Lagos, 1999

Thomas Hoeffgen

football Hoeffgen Lagos Terrain

Un mot sur l'oeuvre

(THOE004)
This image comes from «African Arenas », a major photography project produced over a ten-year period by Thomas Hoeffgen. The project tells the story of a continent through its football pitches.
The work has appeared in print many times and was published in 2010 in Germany by the publisher Hatje Cantz. It was awarded a prestigious International Photograpy Award in 2011.
Taken in Lagos, this image revisits one of the pitches where I had seen the Nigerian international, Jonathan Akpoborie, take his first steps as a player.

Le témoignage de Thomas Hoeffgen

« I caught the football bug in 1999 when I went to Africa to do a photography feature on the Nigerian player, Jonathan Akpoborie. At the time he was playing for VfB Stuttgart and I was working for the German edition of Playboy. At the last minute he couldn’t make it. I was already in Nigeria and ended up alone in Lagos, his home town.
He felt guilty, so to help me he got one of his oldest friends, who knew his life story, to drive me to all the places he had played football at as a kid and teenager. Not wanting to go home empty-handed, I followed in his footsteps.
I stayed there for hours to take the shot. At first I just watched, then waited for the right moment, for everything to fall into place and most of all for the young players to pay less attention to me.

Le choix de Jean-Denis

It is one of the first images of the project. Its simple beauty, its pale light, a whole atmosphere comes to life. It is understandable that Thomas fell in love with the theme of the project and spent all this time on it. Sport can say so much about people and where they live. In this shot, Lagos is much gentler than we imagine it to be.