Where Light Remembers and Time Softens

In Olusola Akinpelu’s photographs, stillness is not absence but attention refined, inviting viewers
into spaces where memory settles and the present holds its breath. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke
writes

Everything in Olusola Akinpelu’s work gravitates towards quietude. Each image courts
attention—gently, yet insistently, like the sailor in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner”. In “Hope”, from the series of the same name and shot in Southend-on-Sea,
Essex, UK, the sun hovers as a radiant ember, reluctant to surrender the day. Its light spills
amber and gold, brushed with blue and turquoise, across the sky. Clouds and sea move in
patient accord, while the shoreline softens into abstraction.

That same attentiveness turns inward in “Waiting Room”, where the gaze shifts from the horizon
to a park bench. The curved metal arms of a solitary seat repeat into the frame like a refrain,
guiding the eye as shallow focus blurs what lies ahead. The future seems deliberately indistinct;
it is the present—the worn wood, the litter of autumn leaves—that insists on being felt. Yellow
and ochre dominate without sentiment, cooled by the arc of unlit lamps overhead. The bench is
empty, yet not lonely. Absence becomes space. Time is measured not by clocks, but by what
accumulates: seasons, conversations, traces of warmth.

These and other works, orbiting five loose conceptual streams—time, seasons, home, hope,
and the choice of two roads—cohere in the exhibition A Place Where Time Softens. Having
concluded in Ikoyi on January 22, the show opens at the George Osodi Centre for
Contemporary Art near the Lagos Business School from January 23 to 27. Within this space,
time stretches and frays at the edges. Youth and age meet without rank; beginnings and
endings circle back on themselves. Nature sets the tempo: trees rooted in duration, birds acting
on instinct, clouds drifting with the quiet assurance that depth does not require haste. Here, time
is layered—a living presence to be observed, felt, and engaged.

Curated with measured clarity by Oluwatosin Adetiloye Jekami, the two-part exhibition prefers
attention over urgency. Time is allowed to settle. In that choice lies Akinpelu’s enduring
proposition: photography at its most generous does not arrest moments, but opens spaces
where memory, identity, and presence coexist. Each frame acts as a meditation, insisting that
experience deepens when fully encountered, and that observation is itself an act of reverence.

This philosophy finds its most embodied expression in “Lifetime Canvas”, a black-and-white
portrait that refuses drama. Shown in profile, the elderly subject turns the image away from
confrontation and toward reflection. The viewer is not summoned to meet her gaze, only to
follow it. Her face reads like terrain shaped by weather and use—creased, layered, resilient.
Each line is inscription, not damage. There is no performance. She does not pose; she exists.
Behind her, the world recedes into a soft haze, punctuated by faint orbs of light—distant lamps,
fading memories, moments unmoored from place. Shallow depth of field loosens her from
specificity, letting her hover between the actual and the emblematic. Light moves across her
face with restraint, honouring texture rather than smoothing it away. In black and white, the
absence of colour sharpens attention to tonal nuance—the delicate negotiation between
shadow and illumination, a visual rhyme for presence and passing.

Her patterned headscarf introduces a quiet rhythm, a counterpoint to the organic irregularity of
skin. Cloth and face converse without fuss, hinting at continuities that outlast individual
lives—patterns repeated long after bodies have left the frame. Nothing is ornamental.
Everything earns its keep.

Akinpelu does not chase the instant. He belongs to the rarer breed who listen for what lingers
after the shutter closes. Over more than two decades, the Nigerian-born, UK-based artist has
built a practice grounded in patience: street corners, landscapes, faces, and surfaces all
approached with unassuming respect. Light remembers. Colour alludes. The everyday becomes

a site of quiet residue, where identity and belonging hover just beneath the surface. He
photographs not what a place looks like, but what it feels like after long attention.
That attentiveness is no happenstance. His grounding in English studies at Olabisi Onabanjo
University, Ago-Iwoye, gives the work a literary cadence. The images read like well-edited
sentences—economical, suggestive, alert to rhythm and pause. Photography, for Akinpelu, is
cultural storytelling: preserving memory without sealing it, as concerned with what is passed
down as with who endures.

The ethic extends beyond the frame. Through years of teaching, mentoring, and community
engagement across Nigeria—from NYSC members to emerging image-makers—Akinpelu has
treated photography as a social instrument. The results are visible in the generation now
shaping Nigeria’s contemporary visual culture, extending a conversation he helped begin.
In A Place Where Time Softens, stillness is not inertia but attention refined. His photographs do
not hurry to explain themselves; they wait, confident that meaning arrives in its own time. To
linger with them is to practice slower seeing, where observation becomes listening, and time, no
longer an adversary, allows itself to be felt. Life, fully attended, unfolds in quiet rhythm, moment
by moment.