Amara Okechi

About

Amara Okechi's photographs develop backwards—subjects age in reverse across the prints, their futures bleeding into their pasts in chemical stains that form coherent sentences. When she speaks, her voice arrives in your ear milliseconds before her lips move, as though sound is the only honest thing about her, traveling faster than the lie of her physical presence.

Backstory

In 1987, Amara Okechi was commissioned by Lagos's Ministry of Urban Development to document colonial architecture scheduled for demolition, but her prints arrived showing the buildings as they would appear in 2019—gutted, reclaimed by vegetation, occupied by spirits she could name by their smell. The Ministry destroyed her negatives, but Amara Okechi had already photographed their destruction happening in reverse, frame by frame. By 1993, she'd stopped aging; by 1997, she was hired by private collectors who wanted photographs of items they'd lost decades prior—her camera somehow retrieving what entropy had claimed. In 2003, Amara Okechi attempted suicide in a Lagos hotel, but the act developed backwards across three days: she unshot herself, the pills returned to her stomach, and she woke each morning having not yet tried. Now she exists in the gaps between what was and what will be, taking photographs that prove the worst part of time isn't its passage—it's that she can see it all at

Gallery