Digitizing Ibadan: explorations of the photoblogosphere as a site of resistance

The camera has been actively involved in the framing of African people. Popular images of the African continent seldom deviate from the normalized visual rhetoric, primarily depicting exoticized images or the extremities of civil unrest, famine and disease. Digitizing Ibadan is a photographic exploration of the city of Ibadan, Nigeria. Residents of lbadan were invited to visually (re)present their perceptions of the city. Over a period of four weeks, hundreds of digital images were recorded and stored on www.picturingnigeria.com- a website designed for the project. The website was designed to display everyday life and everyday sights, allowing for the interpretation of these ordinary acts (of recording and displaying images) as democratic and meaningful. The idea is that a website hosting digital images (in photoblog format) could be established as a site of resistance. This website represents an endeavour by the everyday citizen to recontextualize photography as a social discourse.