Illustration on Niger Delta Fototales…… A View of the Niger Delta through the Lens

This essay attempts a reflection on the exhibition Niger Delta Fototales, a photo exhibition
showcasing PEOPLES, RELICS and ISSUES of the Niger Delta: Novotel Hotels, Port Harcourt, on
the 50th anniversary Nigeria’s Independence. I take it that at the heart of the matter of photography is
“the photographic paradox”, “the coexistence of two messages, the one without a code (the
photographic analogue), the other with a code (the ‘art’/the treatment; the ‘writing’/the rhetoric of the
photograph)”. Beyond a mere reportage of this momentous event, I would attempt an exploration of
these tenets of modern communication by interrogating the messages encrypted in a select number of
images from this show utilizing the critical tools of contemporary scholarship in an attempt at
explicating the nature of the photographic essay itself. In a reading that imbricates the value of the
punctum in the analysis of the rhetoric of the studium, therefore, the groundings of the collaborative
encoded features that intuit the photograph metonymically unfolds the contingent realms of memory
and subjectivity. It is apt to concede that since the Idea of eloquence falls as far below the Idea of
painting as sight is more potent than words, it is wisdom to conclude "One picture is worth a thousand
words!",as the Chinese saying goes.