00:00At 80, Nigerian-born photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi has spent decades capturing Africa's rapidly changing cities.
00:09Born in Oxford to Nigerian parents and raised partly in Lagos, he picked up a camera in 1972 and taught
00:16himself photography.
00:17From Lagos and Kinshasa to Cairo, Dakar and Johannesburg, his quiet, unfiltered images document everyday life.
00:25He later moved to Germany to study German literature.
00:28My way of working is very much walking, wandering.
00:34Even in very small spaces, I try to move as slowly and as gently as possible.
00:41And the main thing is to look for and then take, make images, moments which I feel say something, have
00:52a narrative in them.
00:53It's very intuitive and very personal.
00:56Akinbode's life has completely merged with his photography.
00:59It's all one for me.
01:01I wake up in the morning, I do my exercises, I have breakfast, then I start photographing.
01:08So photography is very much part of my life.
01:11Akinbode's work is being celebrated at the Venice Biennale and at the Sao Paulo Biennale, curated by Bonadventure in Dikong.
01:20He's actually engaging in a kind of a listening practice that he makes us see things that he listens to.
01:29He gives us the possibility of seeing beyond the spectacle and seeing things of the quotidian, seeing things that are
01:37intelligible to us in different ways.
01:39Akinbode moved to Berlin in the 90s and one of the neighbourhoods he wanders through most is the African Quarter
01:46in the Wedding District.
01:48I had heard before about African Quarter, so I came here shortly thereafter, after moving here, to see what it's
01:56all about.
01:56It's an area, it's a neighbourhood of about over 20 streets which are named after parts of Africa and also
02:03what the Germans hoped would become or were their colonies at the time or wanted to colonise later.
02:10Akinbode shoots around 500 rolls of film each year using a vintage camera.
02:15He publishes less than 10 percent, turning the everyday into art.
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