Photography Exhibition by 'Kayode Adegbola

From the 23rd to 31st of December 2010, ‘Kayode Adegbola will be exhibiting his debut collection of 20 photographs, hosted by The Address 21 - a boutique hotel in Bodija, a residential area in Ibadan, Oyo State.

Adegbola has earned his reputation as a promising new generation photographer - the 20 year-old was winner of the 2008 "Fifth Element of Bar Med" and the 2009 "Reflections of Queen Mary" Photo Contests, both in his University - Queen Mary, University of London where he is currently in the final year of a bachelor’s degree in Law.

His areas of specialization include portraiture, street, cultural and travel photography, political and music photo-documentation. He has worked on several projects such as covering political rallies and protests in Nigeria and England, documenting the growth and development of the Nigerian Music Industry - video shoots, live performances, backstage and behind the scenes - with artistes like Femi Kuti and Ayo on stage at the London Jazz Festival 2007, Dr Sid on the set of his “Something About You” video with the Mo’Hits all stars, and R. Kelly at the Thisday Music Festival in Lagos in 2009.

Some of his other personal photo projects presently being developed include “The Polo Diaries” - a photo-documentary on Polo in Nigeria and the rest of the world; and “Vagrants” - a series on homeless people around the world, as well as other cultural and travel photography projects.

Adegbola is presenting a collection of 20 limited edition prints for viewing and sale in his home base, Ibadan. He describes this collection as one in which every piece means something special to him, and says that he is proud to finally be presenting it for viewing and sale and will be happy to provide a private viewing of the collection to some of his clients.

The exhibition will begin with an opening ceremony and private viewing of the collection at 12 noon on the 23rd of December 2010, with His Excellency, Governor Kayode Fayemi, The Executive Governor of Ekiti State as special guest; at The Address 21, situated on number 21 Oba Olagbegi Avenue, Old Bodija, Ibadan. Thereafter the collection will remain open to the public at the same venue between 10 a.m and 6 p.m until the 31st of December 2010.

For additional information: e-mail info@adegbola.com, kayode@adegbola.com, visit http://www.adegbola.com/ or call +2348033245564

Habila & Sontag

In Saturday's Review section of the UK Guardian, novelist Helon Habila presented his rereading of Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, which centres on the experiences West Indian immigrants in 50s Britain.

Habila's second novel, Measuring Time, is published is published by WW Norton.

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Still on the Review, the late Susan Sontag, in an essay written before she died, discusses the novelist's task.

Hear her - "I'm often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: "Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world." To that she added, "Be serious".

Fittingly, Sontag's son, David Rieff pays tribute to his late mother, discussing "her almost devotional insistence on never missing a concert, an exhibition, an opera or a ballet was for her an act of loyalty to seriousness, not an indulgence, and a part of her project as a writer, not a taste, let alone an addiction."

Sontag was torn between her yearning to work on her own fiction, and a sense of duty to write about other writers. "And yet when I asked her once why she had devoted so much time to making essayistic cases for writers ranging from Nathalie Sarraute at the beginning of her career to Leonid Tsypkin, Halldór Laxness and Anna Banti in the year she got ill , what she once called "the evangelical incentive" she spoke of as a duty, whereas fiction writing alone had brought her pleasure as a writer. But she was never able to think of herself as a writer alone, and in the essay on Banti she speaks of "militant reading." It was that militant reader, or, as she put it elsewhere, the would-be "world-improver ", I believe, who wrote most of the essays, while the fiction languished."

Some months ago, I blogged about Annie Leibovitz's own 'tribute' to Sontag - a project of unrestrained bad taste masquerading as love, in which the famed photographer published intimate pictures of Sontag, including some showing her in varying stages of nudity. Thank heavens for Rieff's touching son's tribute and Sontag's own words which will continue to find their way to us. This is how one would wish for Sontag to be remembered.