Nkem Owoh Is Building Lagos's First Artist-Run Darkroom

Film photography is booming globally, but in Lagos, getting a roll developed means shipping it abroad. One photographer is trying to change that with a communal darkroom in Yaba.

Nkem Owoh has a problem that would seem absurd to most photographers: he can shoot film in Lagos but he can't develop it there. The city has no public darkroom, no professional film processing lab, and exactly one camera shop — Doyin Cameras on Broad Street — that still stocks 35mm film, usually expired Kodak Gold bought in bulk from a supplier in Dubai. For the past two years, Owoh has been mailing his exposed rolls to a lab in Nairobi, waiting two to three weeks for scans, and paying shipping costs that sometimes exceed the price of the film itself.

The darkroom is being built in a rented ground-floor space on Herbert Macaulay Way in Yaba. The space is small — roughly forty square meters — and Owoh is converting it with equipment sourced from three continents: two Paterson developing tanks bought secondhand from a retired photographer in London, an enlarger shipped from a closing lab in Johannesburg, chemical supplies from Ilford ordered through a distributor in Kenya, and a drying rack built by a local carpenter from specifications Owoh found on a YouTube tutorial. The total budget is roughly $4,000 USD, funded by personal savings, twelve photographer memberships, and a small grant from the Goethe-Institut Lagos.

Owoh is 26 and largely self-taught. He started shooting digital in 2020 on a borrowed Canon, documenting street life in Surulere — the danfo buses, the roadside welders, the women selling groundnuts at the Ojuelegba intersection. He switched to film in 2022 after discovering the work of Malian photographer Malick Sidibe. What drew him wasn't the nostalgia but the discipline. 'Digital lets you shoot five hundred frames and pick the best one,' he says. 'Film makes you think before you press the shutter. That changes how you see.'

The darkroom, which Owoh has named Agfa — partly as homage to the German film brand, partly because it sounds like the Igbo word 'agha,' meaning struggle — is scheduled to open in June. Beyond processing, he plans to run monthly workshops teaching basic darkroom technique, analog printing, and camera maintenance. The membership model is deliberately accessible: students pay half rate, and Owoh has reserved two free slots per month for photographers who can't afford the fee.

Whether the project survives will depend on whether Lagos's film photography community is large enough to sustain it. Owoh estimates there are between fifty and a hundred serious film shooters in the city. The economics are tight — rent in Yaba has risen sharply, chemical supplies must be imported at fluctuating exchange rates, and the enlarger has already needed one repair that cost more than a month's membership fees. On the wall of the half-finished darkroom, he's pinned a photograph by Sidibe — a young couple in Bamako, early 1960s, grinning at the camera with unreasonable confidence. 'That photo is sixty years old and it still has energy,' Owoh says. 'That's what analog does. I want people in Lagos to be able to make that.'

• WordsSHEPHERD
• PublishedMarch 18, 2026 — TINCT Art & Culture
• Reading time8 min