Agbowo’s Editor in Chief, Adedayo Agarau goes in conversation with Adaeze Okaro
I have been a fan of Adaeze’s critical and creative eye for about two years. Her work is, to say the least, one of the most moving collections from Nigeria—how she captures the most domestic intimacy is beyond compare. In this interview, I sit with Adaeze, who discusses attentive portraiture and the ethics that guide how her images are taken: her color accuracy, retouch limits, credit, and the preservation of cultural signals, how the small life of her mother trained her eye to look at women a little differently—with and into beauty, where she ties saturated blues and violets to childhood memory and argues for “image equity” in a world of fast circulation and AI systems.
Adedayo: Adaeze, you’ve traced your attachment to image-making back to childhood—handling cameras as early as six, photographing with a phone before going pro in 2018, and rooting your practice in the domestic textures of Enugu/Abuja life: mothers getting dressed, church finery, and the emotional charge of family photographs that hold both joy and loss. When you’re constructing today’s saturated blue and violet portrait worlds, what very specific sensory memories (a hymn, a fabric, a scent of hair oil, the way light hit a Sunday hat) are you translating—or transfiguring—into color strategy, pose, and surface? And how has the shift from intimate family impulse to commercial work complicated what you feel you must protect versus what you’re willing to let evolve?
Adaeze Okaro: I often say my earliest training in photography came from simply watching. Watching women get ready for church, watching the way fabric moved, how sunlight would catch a gold earring or a powdered cheek. Some of my most vivid memories are scented. The smell of Blue Magic hair cream, the thick sweetness of fried plantain in the air, the coldness of metal bangles against warm skin. I didn’t have language for it then, but those were visual lessons how to hold space, how to honor ritual. When I reach for cobalt or violet now, I’m reaching for those same memories. Those colors feel like home. Like depth. Like how emotion settles in a room when someone steps in wearing their Sunday best, but their eyes are tired. Color, light, and texture help me hold the things we don’t always say out loud. It’s less about translating memory and more about living inside it again, visually. My work began in love and remains rooted there. The earliest photos I took were of my family, my mother, the rituals of daily life. There was no audience then—just an urge to preserve what felt tender. As I moved into commercial work, I had to learn what parts of that tenderness could come with me, and what needed shielding. There’s a pressure in commercial spaces to reveal more, to make things glossy, to fit into an expected frame. But I’ve learned that I don’t have to give everything. I can still protect the soul of my work. If an image feels exploitative or hollow, it doesn’t leave my hands. I’ve grown more confident in saying no. My sitter’s dignity is more important than a client’s approval.
Adedayo: Think of the infamous “Shirley Cards” and the broader color film pipeline—flattened, ashened, or erased darker complexions, how photographic chemistry and industry standards have been calibrated for light skin. The residue of that bias persists in today’s myth that “dark skin is hard to photograph,” even as inclusive imaging initiatives push back. Your portraits often dwell in deep shadow, allowing melanin to hold luminous highlights without capitulating to flattening “corrective” exposure. When you choose to let a face fall almost into silhouette, revealing only a cheek glint, a jeweled ear—what technical readings and political stakes guide you? How do you negotiate client requests to “open up” shadows without re-inscribing the history that mis-saw us? And what have you learned—practically or philosophically—from recent inclusive camera tech efforts that claim to render a fuller spectrum of skin tones?
Adaeze Okaro: I love the way melanin receives light. It doesn’t flatten—it sings. But that only happens when you respect the shadow. The idea that dark skin is difficult to photograph is really about whose skin the camera was built for. When I let a face rest in shadow, I’m not hiding anything. I’m allowing it to speak in its own language. Some clients want every detail exposed, every corner of the image brightened. But I remind them our visibility should not be at the cost of our depth. Shadows can hold softness, sensuality, even resistance. Tools like Real Tone are a welcome shift, but what matters most is the photographer’s intent. The camera can only see as clearly as the person behind it.
Adedayo: Across West African and specifically Yoruba contexts, beads (ìlèkè, ibèbè, lagídígba) and bead-intensive regalia register far more than ornament: they index rites of passage, sexuality, fertility, spiritual protection, lineage, hierarchies of power, even the metaphysics of àṣẹ; color codes and material rarity can mark rank, intimacy, and states of the body. Your portraits frequently foreground stacked bangles, jewel-bright earrings, plush wraps—objects that seem to carry biography and cosmology. When you wrap, layer, or spotlight these materials, how consciously are you activating those coded histories, and where do you deliberately scramble or reassign them for contemporary self-invention? What protocols do you observe when a sitter brings adornments that have a private or sacred charge? And in the violet-dress series, where bead-swathed forearms read almost like ceremonial armor, are we looking at protection, seduction, mourning, play, or a composite language you’re inventing with sitters? Could you also help me position my frame of thought in Igbo cosmology?
Adaeze Okaro: Adornments in my portraits are never just decoration. They’re history. In Yoruba culture and beyond, beads carry meaning—age, power, transitions, prayer. I try to hold that knowledge with care. When someone brings sacred jewelry or cloth to a shoot, I ask what it means to them. Sometimes the meaning is personal, sometimes spiritual. Either way, I listen. In some images, the adornments speak louder than the body. The violet dress series, for example, was not just about beauty. The beads felt like a kind of protection, like armor but also like joy. There’s often a layering of meanings: mourning and seduction, tradition and invention. I don’t always decode them for the viewer. That’s intentional. Not everything has to be explained to be powerful.
Adedayo: bell hooks’s “oppositional gaze” grounds the idea that Black women have been practicing looking back, looking askance, or withholding visibility as acts of resistance within visual regimes that sought to fix or punish their gaze; hooks links this rebellious spectatorship to everyday micro-gestures that reclaim power. While bell hooks brilliant observation does not entirely capture the diversity of african women, many of your portraits avert the sitter’s eyes, plunge features into cobalt shadow, or crop the head so that jewelry and skin shimmer speak where the face does not and these recall hooks’s insistence on strategic refusal, and echo how you edit what stays in or out of the frame to protect your subjects. How do you choreograph levels of access—what strangers get to see, what remains intimate—and do you negotiate different “cuts” of an image (public, community, private) to honor a sitter’s boundaries? Where in your workflow do conversations about gaze, consent, and circulation happen?
Adaeze Okaro: bell hooks taught us that looking is political. I think about that often when I shoot. A sitter turning their face away can be as powerful as eye contact. It says, “I choose what you get to see.” Some of my images obscure the face entirely, letting the jewelry or the posture speak instead. That’s not withholding—it’s a different form of intimacy. I always talk with my sitters about what feels right. Some images are for them alone. Some are for the world. Some shift depending on context. I try to honor those boundaries. Editing is part of that care. It’s where I decide what to share, what to veil, what to leave unsaid. I want people to feel held by my work, not exposed.
Adedayo: Scholar Tina Campt proposes that photographs of Black subjects register “lower frequencies” we must listen to—breath, vibration, affect that exceed the purely visual, especially in archives where Black presence was historically over-regulated. Your popular, low-key tonalities and textural close-ups seem built for that kind of listening, and they agree to some degree with Deana Lawson’s staged domestic tableaux, which elevate everyday Black interiors into mythic, affectively dense spaces, where personal objects hum louder than spectacle. When you build a portrait that’s mostly darkness and texture, what do you hope we’ll hear—a mother’s dressing ritual, a nightclub bass line, prayer, grief? Do you craft sonic or conversational atmospheres on set that you want to reverberate in the final still? And how do you decide which single highlight (a glossy lip, a bead flare) becomes the “note” that carries the whole chord of the image?
Adaeze Okaro: Tina Campt’s idea of listening to photographs resonates deeply with me. My work lives in low frequencies—texture, breath, atmosphere. On set, I pay attention to what’s unspoken. The music playing. The pauses between words. The energy in the room. Sometimes it’s joyful. Sometimes it’s heavy. I try to let that shape the image. I don’t always know what the final “note” will be—a glint of sweat, the shimmer of a bead, a swollen lip gloss—but I know it when I see it. It’s the part of the image that hums. That keeps vibrating long after you look away. That’s the part I build everything else around.
Adedayo: Seydou Keïta sculpting pose and textile with sitters in Bamako, and Malick Sidibé’s Studio Malick, where youth styled themselves into rites of modernity, both archives whose patterned backdrops and props play let Africans narrate independence-era selves on their own terms—established portraiture as a collaborative stage of self-fashioning, preservation, and later, national memory. You, too, are self-taught—you stage richly tactile environments, and your work now circulates globally at a moment when computational tools promise to correct legacy racial bias in imaging tech. How do you place yourself in conversation with those studio lineages—continuing, critiquing, or retooling their strategies of collaboration and spectacle—and what does “image equity” mean to you when your portraits travel into datasets, stock libraries, or AI training sets that will shape how future cameras see Black skin?
Adaeze Okaro: I see myself in conversation with the studio photographers who came before me. Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé—they created spaces where people could dream themselves into being. Their work gave everyday people the tools to shape how they were remembered. I carry that same intention. But I’m also working in a world where images move fast, where AI and algorithms are learning how to see from what we feed them. That makes authorship even more urgent. Image equity, to me, means we get to define how we are seen. Not just in galleries, but in datasets, search results, camera training. It means our skin tones aren’t corrected to fit someone else’s standard. It means we’re not reduced to keywords. It means care and credit are built into the system.
Adedayo: You’ve said your work aims to “thrash stereotypes” and center the beauty of Black men and women—especially darker, plus-size, or otherwise underrepresented bodies—by photographing them with dignity, cultural specificity, and emotional nuance; editors have noted how your imagery captures the “unspoken” and holds joy and sorrow in the same frame. At the same time, you work within global image economies—stock platforms, brands, editorial—where files detach from origin and circulate under new captions, color grades, and contexts; audience reception can shift radically across geographies. How do you safeguard meaning and bodily dignity as your images move from an intimate portrait session to a brand library to a magazine cover? What are your non-negotiables around color accuracy, retouch ethics, and crediting when the work is meant to push back against erasure? And can you share a moment when a sitter recognized herself in a published image and felt that stereotype “thrashed”—or when circulation failed that promise, and you had to intervene?
Adaeze Okaro: Once an image enters the world, it begins a life of its own. That’s both beautiful and terrifying. I’ve seen my work on stock platforms and brand campaigns—sometimes treated with care, sometimes stripped of context. That’s why I have non-negotiables. No skin lightening. No excessive smoothing. No stripping away of cultural signifiers. And credit always matters. One of the most moving moments in my career was when a sitter messaged me after seeing her portrait published. She said, “I finally look like how I feel on the inside.” That’s why I do this. But I’ve also had to intervene when an image was cropped to remove a head wrap, or when it was used in a campaign that had nothing to do with the story behind it. In those moments, I speak up. My images begin in trust. I want them to carry that same trust wherever they go.
Adaeze Okaro
Adaeze Okaro is a photographer whose work captures the unspoken poetry of human experience. Her journey into photography began at the intersection of curiosity and nostalgia. She was commissioned for Dove and Getty Images in November that same year.
Through her lens, Adaeze explores themes of love, melancholic, beauty identity, crafting work that reflects the emotional intricacies of life. Her photography is more than a practice, it is a dialogue, a way of connecting with others and herself. Influenced by the cinematic quality of storytelling and the depth of her experiences, her portraits honor beauty of and the universality of human emotions. Her work is a celebration of complexity, layered meaning, and the fleeting, transformative moments that shape us.
Adaeze’s portfolio is a vibrant blend of portraiture, fine art, documentary, and fashion. Her ability to capture the depth of her subjects is matched by her meticulous attention to detail, from her use of color to her ability to create visual stories that transcend the frame. Her work has been described as a harmonious convergence of emotion and technique, where tradition and modernity coexist.
Her achievements reflect her dedication and vision. In March 2021, she was awarded the prestigious Adobe Stock Artist Development Fund, where her brief, Celebration of Self, aligned seamlessly with her mission to explore the layers of identity. Collaborating with global brands such as Google, Adobe, Penguin Books, HarperCollins, Dove, Getty Images, Girlgaze, WeTransfer, and VSCO, Adaeze has consistently proven her ability to merge artistry with cultural relevance.
But beyond the recognitions and partnerships, Adaeze’s art is deeply personal. It is rooted in her desire to understand and portray the human experience. its intricate connections, quiet moments of joy, and layered complexities. Her work is inspired by the cultural richness of her background, the vivid colors of her childhood, and her love for exploring the beauty of emotions that often go unspoken.
For Adaeze, photography is not just about capturing images; it is about documenting life as it is, while leaving room for the imagination to wander. She embraces the journey of experimentation, celebrates growth, and believes that imperfection holds its own kind of beauty, a philosophy that mirrors her artistic evolution. As she reflects on her path, from picking up that film camera as a child to becoming a voice in contemporary photography,
Adaeze remains committed to her vision: to tell stories that matter, celebrate black beauty, and hold space for moments of humanity that connect us all. Her work continues to inspire and resonate, not just as an ode to her background but as a universal language of love, beauty, and discovery.