Kelechi Amadi-Obi

Biography

In 2001, at the African Photography Encounters in Bamako, the capital of Mali, six Nigerians met: Uche James Iroha, TY Bello, Amaize Ojeikere, Emeka Okereke, Zainab Balogun and Kelechi Amadi-Obi. On returning home they founded the group Depth of Field. They agreed to meet regularly, to support one another and to critique one another’s pictures. The group went on to stage exhibitions in Nigeria and abroad, among them one at the South London Gallery in 2005.

By then Amadi-Obi already had a law degree and several exhibitions of paintings behind him.

He was born on 29 December 1969 in Owerri, in Imo State. He went to school in Umuahia, at Library Avenue Primary School and at Government College, and then read law at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He took his degree in 1992 and was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1994; while still a student he set up a small company called De-Zulu. Later, a fashion magazine asked him in an interview why he had traded law for photography. He replied that his choice had been between photography and art, not between photography and law: he had been an artist, he said, since childhood.

His first exhibitions were of paintings. In 1996 his solo show “Morning Light” was held in the Lagos district of Surulere, in 1997 “Man and Nature” at the Russian Cultural Centre in Lagos, and in 1998 and 1999 two more exhibitions of new work. At the same time he took part in group shows: the UNESCO exhibition for World Environment Day in Lagos (1997), “Vision 2010”, a survey of contemporary Nigerian art in Abuja (1997), and exhibitions at Galleria Romana in Lagos and in Port Harcourt (2000). From 2001 photography dominates the list: “Photography and the Mega City” at the Goethe-Institut in Lagos, Bamako, Milan (2002), London and Brussels (2003), the ifa Gallery in Stuttgart (2004). How the painter became a photographer is hard to trace from the available sources; all that is known is that long years of practice came first. In 2006 his photographs were included in “Snap Judgment: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography” at the International Center of Photography in New York. Amadi-Obi’s work has also been shown at the Lagos Photo Festival, the Didi Museum and the Rele Gallery.

For many years he shot fashion and beauty for the South African magazine True Love, which went on to launch a West African edition, and then founded his own glossy magazine, Style Mania (later simply Mania). Its covers, all photographed by him, featured Nigerian musicians, actresses and models. In June 2013 he photographed the duo P-Square in his studio and the singer Tiwa Savage for the cover of Mania; in October 2014 the actress Stephanie Okereke in a yellow gown; and in November of that year Agbani Darego, the winner of Miss World 2001. Vogue has called him one of the major forces in the creative scene in Nigeria. His clients and the owners of his work include the Vatican collection, the Ford Foundation in Lagos, Guinness Nigeria, for which he made the 2004 calendar, and the collection of the Aso Villa, the presidential residence in Abuja.

In late 2016, while photographing the musician Jidenna on Broad Street in Lagos, he noticed a street seller of pillows named Bukola and invited her to his studio. The pictures spread across Nigeria, and they started her career as a model.