Picture of woman with hairdo created by sectioning hair with a comb using green thread and another with blue thread.

Celebrating the proud culture behind Nigerian hairstyles

A contemporary photographer pays homage to the late J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere, famous for his images of Nigerian women’s hair.

With her project Chroma, photographer and artist Medina Sage Dugger pays homage to J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere (1930-2014), a photographer famous for his black-and-white images of Nigerian women’s intricate hairdos. Wunika Mukan consulted on the project.

Before then, hairstyles were social markers symbolizing marital status, ethnic origins, socioeconomic class. With Nigerian independence, they took on political meaning too. 

Ojeikere’s work seems to have had a threefold purpose. He captured the resurgence of indigenous hairstyles that had fallen from favor under colonial powers. He documented hairstyle innovations as citizens reestablished their identity. And after a time, his approach became more archival, to preserve the memory of the styles in the face of globalization. 

Photographer Medina Sage Dugger launched her project in 2017, roughly 50 years after Ojeikere began his. California-born Dugger relocated to Lagos in 2011. She spent four years as a co-curator and project coordinator for the African Artists’ Foundation and Lagos Photo Festival, before devoting herself full-time

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