A portrait usually promises access. Here is a face, it says; come closer. In Ibrahim Kareem’s photograph Escape, the promise is made and then interrupted.

Several hands press across a woman’s eyes from either side. Light finds her nose and lips, and the darkness behind her takes the rest. You can look at her for as long as you like. You still

cannot meet her gaze, and that refusal is the point.

It is not the picture that made Kareem a photographer. That one, as he tells it, was not a great picture. It was a portrait of a man standing beside an old building, and what he

remembers about it has little to do with sharpness or light.

He remembers the contrast between the man’s presence and the condition of the building behind him, and the questions that arrived afterwards, uninvited. What had that place witnessed? What did

the man remember of it? If the building came down tomorrow, what would be left of the stories attached to it?

That was early in a practice that began in January 2022. A little over a year on, the questions are the same ones. They have simply been given a larger room.

A gradual realisation

Kareem is a Nigerian fine art photographer and visual artist. He was raised in Nigeria and describes his first months with a camera as a period of observing and experimenting, before photography became something he took seriously. He is quick to7 deny any thunderclap. “I wouldn’t say I suddenly knew photography would become my life’s work,” he says. “It was a gradual realisation.”

What shifted was a decision about purpose. He stopped wanting to make pictures merely because something looked beautiful and began insisting on knowing why he was photographing it. People became the centre of his attention, in particular what they carry that cannot be seen which includes histories, fears, memories, their relationships with the places they came from.

Photography turned into a way of asking questions rather than documenting answers. By the end of 2022 he had begun to see it as a practice he could build a life around, “not because I had discovered all the answers, but because I had found questions I wasn’t tired of asking.”

What Remains Unsaid

The first public statement of that practice came at Art Place Lagos, where “What Remains Unsaid” ran from 6 to 12 April 2023. It was twelve photographs: conceptual portraits set beside images of objects and spaces that carried personal or cultural weight. Some portraits worked through the relationship between the sitter and their surroundings. Others leaned on fabric, shadow, symbolic objects and the placement of the body.

Escape is where the show’s central idea becomes most visible. The hands could be restraining the woman or shielding her. She might be hiding from the camera, from the viewer, or from something beyond the frame. Kareem describes the picture’s engine as the tension between “being seen and being unable to express yourself freely.”

The photograph supplies the situation and withholds the story. “We are looking at her, but we cannot make the usual connection through her gaze,” he says.

“That interruption is important to the image.” He resists letting it settle into a single reading: “Its meaning is not exhausted by one interpretation.”

A quieter portrait works differently. A woman sits with her hands folded close to her body, her expression restrained. Kareem used the empty space around her to build quiet, and refused to hand the viewer an instruction. “I wanted viewers to sit with the subject without feeling that they had to arrive at an immediate conclusion about her.”

The show was about the distance between what a person feels and what she is able, or willing, to say, and he is careful to add that silence is not always a symptom.

“Sometimes silence is protection. Sometimes it’s a form of dignity.”

A visitor spent a long time before another portrait, then turned to him and said she felt she knew the sitter but could not say why. He treats that remark as the show’s truest review, because it describes an image doing its work without a biography attached.

How he works

Kareem describes a process that starts with a question rather than a picture. From there, he says, comes research and, above all, conversation, with the people he photographs, and about the places and histories they carry.

He is careful about how he treats the people in front of the lens. He talks through a project with his sitters and welcomes their reservations. And he tries to be sparing with cultural symbols, wary of adding them just because they make a picture look more recognisable. “The person must retain their own dignity and agency.”

What comes next

He describes no destination. What he wants is to keep developing without losing the questions that brought him to photography, and to carry them across different subjects, places and experiences.

He does not want every photograph to arrive at the same conclusion. He wants the work to grow, and to challenge his own thinking.

Asked to describe his purpose to someone who has never seen his work, Kareem answers in two sentences. He uses photography, he says, to explore the stories people carry within themselves, and he wants his images to invite people to look past what is immediately visible and recognise something of their own lives in the lives of others.

The man beside the building would probably understand.