnson Dopnatus Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere (known as J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere) documented the culture of his native Nigeria in exquisite black-and-white photographs, capturing the elegance and exuberance of its celebrations, ceremonies and daily rituals. With one work generously gifted by Dr Paul Eliadis AM in 2022, and two from Timothy North and Denise Cuthbert in 2023, the Gallery now holds three works from Ojeikere’s ‘Hairstyles’ project. Here, curator Nina Miall delves into their dual importance as both photographs of great beauty and documents of what the artist considered a dying cultural form.

 
A prolific figure in twentieth-century photography, Nigerian artist J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere is best known for his ‘Hairstyles’ project, which saw him immortalise culturally specific hairstyles and headdresses in a compelling visual taxonomy. The project has attracted considerable international recognition in recent years. One particularly iconic image that has recently joined the QAGOMA Collection, Onile Gororo Or Akaba 1973–85, shows an impressively engineered ‘tower’ of hair. Prints of this work can also be found in London’s Tate Museum and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Onile Gogoro Or Akaba gives a prime example of how traditional hairstyles — which made a strong comeback following Nigeria’s independence from Great Britain in 1960 — were often adapted to suit new cosmopolitan lifestyles inspired by the nation’s growing oil economy. The title of the work comes from a Yoruba expression meaning ‘stand tall’, a phrase commonly used to refer to the multistorey buildings going up in Nigerian cities at the time. The Onile Gogoro hair designs were achieved through a technique called olowu (‘done with thread’), which involved wrapping separate segments of hair into locks that are then woven into an overall design. Here, this resembles an industrial structure, its exposed beams conjured by tightly coiled lengths of wrapped hair, which stand strikingly upright from the subject’s head.

Combining the instincts of an anthropologist and an archivist, Ojeikere embarked on the extensive ‘Hairstyles’ documentary project in 1968 and continued it for over 40 years, amassing over 1000 prints and some 20 000 negatives. A collection of remarkable breadth and depth, today it is historically and anthropologically significant for the way in which it records this expression of Nigerian culture, considered by Ojeikere to be a vanishing art form: 

All of these hairstyles are ephemeral . . . I want my photographs to be memorable traces of them. I have always wanted to record moments of beauty, moments of knowledge.¹

The ‘Hairstyles’ project took Ojeikere, a native of Ketu (part of the larger city of Lagos), on extended travels across his homeland, in pursuit of the rich range of contemporary and ceremonial hairstyles and traditional West African gele (in Yoruba language) or head-tie in use. The resulting photographs reflect the uniqueness and diversity of Nigerian culture, with different hairstyles marking special occasions, such as weddings or birthdays, symbolising the wearer’s social or marital status, denoting a particular geographical region or cultural affiliation, or responding to current trends.

Typically taking from 30 minutes to up to five hours to create, the styles vary from intricate, scalp-hugging plaits to more sculptural constructions, and were usually nicknamed for the shapes they imitated (for example, pineapples, crabs or bridges). An affirmation of cultural identity and selfdetermination, they were often passed down through generations of families. Ojeikere shot predominantly with a Hasselbad or Mamiya camera, capturing the beauty of these hairstyles with the regard of one artist admiring the handiwork of another: ‘It is fascinating to watch a ‘hair artist’ make all these precise movements, just like an artist making a sculpture’.² He generally found his subjects on the street and documented them in the studio, using soft lighting, neutral backgrounds, and printing in blackand- white, emphasising the styles’ elegant, architectural quality.

It is one of the distinguishing features of the series that Ojeikere almost always chose to photograph his subjects from behind, lending the images an abstract dimension and distancing the project from conventional portraiture. Gifted by Timothy North SC and Professor Denise Cuthbert last year, Mkpuk Eba 1974 exemplifies this approach, its focus the back of a young woman’s head from which hair ‘pom poms’ sprout like impromptu growths. Ojeikere’s decision to obscure the face may originally have been prompted by a reluctance on the part of the sitter — at the project’s beginning in 1968, he found that many women refused to be photographed, fearing that the ‘evil eye’ of the camera might steal their life force. Ultimately, though, it was an aesthetic decision. As he says: ‘A frontal photograph shows nothing. The ones from behind are almost abstract and better reveal the sculptural aspect of hairstyles’.³ A second photograph gifted by North and Cuthbert, Coiling Penny Penny 1974, is rare in Ojeikere’s oeuvre in that it is shot front on, revealing the coyly smiling face of the subject, framed by a tangle of tightly coiled hair.

Ojeikere’s ‘Hairstyles’ project was unique in that it was made without any commercial support, while most African photographers of his generation worked only on commission. In mapping the extraordinary evolution of hairstyles over decades, he recorded how local hair traditions adapted to influences not only from European and North American popular culture, but also from African communities beyond Nigeria, and charted developments in styling enabled by new hairdressing tools, such as clippers and shears.

An exhaustive undertaking, ‘Hairstyles’ enabled Ojeikere to celebrate the everyday creativity articulating Nigerian social and cultural life at the time. His keen observation of this cultural expression captures a formative moment in the development of a proudly Nigerian national identity, particularly regarding the empowerment of black femininity. The resulting works also form an invaluable archival record; as his son, photographer Amaize Ojeikere has noted: ‘Apart from being fascinated by their beauty and the artistic nature of each hairstyle, he documented them for posterity’.⁵

Nina Miall is Curator, International Art, QAGOMA.

Endnotes

1, 2 & 3. J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, quoted on the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain website on the occasion of the exhibition ‘J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere’ (4 April – 27 May 2000), accessed 5 April 2022.

4 & 5. Amaize Ojeikere, quoted in Kathryn Bromwich, ‘Nigerian women’s elaborate hairstyles – in pictures’, Guardian, 24 June 2018, accessed 5 April 2022.