The Trade of Fruit

ARTIST STATEMENT

The Trade of Fruit is a photographic series that examines how fruit is displayed, carried, and exchanged across roadside and market settings in Nigeria. The work focuses on fruit trading as a lived system of labour—one shaped by movement, negotiation, and everyday decision-making.
Across the series, fruit appears arranged in baskets, stacked on tyres, spread across tables, balanced in wheelbarrows, or carried through traffic. These varied methods of display and transport respond to location, visibility, and access, revealing trade as adaptive rather than fixed. Markets and roadsides operate as connected spaces within a wider network of circulation.
The photographs move between wider views of trading environments and closer observations of gesture and arrangement. Attention is given to hands, surfaces, weight, and balance, details through which the intelligence of trade becomes visible. Natural light and unembellished framing allow colour and texture to remain direct, grounding the images in everyday experience.
Rather than presenting the market as spectacle, The Trade of Fruit treats fruit selling as skilled, continuous work. The series foregrounds the knowledge embedded in informal trading practices and considers how value is produced through repetition, movement, and presence. In doing so, the work positions fruit not only as a commodity, but as a central actor in the social and economic life of the street.