Portraits of Dignity: How We Photographed Ex-Captives of Boko Haram
For the past year, photographer Adam Ferguson and reporter Dionne Searcey, have met with hundreds of victims of Boko Haram.
Girls who were forced to have bombs strapped to them. People who were living along a highway after militants displaced them three or four times from their homes. University students who carried on while under threat from bombings.
But they’d never managed to talk to the group of students from Chibok, in Nigeria, who were released after a high-profile kidnapping in 2014 that inspired the social media hashtag #BringBackOurGirls and brought international attention to the group.
They wanted to photograph the young women whose images the world knew mostly when they were teenagers, in dark robes with sad faces, from a video Boko Haram released about a month after they were kidnapped. Their hope was to portray them through a series of portraits in a dignified manner, as the young women they had become. Last year Adam and Dionne went to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, to try to persuade government officials to let them meet the students. Getting permission to photograph them wasn’t easy.The students were being questioned in government custody to gain information that could help in finding the dozens of girls still missing and to make sure they had no loyalties to Boko Haram.
For days, they visited every office and called every authority figure they could think of in Nigeria. No one would budge. In hopes of getting a meeting to plead their case, they even tried wooing a minister’s secretary with a piece of cake. No luck. Adam set up a studio in a friend’s apartment and photographed their driver, just for practice. No one would grant them permission to photograph the ex-captives. Meanwhile, in Boko Haram’s stronghold in the northeast, militants for months had been strapping suicide bombs to young girls and sending them to blow up crowds. They turned their attention to that situation instead and found 18 girls who bravely had defied Boko Haram and surrendered rather than blow themselves up. They gave up on our original mission, and Adam took portraits of those teenage girls.
Last fall, the Chibok students were moved to a university campus. In February, after weeks of persuasion, university officials allowed Adam to photograph any of the ex-hostages who consented. Adam prepared to take their images.“I needed to find a deliberate reference to Nigerian culture to honor it,” Adam told Dionne. “So I started researching Nigerian art, looking for a visual cue.”Around this same time a long-lost painting of a Nigerian princess, known as the African Mona Lisa, was rediscovered. The 1974 portrait of Adetutu “Tutu” Ademiluyi, by Ben Enwonwu, was recently sold at auction for more than $1 million. Adam decided he wanted to use the painting as a reference for lighting his new subjects. To test out the method, he rented a studio in New York, even hiring a model until he got the light exactly right. He then packed up the configuration and took it to Nigeria. In late February, Adam and Dionne headed out to photograph the ex-captives, finally. He shot all 83 portraits in one day.*
To see all the portraits, along with that article visit HERE
