I knew there would be culture shock going from Santa Monica, California to Lagos, Nigeria, but I never expected it to be so profound.

Biggest shocker? Lagos definitely isn’t some little African city nobody’s heard of. Lagos, by most estimates, is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. In fact, Lagos is the second fastest growing city in Africa and the seventh fastest growing worldwide. Predictions have been made that Lagos will be the third largest mega city on the planet by 2015! As Americans, we admittedly assume we’re the center of the universe, but the reality is Nigeria alone boasts 170 million people. That’s nearly 60% of the U.S. population in a space the size of Texas.

The symphony of people on the streets in Lagos.

Alongside my naïve assumption that Lagos was “some small city in Africa,” I inaccurately pictured a quaint, easy-to-get-around, not-so-built-up town. Wrong again. Lagos is huge. I mean HUGE! It’s a sprawling, very densely populated city that is crowded and congested like I’ve never seen before in my life.

Can we talk “traffic?” I arrived at Lagos airport at 2:00 p.m. and was in the car until 9:00 p.m. trying to get to dinner arrangements that included a mere pit stop at my hotel to drop off my bags. The traffic was so intense that my colleagues and I literally gave up on our group dinner only to end up back at the hotel. We managed to coax a dinner out of the staff, which took another two hours. Nothing in Lagos is fast. Lol!

I came to learn that Lagosians plan their life around this deplorable amount of traffic, which means they don’t go far nor attempt too many things in a given day. It was amazing to see how adaptive the people were while facing something we’d find so incredibly frustrating here in the states!

Stuck in my car all day shooting out the window!

One day, renowned Photographer Joe McNally (National Geographic) and I set out for an early morning photographers’ photo safari. Fun, right? We got as far as the gate to leave the compound and turned back around. Why? You guessed it. Traffic. It was so unbearable we may have only circled the hotel for several hours, so we took our safari to the hotel restaurant and had breakfast instead. One thing we did see “trying” to head out was that many people live in gated communities or behind barbed wire fences with heavy gates and security guards. And the guards curiously wearing flip-flops. I could not help but think how easily a thief could incapacitate a guard by simply stepping on their toes!

Street art, Lagos Nige

The second day I spoke at NiPHEC, the Nigerian International Photographic Expo and Conference. This was the vision of Seun Akisanmi, a local Lagos photographer who, without sponsorship or much support, pulled off a four-day event. I’m telling you, the logistics could not have been easy. SHOUT OUT TO SEUN!

Arriving at the conference was like arriving as a Hollywood celebrity. I have never had so many people wanting to take pictures with me, in my life! The photo-op did not stop for what seemed like forever, but at the same time, it was the sweetest welcome gesture from such a kind, sincere and appreciative group of people that I may have ever imagined.

A place where newspapers still rule

Lagos the city, with its massive growth, bustling citizens, and intense congestion is prime it for its story to be told in pictures. It’s a photojournalist’s “capture a glimpse of it now” mecca. I hope the conference helped elevate the awareness of photography as art, for photography, parallel to storytelling, is undeniably important to the history of this city and its culture. Photographs of Lagos during this time are literally visual chronicles of a city undergoing immense growing pains, headed for huge transformation. 

A construction worker in Nigeria

Fixing the infrastructure of Lagos

There was beauty to be found in my experience, the juxtaposition of many unrelated things. Saturday I walked the streets. We saw the sites and took a few pictures, even though we got hounded by people wanting us to pay a fee to take those pictures. One guy at the beach had fake sanitation tickets and wanted us to pay to see the beach. We refused. I guess if you live there it might make compassionate sense to think of it as a civil tax that helps people survive, but honestly, I’m not there yet.

It’s the rawness of the culture that also allowed us to climb up these towers that were surrounded by dangerous construction material. There, we got a spectacular view of the city as we had climbed up one of the tallest places around. You would have never been allowed to do that in the U.S. because of “liability issues.”

Sunday, there was no traffic as everyone was at church, no really!! Sunday was almost traffic-free. It was awesome! I was finally able to move around the city. I started to get a better understanding for Lagos as a whole. It’s a city clashing against itself, it’s massive size, its growing population, and new found oil revenue. You could even go so far as to compare it the wild wild west during the Gold Rush. Eventually, I can only assume Lagos’ success will force the infrastructure to catch up. After all, a city of this magnitude and capacity cannot feature regular power outages during the day or endure streets with crater-size potholes. I‘m just saying…

And a moment to share my thoughts on the people: We often take for granted the remarkable differences in the lives of people, what sets us apart from each other, miles apart, and I’m not just talking geography. It would be hard to even conceive without witnessing it for yourself. For example, in and amongst the city of Lagos lives a tribe, the Egun. The Egun live in the water of a lagoon, between the mainland and Lagos Island. This tribe exists on wood boats and huts that are built on stilts. The inhabitants sail out to the mouth of the channel and fish, living almost independently from the city dwellers around them. Check out my image, of what is known as the Makoko Slum.

What a gift for me to gaze over at this tribe and their way of life, firsthand. There is beauty to be seen in the diversity found among life across the planet. It just takes me back, leaving me humbled, grateful, and curious. Quite a long ways away from the mind-blowing conveniences are famous estates and the incredible restaurants of my native Santa Monica! How easy it is to forget…

…although I did get to see the The Shrine, the home of one of one of my heros, Afro Beat sensation Fela Kuti. I used my Sony A900 with the SteadyShot anti-shake to capture these last two images at 1/4 second handheld, crazy!

Smokin’ spleef freely at The Shrine, Lagos Nigeria

I still don’t get this?

Recently, I spent several weeks in Northern Europe, specifically Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands. I was astonished at the appreciation of modern art and modern design there. In particular the way the modern mixes with the traditional and coexists to add a historic depth to both.

If I had to choose another career in my life, I would have a hard time choosing because I love so many things, but I would have probably been an architect or industrial designer. As a kid, I learned about photography by going to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Next to the photography department was the museum’s Industrial Design collection. Before that, I could have never conceived that common objects like a coffee pot, chair or typewriter could be a work of design genius. This is especially true since I grew up in a home of the tacky, ornate, and faux rococo design. Luxury was perceived by my mom (she was the purchaser in the home) as being decorative, not clean in it’s design. To give her credit, that was also the populist taste at the time. It was pre Design Within Reach/CB2.

So, I have always loved the opposite: clean modern lines and smart objects where the form does follow the function. This was especially true after being exposed to what design could be, smart, funny and conceptual. My recent pleasure was seeing that esthetic all around me, in the most mundane of places like a modernist factory building making a bold statement in the Danish countryside. And this was not one isolated factory, mostly all of the industrial architecture on the road from Copenhagen to Aarhus was an architectural statement- strong, bold and colorful.

Photokina’s Visual Gallery with works by Stephan Zirwes (left) and Sebastian Riemer.

My trip began in Cologne (or KÃ ¶ln) at the opening of a show I had in that city. I was also at Photokina were one of the exhibit halls was The Visual Gallery space featuring current European photography. Those galleries had bold new work and gave me a sense of what European photographers were doing. One in particular is the aerial photographer Stephan Zirwes who shoots his high resolution images with a Hasselblad out of a helicopter. These exceptionally detailed images create intensely graphic photographs reminiscent of a Joseph Albers painting in their optical effect. The one image that is not an aerial is of scaffolding on a column that is a symphony of line, light and shadow; it appears to vibrate.

Another photographer featured there was Sebastian Riemer. His work also deals with perception and verges on the conceptual. His intensely graphic images reveal a subdued image beneath. You have to look through the surface to find a deeper secondary meaning such as the speakers of a loudspeaker underneath the grill. His images deal with not only perception, but they play on realities and the role of photography’s intrinsic nature to document.

Fashion designs at the DÃ ¼sseldorf Airport.

After Cologne I was in the DÃ ¼sseldorf airport while making my way to Copenhagen. At the airport, in empty storefront, were the winners of a fashion forward design competition from the Akademie Mode & Design. You would rarely if ever find something like that in the US, the country of consumerism.

All the designs used the same felt like fabric reducing the work to it’s structural elements. Each work became a sculpture and not just a dress; it was as much a play of engineering and architecture as it was of fashion design. The fabric was cut and shaped to make not a fashion statement, but also a structural statement. They were striking. I wanted to see these pieces fully executed and on the runways of Milan or Paris.

In Copenhagen, I stayed at the Tivoli Hotel which was under construction. The lobby looked like a bomb hit it and the rooms were ridiculously small. The bright side was my view of the exterior plaza which was also still under construction. The architecture was smart, the skylights for the portico below became glowing pyramids for the second floor plaza. The very dramatic area was designed for outdoor social events. It extended in front of the building all the way across the street, giving people an easy way to get across the street with busy traffic.

The roof deck of the Tivoli Plaza Hotel.

Many of the light fixtures in the hotel were a little garish (like the balls in the outdoor pyramids). I believe this was because of the hotels thematic association with it’s slightly Disney-like namesake (Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park in the city). That said many other light fixtures were textural wonders. The lights upstairs in the Sticks and Sushi restaurant, in particular, used different fabrics in different fixtures to create either a translucence textural feel or a black void of light outside the fixture. The black lights glowed from within, radiating their light straight down as they appear to float in negative space.

The translucent lights above the dinning area at the Sticks and Sushi rooftop restaurant.

The last time I was in the city, I stayed in a small section that I had not realized was actually outside of the city leading me to believe Copenhagen was small and not very interesting. On this trip I had almost a week in the city and discovered it’s true mix of modern and traditional beauty.

A Xeon sign designed by David Lynch and exhibited in the courtyard at his show at the GL Strand Museum in Copenhagen.

One of the most memorable things was the David Lynch exhibit at the GL Strand, not far from the new harbor area of the city. GL Strand is a historic (by LA standards anyway!) 4 story building and the work was incorporated into the courtyard and the upper floors. Downstairs was a installation piece by Danish artist Erik A. Frandsen. The work was a play on European culture and the esthetic I have been so enamored with here: contemporary art playing it off of a traditional reference.

The neon fixtures at the Erik A. Frandsen exhibit at GL Strand.

Erik A. Frandsen’s work consisted of three neon light fixtures that were almost global representations of the confusing mix of world cultures done in the best of pop-art style. The polished inner globe on the inside reflects the neon light on the outside repeating the pattern of light. The room itself then repeated the pattern again with it’s mirrored walls. The mirrors were reminiscent of those used in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. They were used to give the room an additional grandeur and a larger sense of space. The hook was, the wall was not made of mirrors, it was polished stainless steel and had decorative floral designs ground into the steel with a grinder. The effect was a play on the decorative, the modern and the conceptual. The flowers in particular gave a sense of European Tulips which tie the piece to it’s origin.

The ground Stainless Steel walls at the GL Strand.

While walking through the museum I spied the conference room called the Salen which was decorated as a modernist art installation designed by artist Kirstine Roepstorff. The Formica table and the curtains were reminiscent of more modernist Rauschenberg, all set in the context of a very tradition historic building.

The Salen at the GL Strand in Copenhagen.

Next, I was off to Maastricht in The Netherlands. I was lecturing at the Museum Bonnefantenmuseum. I stayed at an inn called the Galerie Hotel Dis. It was appropriately named because the first floor was an art gallery consisting of paintings, rubber light fixtures and functional art furniture. The furniture was by an artist named Partrick Schols and reminded me of the some of the furniture design pieces I saw as a kid at the MOMA because of their use of progressive materials.

The beauty of my trip was the design surprise factor while walking around. One moment you pass traditional house after house and then you see a building that has it’s bricks ripped away to reveal the modern glass interior of the build. The building was done in such a way to make the arched windows, that would normally be the structural support of the building, appear to float weightlessly within the wall of the building. This was a beautifully surreal illusion. Additionally, the mechanics of the interior were designed in such a way that they protected the interior structure from the elements without requiring additional awnings or covers.

A traditional Dutch building in Maastricht “cut away† to reveal the modern interiors glass structure.

Another design encounter was this last image. It illustrates this idea of playful contemporary design and exists in a simple passageway. Florescent tubes were covered with green gels and installed in an alternating series of angles to make the passageway a combination of Star Trek Lighting and Dutch bicycle culture. The real surprise is how well it worked together.

A passage way to an interior courtyard used for bicycle storage.

My trip made me want to live in Europe for a while, or at least visit a whole lot more. Besides the great design, they really appreciate the other arts, like photography just as passionately.   – Michael

I recently spoke at the Brazilian National Photography Congress in Sao Paulo. The event was held in one of the modernist buildings of the Memorial da America Latina in the heart of the city. The text and images below are my impressions of the city over my four day stay.

I love the color and the textures of Sao Paulo, created by the starkly contrasting light. The sun is either bright, hot and white, or orange and heavy like butter. The bright light exposes the city’s color lines and contrasts. There are people in the street with red hair, bright clothes and a patterned backpack, or red buses, red sidewalks, and blue fountains that fill my vision. The heavy light from rain or the sunset mutes the colors into a series of patterns. The rain makes an abstract symphony of the telephone lines of the city, or the late heavy sky helps shape the buildings from my window (and the tar on the street).   -Michael

A fountain outside a store downtown with a flier of Brazilian President-elect Dilma Vana Rousseff, stuck to the tiles.

A passer by walks across brightly colored access panels on the downtown Sao Paulo streets.

A red bus intersects a subway station that reflects the clouds in downtown Sao Paulo.

A rainy street in a suburban neighborhood.

A pattern in the tar outside the Memorial da America Latina.

The view from my hotel room at sunset.