Through The Lens: Isabel Okoro

Isabel Okoro features in 'Through The Lens' by Nexville Magazine.

Interview by: xInsomniac and Biyi Campbell

Written by: Biyi Campbell

Article Cover Design by: KIKO

Every body of work that emerges from the mind of Isabel Okoro is a fire that has and continues to burn out the limits of our imagination and transform our perception of possibility. With a mind and imagination wider than the skies, she continues to create art that is real, authentic and intentional to her.

Her art, of which she is both conduit and creator of, has always been a marriage of people and spaces as well as a documentation of moments. A story, a dream, a temporal and ever expanding space filled with tastes of imagined and attainable possibilities, her work takes different forms but it will always be to her, a means of free therapy. The 20-year-old photographer’s work, which so many people have deeply connected with, serves as a medium for her to truly process her feelings, fears and hopes. As we navigate the timeline of her work and slowly surrender to its flow, we start to gradually see, feel and step into the world Isabel has created. This inspiring artist is not only changing the world, but she’s also building her own.

Through different approaches and by journeying through different spaces and experiences, Isabel Okoro has managed to carve out and create an imagined visual universe which we are able to see in her new photo book ‘Friends in Eternity’. Isabel’s world (‘Eternity’) has been described by her as a “normatopia” (a word coined by her), a world that is normal but not perfect.

As she continues to journey through her world, dreams and thoughts, her new experiences are documented and vividly expressed in different forms. Using different spaces (her monograph, various exhibitions and editorials), She is telling stories in different ways.

We caught up with Isabel Okoro and through conversation, explored the different arcs of her world.

NV: How do you pick and capture your subjects?

ISABEL: I think the first thing is I tend to do is focus on other young black people just because I like to photograph about what I already know and so that’s just an easy filter like “ok I’m looking for someone that’s my age and this person has to be black”. Boom. Then afterwards it then becomes what type of story am I trying to tell with this person and then I sort of always like when people come into the story in their own way. Sometimes I would pose my models and stuff but really I don’t like doing that. The way I choose to photograph someone depends on the energy that they give me and how I feel that best represents them as a person.

NV: Who are some of the visual artists that you look up to?

ISABEL: I feel like firstly Solange and then Wong Kar-wai. Those are the two visuals artists that greatly influenced not necessarily my style or anything but just my desire to create my own visual universe. I think I saw Solange and Wong Kar-wai doing something so cool which was them dictating the boundaries within how they wanted their own versions of the world to exist. That was something that inspired me to start creating Eternity and thinking of my work as a visual universe. And also just thinking of people like Hype Williams, Gordon Parks, James Barnor. I try to allow myself honestly be inspired by anyone and everything. A lot of my references tend to not even come directly from visuals artists but they come from like text or music or you know anything that sparks something in me and that’s like where I think a lot of my magic happens.

NV: Yeah and ‘Eternity’ is this world that you’ve created so how did you discover the concept of world building as well as coming up with the idea of creating ‘Eternity’

ISABEL: I think in like 2020, there was just this feeling generally amongst everyone globally to get out, like we were all seeking refuge and some obviously had more privilege than others in finding that refuge that they were seeking but it just felt like there was this global need to break free or to escape somewhere. At that same time, I had watched this interview with Solange and Trevor Noah and she was talking about her album, When I get Home and how she had visually built her own universe and I was also watching Wong Kar-Wai movies and so just those two artists really got me thinking about what I could do with my work. And I know in December 2019 I went back to Lagos, and around the time I did the show You + Your Friends I also photographed 3 different brands, 3 different shoots but all of them were kind of similar and I guess that there were things that I was subconsciously trying to say within my work that I didn’t honestly notice until March or April 2020, obviously the pandemic hit and all the projects I had shot were now delayed for a while. I now had time to dissect everything and think about what exactly it was that I was trying to say about world building and honestly that was how Eternity just came about. I like to say that Eternity revealed itself to me and ever since then it’s just been constant building.

Clear eyed and clear minded, she continues to tell her stories with clarity and devotion. By creating a world and leading us into it, she has managed to bridge the world we live in to her ever-expanding ‘Eterenity’.

Eternity itself is the perfect bridging of her influences and ideas. Similar to Solange trying to find a sense of self through lineage and homage by creating a world of ‘music in a space’--characterized by reflection and a continuity achieved through rhythm-- or Wong Kar-wai successfully conveying a sense of timelessness in his films by using time as a landmark rather than a guide in his characters' stories, Isabel’s ever-expanding, timeless Eternity is a world filled with people and their stories in spaces, built upon the belief of an intersection of Utopia and normal; characterized by color, feelings, loose thoughts, community and dreams. As conduit of Eternity, the world created flows through her and is manifested wearing different faces in this world.

And because it is magic, in its own way, the devotion she possesses allows her to connect us to her universe using three key elements: Stories, Subjects and Spaces. All three come together to form the continuously growing world and its different arcs.

NV: You described Eternity as a “normatopia” and I’d like to know what that word you coined means.

ISABEL: For the longest time, when I started building Eternity the idea of normatopia came around this time last year but before then everything that I had done in eternity, I would consider it to be a utopia. So when people would ask I’d describe it as this black utopia. And then obviously bad things in the world around us kept happening and shit kept hitting the fan, I kept noticing that a lot of black art was being described as this utopia and it was something that I was hearing over and over again. And I was like “wait, what are we doing here?” not that I have anything against Utopias but right now we need work that feels achievable, work that’s giving people hope that they can hold onto and believe that the possibility of that thing happening is close. And then I started to think how could I call my world a utopia when human beings exist in this world and by default human beings can never be perfect. There are all these conflicts that we have as human beings that it would be kind of disingenuous to disregard all of that and say I’m creating this thing that’s perfect and brushed up nicely. That was what I was thinking about when I came up with normatopia and it’s a world that’s simply normal. But then in saying that, I now had to ask myself okay what does normal mean to you? There are two different ways that you can see normal. You see normal as what you consider to be normal to you or you can see normal as what the world has predetermined to be normal.

NV: What type of spaces do you see yourself being comfortable enough to make your work in?

ISABEL: So I think I’m most comfortable around my peers like I’m big on collaboration not even just collaboration in the sense of making the work but also in the sense of experiencing the work. For example, with my show ‘Magic Dreams’ something that I really wanted to do was to invite people to take part in the creation process with me but also to challenge them to collaborate with me. Collaboration is so important to me so I think that I thrive in spaces where I find other likeminded people. I’m very big on intentionality and I think that anyone that’s intentional just gets me.

Also I think I’m a very emotional person so I like being around people who can sort of handle my emotions and not make me feel like I’m a burden.

NV: What was it like self-publishing your new book?

ISABEL: Honestly I think that this book was Friend published. Yes, its self-published in the traditional sense but honestly it took a village. One of my friends Ayotunde Sule, she’s the one who did the design of the book as well as the layout. Another of my friends Ade Abegunde was the one who sort of did the production and handled all the logistics and the communication. So three of us really put our everything into this. Self-publishing was honestly very difficult. With us we were basically learning everything from scratch and learning everything there is to know about making a book. Obviously in that process due to our inexperience we got challenged with a lot of roadblocks. For example, ordering samples and having the samples come back and they’re completely botched up and there’s nothing you can do again besides ordering another sample and hope that they can get it right that time. There was a lot of back and forth with production and just trying to get samples right. So we had three samples made before we finally arrived at something and the third one is actually the one that’s being made. It took forcing myself out of my comfort zone and just thinking about different approaches to creating this thing that I wanted. I think going into it I had this idea in my head about what it’d be like but just like anything in life it didn’t end up the way I’d expected. So that led me to make changes, decisions and adjustments and that was sort of hard to deal with but also it all just led up to the amazing final version of the book that exists today. I’m just really proud of the fact that it exists in spite of everything else.

NV: A space where you seemed to thrive was at Gallery 44. What was the experience like with your Art residency and your exhibition?

ISABEL: I didn’t go to art school, I studied Neuroscience and Psychology but when I was looking up artists and studying them I would notice that “oh this cool artist has a show in this gallery and they’re an Artist-In-Residence” then I would go and google what that meant and so from there I started to realize that these resources existed and I could apply for them and maybe one day I would get one which I eventually did and the resources were able to provide me with most of the funding for the book.

After I had started the art residency, in the summer of 2020 a curator at the gallery, Liz Ikiroko reached out to me because I guess someone had shown her my work. At that time, I had dropped a few of the projects that I was saying earlier began the whole Journey of Eternity. I guess more and more people were finding out about my work so the curator reached out to me and just basically asked if I was interested in doing a show with this other artist Timothy Yanick Hunter and that was how the show 'Is Love A Synonym For Abolition' got started. With the exhibition more of what she wanted to know was how photography could act as tool to sort of inspire motivation towards a feasible future for black people.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to take advantage of it more because obviously COVID so the gallery was closed for most of the year and I wasn’t in Canada for a long time in 2020. So I didn’t really get to take advantage of the residency in that way but it was so nice to experience. I had a lot of great conversations and mentorships that I value a lot.

NV: How different was it for you working on that show with others and now working on and opening your new show ‘magic dreams’

ISABEL: So the really cool thing here is when I think about the show, my book and ‘magic dreams’, I see them all as individual arcs within Eternity because in each of these projects I’m exploring the same ideas of normatopia but I’m just in different stages of my thought with each project. When I made the work in ‘Is Love A Synonym For Abolition?’ I knew that Eternity existed to me and so I was thinking about it in terms of a prologue basically. Kind of like a fictional story where there’s a main story and then there’s a prologue. It’s kind of interesting because I notice that at the end of the day I’m always still saying the same things. I’m still trying to be honest, still trying to ask all the same questions and make work about what I know but I find that in each of these different projects I’m just thinking about these things in a different way so they all manifest differently. The exhibition prints they were made to be seen on a wall but then ‘Friends in Eternity’ is a book and it’s made to be flipped through and held and then ‘magic dreams’ is an installation that you step into and experience.

Honestly I feel very lucky sometimes to just have been able to do a lot of projects. For example, ‘magic dreams’ was a design residency, I was a designer-in-residence so I got funding to make everything. I feel like I’ve been lucky to firstly know that these resources are available to me I if apply to them and also to know that I’ll get a lot of support along the way.

More from Isabel Okoro Here