John and Funmilayo Abe’s famed Abi Morocco photographic studio captured generations of Nigerians on camera

This picture was taken at a famous photographic studio in Lagos in 1979. The studio, Abi Morocco, was run by a husband-and-wife team, John and Funmilayo Abe, from the 1970s to 2006, and captured images of generations of Nigerians during decades in which the exponentially growing city became the unofficial street-style capital of Africa and the world. The picture is included in a new exhibition that traces the place of the staged portrait in that story – in the years before smartphones and Instagram rendered many high street studios obsolete.

The exhibition is derived from an evolving project called Lagos Studio Archives that is the work of two artists and curators, Karl Ohiri and Riikka Kassinnen, which now involves the preservation of thousands of film negatives from that period. The project began when Ohiri, based in London, travelled to Owerri in southern Nigeria in 2015 to visit family. While he was there, he met a local portrait photographer and asked if he might look at his archive of images. The photographer told him that he had thrown out and destroyed all his negatives as they were taking up too much space. When Ohiri asked around other photographers, he often heard the same story. He raised funds from different foundations to create the archive project and preserve the negatives that remained.