West Africa, as Seen From Its Barbershops

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It takes a certain amount of trust to allow a man to put a straight razor to your neck or run scissors around your head.

That’s why, while barbers may start off as strangers, they don’t remain strangers for long. Often, they become long-term confidants with whom en share intimate details of their lives. The conversations may begin with sports, cars or politics, but they often end with personal revelations that customers would share with few others.

“The barbershop is an intimate space where people come to discuss what they cannot speak about in their homes or in public, including politics and even their lovers,” said Andrew Esiebo, who has photographed scores of West African barbershops. “It’s one of the few spaces where people from different walks of life, from different classes, mix.”

Mr. Esiebo, 34, a Nigerian photographer, is fascinated by the nuances of this relationship and how men present themselves to the world. He has traveled through seven West African countries to explore how barbers and their shops function, and to document the often kinetic aesthetics of the salons. Whether they consisted of a single chair on a sidewalk or a fancy space in a shopping center, the barbershops he foun! d were more similar than different.

“Their signs, often hand-painted with shiny colors and bizarre reproductions of utensils and men’s haircuts, reflect the coexistence of tradition and modernity,” he wrote in an artist’s statement.

Inside the barbershops, he found “religious imagery, hip-hop artists, posters of soccer teams and icons of global black culture.” He also discovered that the hairstyles customers chose were often inspired by black American music idols and reflected the “tensions between their African and global blackness.”

In Benin, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal, he realized, the shops and the hairstyles were much the same. Arbitrary colonial borders did not mask the commonalities in what the barbers and their businesses represented.

Anrew Esiebo Ghana.

“Somehow, we’re all the same,” Mr. Esiebo said. “We’ve been divided politically because of our past, but the shops were somehow interconnected. The only real difference was the languages. In terms of setting, they were the same.”

Often, the hairstyles in the shops reflected how people wanted to project themselves socially. In some countries, he said, people might think that men with dreadlocks are “ruffians,” while an unusual hairstyle “might place you as an artist.”

While the hairstyles overlapped, though, their functions could differ depending on the country.

“In Senegal or Mali, which are restrictive Islamic societies, wearing a very eclectic hairstyle can be your way of making a statement that you are taking your freedom to say what you want to say,” Mr. Esiebo said, “while in Liberia or Côte D’Ivoire, the same hairstyle can be a statement of self-representation or a way to get attention o! f the lad! ies.”

Mr. Esiebo was born in Lagos and grew up there and in Ibadan, Nigeria. As a teenager, he assisted his uncle, a commercial photographer with a studio in Ibadan, though his uncle insisted that Mr. Esiebo become an accountant or a banker because photography was not then a respected profession in Nigeria. After studying economics and business in college, Mr. Esiebo became a photographer anyway, but he sometimes felt as if he were working in a vacuum.

Andrew Esiebo Mali.

“At that time, there were few people in Nigeria to inspire me to become a storyteller with my photography because photography wasn’t considered a career,” he said. “Even now, there is no real school for photography.”

In 2005, he met a Nigerian photographer, George Osodi, and was impressed by the high quality of his images and his storytelling. “Seeing a Nigerian working on that level gave me confidence that I could as well,” Mr. Esiebo said.

When Mr. Esiebo was hired as a fixer for a travel photography shoot on Nigerian culture and natural heritage in 2006, he presented his portfolio and landed the account himself.

Another turning point came the next year, when he received an artist’s residence in Paris from a French governmental cultural organization and photographed the African gay community there. He took part in a master class at the Noorderlicht Photo Festival in the Netherlands and, in 2009, a Noor master class in Lagos. He received training in multimedia storytelling through a World Press Photo project, “Road to 2010,” for African photographers, which was held before the World Cup in South Africa.! Later, h! e was one of a handful of participants chosen to document the World Cup itself.

When Mr. Esiebo was growing up, photography was mainly a trade in Nigeria. Now, that seems to be changing. The Internet and the availability of international workshops have made a significant difference for West African photographers. Oddly, it may be the very difficulties that confront photojournalists in the United States and Europe that contribute most to the creation of a photography market in Nigeria. Mr. Esiebo says there may soon be fewer Westerners parachuting into Africa, and so more opportunities for people like him.

“Now we all have access to the same gadgets, and economic problems elsewhere in the world make it easier for someone to hire me in Lagos instead of flying in someone from the U.S.,” he said. “This has created a market for me and some African colleagues to make a living.”

As important, or perhaps more so, this shift allows local voices to tell more of the stories from West Africa. he way Mr. Esiebo and his colleagues understand Nigeria and West Africa is different from the way many of the Western photographers who make pit stops there understand the region.

“Most photographers who come to Lagos want to go to the slums and do stories looking only at the problems,” he said. “I’m interested in other stories.”

Like the ones found in barbershops.

Mr. Esiebo said he was drawn to these shops because of the important role that barbers play in a community’s daily life.

“It’s a different way to look at the continent,” he said. “Often the news that we get is only showing poverty, war, crime and starvation. You can find the barber story everywhere in Africa.”

Andrew EsieboGhana.

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