As a continuation of the celebration of Lemi Ghariokwu’s 70th birthday in December 2025, iBAND editorial visited Lemi Ghariokwu social media page where the living legend has chosen to share a rare chapter of his career, one that blurs authorship, memory, and identity, but not authorship of the camera.

iBAND Magazine | Don’t Keep Your Art in the Finger! Concept and execution: Samaila Dan Gargajiya, Photography: Justin Francis, Model: Lemi Ghariokwu

Lemi Ghariokwu opens a window into an extraordinary creative moment that had remained unseen, quietly preserved like a well-kept vinyl. These images are not evidence of Ghariokwu as a photographer. Rather, they are conceptual footprints and markers of a restless imagination that has never stopped questioning form, presence, and legacy.

During a visit to the United States in 2010, Ghariokwu encountered an unexpected proposition. International seismographer and cultural thinker Samaila Dan-Gargajiya, and instigator of the project, approached him with an idea that inverted everything the artist had long practiced. Ghariokwu, globally celebrated for directing visual narratives and shaping others into iconic album covers, was asked to do the unthinkable: step into the frame himself.

Dan-Gargajiya selected five album covers, four by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and one by Tony Allen and proposed that Ghariokwu become the model, physically inhabiting the bodies that once defined those legendary works. The camera remained Justin Francis shots and Dan-Gargajiya’s the vision. However, what emerged was neither imitation nor nostalgia. Instead, the photographs function as remix cover art. Ghariokwu’s face replaces the original figures, while the spirit, structure, and revolutionary energy of the source material remain intact. It is candid performance, embodiment, and reflection.

In this role reversal, the artist becomes asubject, the long-time director becomes the directed. Authorship folds into identity, homage into self-portrait. The images spark a layered visual conversation between past and present, original and reinterpretation, memory and reinvention.

For Ghariokwu, these moments are not about the camera or technical authorship. They are about presence and what it means to live inside one’s own legacy, thereby having the ability to confront it physically, and to ask a final, unsettling question that what happens when the maker becomes the cover?

iBAND Magazine, Celebrating Visual Arts from the Original.
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