Akintunde Akinleye: Hell from Heaven

Being the first Nigerian to win a major prize at the World Press Photo awards has brought Reuters' photographer Akintunde Akinleye fame and great satisfaction. It has also brought a heightened sense of the dangers of working in an oil rich country where poverty and a feeling of injustice has led to social unrest, violence and environmental damage. He talks to CPN editor Mike Stanton about his work.

On 26 December 2006, Akintunde Akinleye was at home in Lagos when he received a phone call from a friend about an explosion on the outskirts of the city in a suburb called Abule-Egba. Thirty minutes later he arrived at the scene of a massive oil pipeline explosion, one that ended up reportedly claiming the lives of 269 people and injuring dozens more. Akintunde is used to reporting on the social, political and environmental fallout from one of the world's major oil fields, but it must have been with a heavy heart that he lifted the camera to his eye that day to begin recording the horror of what he saw.

© Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters

Attempts to control the fire after the explosion.

Nigeria is the world's eighth-largest producer of crude oil and its earnings have soared in line with the rising oil price in recent years. But many poor Nigerians are unhappy about how the wealth from oil production is distributed, and there are often attempts tap into pipelines. One such attempt was thought to be the cause of the explosion of 26 December 2006.

After walking around the disaster area in Abule-Egba, Akintunde spotted a man with a bucket trying to put out the fire. The man's sawmill had been completely destroyed in the blast. With a backdrop of smoky ruins, Akintunde took about six pictures of the man. “Technically, I did nothing extraordinary. I just waited for the right moment to take the images,” he says. One of the images, the winner of the World Press Photo?s Spot News prize in 2007, appeared across the world the following day.

“I knew right away that I had taken a world-class picture but I never knew it could go on to sell me to the world,” he says. An hour after the picture reached the web, Finbarr O?Reilly, Reuters? chief photographer in West Africa and winner of World Press Photo of the Year in 2006, sent Akintunde a text message. It read: “The picture of the man washing face is great, congratulations.” This, along with the praise he received from people who read the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Washington Post and the rest the following day encouraged him to send the image to the offices of World Press Photo in Amsterdam.

The Delta is regularly exposed to gas flares, oil spillages and other environmental pollution causing health risks and other hazards. “Gas flares, which are often situated close to the villages, produce soot which is deposited on roofs and washed off by rain to produce chemicals that affect the soil”, says Akintunde. “Developmental strategies focused on increased foreign investments by multinational oil companies to boost exports of crude oil have no direct [positive] impact on the inhabitants. The people are further impoverished due to environmental degradation from oil production and the resulting climate change. They have become vulnerable to food shortages, health hazards, loss of land and population, forced migration, unemployment and youth unrest.”
A once peaceful delta has turned violent and hostage-taking is commonplace. But Akintunde is determined to tell the story of its now angry and afraid communities despite many people seeing photographers as “spies” who work for the government or the oil companies.

© Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters

Akintunde says that few fish are left in the Delta’s waters.

His desire to use photography as a social tool stems from his exposure to social issues and the inspiration of his mother, Akintunde says. “At 13, my mother gave me the idea of learning the basics of photography at a local photo studio after school. She inspired me and now I see the reasons why I chose a career in photography.” This studio experience while still a schoolboy gave him a start, but it was his social studies courses during his Bachelor degree that encouraged him to move into photojournalism. Then in 2005, while still working for Daily Independent Newspapers, he was selected as one of the 12 participants in the two-week long World Press Photo training programme giving him access to international photographers like Marco Longari, the regional chief photographer for AFP in Nairobi, Kenya. “It was my first contact with the outside world of photography”, he says. “The training gave me the wider opportunity of thinking in line with what is happening in other parts of the world. This became the foundation on which I built my photographic practice. And two years later, I got a result.”