How Port Harcourt-Based Nigerian Photographer Enefaa Thomas is Carving Out A New Outlook on Travel a

How Port Harcourt-Based Nigerian Photographer Enefaa Thomas is Carving Out A New Outlook on Travel and Photography in Nigeria.Whether shooting colourful scenery of lush natural landscapes in southeastern Nigeria, taking on a minimalist approach with his lens of activity on sandy shores in Ikuru Town, Rivers State, or familiar urban settings in his hometown of Port Harcourt, as a photographer and travel writer Enefaa Thomas considers himself both a storyteller and documentarian, but a difference-maker most especially. Photographing and capturing for over ten years now, Enefaa gets candid with us about his work and travels as a photographer.I’m Enefaa Thomas and I’m a photographer in my mid-thirtiesbased in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.Port Harcourt is probably the 3rd most important city in Nigeria. I can argue for it being higher than 3rd place but I’ll just pretend to be modest instead. I have lived here almost all my life so seeing it in a different light has not been easy, which in turn makes creating great photographs difficult for me here. This I think is one reason I find myself travelling out of Port Harcourt a lot lately.Life here is slow paced and laid back, at least way slower than it is in Lagos. It is small in certain respects so you tend to find the 6 degrees of separation theory in action a lot here. Everybody knows somebody that knows somebody that knows somebody.(images: scenes of Port Harcourt)With photography I feel like I’m making a difference withthe photographs I make, albeit a small difference. What initially piqued myinterest in photography is its ability to freeze time. It feels like taking asnapshot of time of a person, an even or a place.How did it all start? I got a cheap film camera more than adecade ago but I didn’t like the photos I was making with it at the time sothat experience didn’t last. Eight years ago I got a Canon point and shoot andjust kept making portraits of friends. I got a DSLR some years later and longstory short, that’s how I ended up here.I like to take a documentary approach to visualstorytelling, maybe that’s just me taking the easy way out. I do hope not. I’mtrying to create visual style that is recognizable and that guides the approachI take to photography. I like to have local help for most places I visit. That wayit is easier for me to socialize with the community I photograph and alsoreduce the chances of me parting ways with my camera. This is also especiallyhelpful when the amount of time I can spend at a given place is limited. Goingwith a companion who already has a relationship with the community reduces thetime it takes for people to be comfortable around you. I try to be invisibleand I feel like it’s easier to accomplish this when people are comfortable tothe point where my presence becomes nothing out of the ordinary.(images of Ikuru Town, Rivers State)(Ibeno Beach, Akwa Ibom, the longest sand beach in West Africa)I had a bucket list of countries to visit in Africa startingwith a trip to several countries in West Africa but then Ebola happened and Ihad to shelve that idea. Going to East Africa or Europe was going to cost moreand I was going to have to deal with getting a visa which I wasn’t lookingforward to. I just decided that I was going to look for places within Nigeriato visit instead. It is way cheaper and I wouldn’t have to take a lot of timeoff work.I took a trip to Obudu and I was hooked. Everywhere I lookedthere was a photograph staring back at me, begging to be made. It was just wayeasier to take pictures when everything was new. For someone like me who grewup in Port Harcourt, which has a topography that is almost entirely flat andmost of my road trips out of town took me through entirely flat roads to Warri,the hills and mountains in Obudu made for a totally different experience.(images: Obudu)My experience photographing these places has been great. Themain difficulty has usually been trying to get to the places you mentioned. Forinstance the shortest distance by road to Obudu we have been able to find fromPort Harcourt is 7 hours through Abakiliki. One reason I decided to really take up photographing the citiesand towns around me was the dearth of images online taken of Port Harcourt andother cities and communities in the southernmost parts of Nigeria. VisitingOpobo and Ikuru Town was borne out of a need to correct this anomaly.Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Soundcloud | Mixcloud -- source link

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