By Omolara Akintoye
Kareem’s Echoes of Light Through Silence. In his third solo exhibition, “Echoes of Light,” the Nigerian photographer makes a portrait that is easy to feel something about and hard to know anything from I want to begin with what is physically there, because Silence rewards that more than it rewards speculation. A woman sits holding a lantern.
One hand supports her head, and her eyes are turned down, away from the camera and away from the flame. The lamp sits close to her and throws a small, warm circle of light across her face and hand. Past that circle, the frame is dark.
That is nearly the whole inventory, and it is worth being clear about how short it is before saying anything about what the picture means.
Silence is one of sixteen photographs in Echoes of Light, Ibrahim Kareem’s third solo
exhibition, presented at Oluwole Omofemi Art Gallery in Ibadan on 5 December 2025.
Kareem began photographing in January 2022, and across the years since, his subjects
have included identity, memory, spirituality and belonging. This photograph is a good
place to test how those interests work in practice, because it gives a viewer so little to
hold on to and so much room to project.
The room is where I would start. The lowered gaze invites a reading almost at once.
Tired, grieving, praying, thinking. Each of these comes quickly to mind, and each feels
plausible. But plausibility is the problem. Nothing in the frame supports one over the
others, and a posture like this is common to all of them. The picture gives us a gesture
that any of those states could produce, and our minds supply the state.
That is how portraits usually work on us, and it is a habit worth noticing in ourselves. We see a face and begin writing a biography.
The lantern makes the habit stronger, because it arrives already loaded. Lamps in the
dark are a stock image for hope, guidance, vigil, faith. I do not think those associations
are illegitimate, and in a body of work that cares about spirituality they are hard to avoid.
But a symbol that arrives that easily should make a critic suspicious.
If Silence is simply light meaning hope and darkness meaning despair, then the photograph is a slogan with a good palette, and it has nothing to say that its caption could not. What keeps it from being that, in my reading, is how particular the lantern is. It is a real lamp, held close, lighting a small area and leaving the rest alone.
The light does not flood the scene or
rescue the woman from the dark. It lets us see her without telling us anything about her,
and that restraint is the most interesting decision in the picture. I would rather leave the
lantern as an object than turn it into a message.
The title complicates things further. It asks whose silence this is, and the photograph
gives no answer. A person who is not speaking is not necessarily a person with something unsaid. Silence can be chosen or imposed, brief or long, loaded or ordinary, and sometimes it is only someone who wants to be alone. I think this is where viewers, myself included, should be most careful. Stillness reminds each of us of our own grief, our own prayers, our own lonely evenings, and those memories are real. They belong to the viewer, though. They are not evidence about the woman.
The line between what a photograph shows and what it lets us feel is easy to blur, and a portrait that feels intimate makes it blurrier still, even when we know nothing about how it was made.
So what can be said responsibly? Her posture, her hair, the lamp and the pool of light
are visible.
Her thoughts and her history are not, and no amount of looking will bring
them into the frame. To read the picture as proof of a particular emotional state is to
confuse our response with her experience. I do not think this makes interpretation
pointless. It makes it a matter of care, and there is something respectful in that care.
She is no less interesting for staying closed to us, and the photograph is no weaker for
declining to explain her.
A single image is a limited basis for judging an exhibition, and I do not want to claim
more than I have looked at. Silence is a way into Echoes of Light, not a summary of it.
In sixteen photographs there is room for images that sit comfortably together and images that pull against one another, and the show has to be judged on how they work as a group.
What I can place Silence against is the work that came before. What Remains Unsaid, at Art Place Lagos from 6 to 12 April 2023, examined the distance between outward expression and inner experience. Before the Light Disappears, at the same gallery from 6 to 10 June 2024, turned toward memory, place and the passage of time.
Echoes of Light does not repeat either. What the three share is a doubt that an image can make
something visible and knowable at once, whether the subject is a face, a building or a
memory.
That continuity is a strength, and it carries a risk that is worth stating plainly. Warm light,
deep shadow and stillness make beautiful photographs, and beauty can pass for depth.
If the atmosphere starts to do the interpretive work, the questions harden into a style,
and every new picture is an exercise in the last one.
Silence avoids that, I think, because it holds back. The light is specific, the woman stays a person, and the picture does not reach for a larger statement. The test for Kareem is whether the rest of Echoes of Light, and the work after it, shows the same discipline. The show’s themes are a framework for looking, and they cannot substitute for the looking itself.
Behind all of this is a plain fact about the medium. A frame fixes one arrangement of
people, objects and light, and everything outside it is lost.
That can feel like a weakness, but it is the condition every photograph works under, and no portrait contains a whole person. Silence is unusually frank about it. The lantern lights her, and the dark around her stays dark. We can discuss composition, light, gesture and symbol, and we can say honestly what the picture makes us feel. What we cannot do is treat a plausible reading as a fact about her.
That is a modest conclusion, and I think the photograph earns it. It is a good portrait of a
woman holding a lantern, and it is honest about how much a portrait can tell us. What I
will want to know, when I see the other fifteen, is whether they are as hones
