Adisa Olashile on Harnessing The Magic of Serendipity Through Photography

On the morning of the day that would change his entire career trajectory, Adisa Olashile hadn’t the slightest clue about what was to come. Like every other Thursday for the past year, he had girded up his green khakis, thrown on a white shirt, his green NYSC khaki jacket, and bright orange boots. Having dressed up, he slung his black, single-strapped bag with a bold depiction of the Off-White logo over his shoulder. He headed to his National Youth Service  CDS—community development service—center, located in a secretariat close to the Ibadan Airport, without the faintest clue of the events that would soon unfold.

The sun was especially sweltering that day, prompting Adisa to take off his jacket, like many other corpers had done. A large angular watch was suddenly visible on his wrist. His ring, silver with a black gem, also came into focus, and a slim silver chain, peeking out of his shirt, glinted under the implacable sun. He had completed most of his business for the day and was milling around with his friends when he happened upon an elderly man with a talking drum slung over his shoulders. He wore a flowing grey Buba, adorned with a repeating floral pattern, and matching sokoto. On his head was a green fila, with a soft fade, cocked to the right side. His skin was the color of loamy soil after rainfall, and he had a beautiful smile which opened to reveal two sets of jagged teeth. This elderly, sage-looking man approached Adisa and his friends with a simple proposition: in exchange for whatever monetary donation they were willing to offer, he would beat his talking drum for them. 

A simple exchange, you would think, except there was a tiny problem, one that threatened to throttle what fate seemed to have lined up for Adisa. This was not the first time Adisa had sighted this old man who exuded a kind of mystical placidity. But on that day something about the man’s wide smile and jaunty affect called out to Adisa. He was scarcely interested in hearing him play his talking drum, however interesting that might have been. Instead, he wanted to, needed to, take a picture of him. The problem: he didn’t have any spare change and didn’t feel comfortable approaching the old man empty-handed. The challenge then became to find some cash before the man disappeared into the crowd. He quickly borrowed some change from his friends, gave the man the money, and asked if he could snap him—to which the man obliged. Adisa whipped out his phone, flipped it upside down, leaned his body slightly forward, one earpiece hanging over his left ear, and took a few pictures.  

After taking the photographs, he beamed with excitement—they were great—but even then, he had no expectations of the pictures. The next day, he edited them, crafted a cheeky caption that tells the story of how the pictures came about, and posted them on Twitter, the platform now known as X. A few minutes after posting the pictures, his phone began to buzz implacably—he was experiencing his biggest viral moment at the time. Amid the flurry of notifications, an NFT collector whom he had worked with before reached out to him with an offer to purchase the two pictures for $1000 each. He made another post, updating the public that the pictures had been purchased by an NFT collector for $1000 a piece. This only served to amplify his virality—who doesn’t like a good fairytale? 

Upon receiving the money, $2000, he divided it in half and gave the old man his share—he had to open a bank account for him, to which he deposited the money. “Why did you give him any money, especially half of it?” I ask, curious as to his motives. Some other photographers would have kept the entire amount; photographers, after all, own the rights to their photos. “I was not expecting any money that day. I think it was out of kindness. I didn’t even think twice.” “How did he react to it?” “He was just smiling, you know, he was very thankful.” 

On the day Adisa finished his NYSC program, the old man was, as always, present at the scene. This time he wore a bright orange buba and sokoto ensemble, adorned with circular patterns, and an orange and grey fila. In the photograph Adisa took of him that day, he’s even more radiant, more boisterous. His smile sprawls like a limitless ocean and his eyes gleam with childlike excitement. 

Adisa pitched his NFT collector, the one who bought the first version, on the new set of pictures. He declined, presumably fearing they would diminish the value of the original photographs. “Did you sell to anyone else?” I ask him. “No, I didn’t sell that one at all.”  “Why not?” “I didn’t want anyone to have those pictures since he was not interested. I was just being loyal to him.” In his voice was a hint of incredulity, almost as though he could not believe I was asking him those questions. In that moment, I had a sobering realization that instantly brought down my usual cynicism: this guy seems to take idealistic virtues like loyalty and fairness seriously, with an almost fanatical zeal. 

Adisa was born in Ore, a layover city in Ondo State, and grew up in Kajola, a rustic village in Ogun State, leaving for Ilorin after his junior secondary school education. As a boy, art held a deep fascination for him and he’d spend hours perfecting his drawings. Drawing would however start to slip from him as he grew older and started to take on real-world challenges. Things would start to change when he got into university. He met a guy who had a keen sense for taking striking photographs. Impressed by his photography chops, Adisa and a gaggle of friends met him to teach them the ropes of the vocation. He charged them 50 thousand Naira each, a ridiculously large amount to Adisa at the time. “That was in 2016, 50k was really huge to me then.”  Somewhat deflated but still passionate about his photography aspirations, he turned to mobile phone photography.

To this day, he prefers using his smartphone’s camera. “It really works well for me,” he tells me. “Most of my best pictures were taken with a phone.” While his current pictures command both feverish acclaim and large sums, it wasn’t always so. In the early days of his photography career, he charged in the vicinity of two thousand Naira per photo, a trifling sum even for the time. “I think I was charging less because I wasn’t expecting anything from photography until NFT.” 

Non-Fungible Tokens, NFTs—the next chapter in his story. Wikipedia describes it as: “A unique digital identifier that is recorded on a blockchain and is used to certify ownership and authenticity.” The period is 2021–2022, the height of the NFT fad. NFTs are still plenty useful and lucrative, but the hype around them has tapered to a stable register, but in 2022, the excitement around the technology reached a fever pitch. That was the year when Bored Ape Yacht Club—the company responsible for a suite of garish illustrations of a monkey perpetually looking gobsmacked—reached its apogee, with a $4 million valuation. That was also the year when BNXN, Nissi Ogulu, The Weekend, Snoop Dogg, and every other artist who sought to be at the frontier of the technological revolution released NFT offerings. Adisa happened upon the new technology on a WhatsApp group chat for photographers, which set him on a convoluted journey through YouTube pages and the halls of Twitter Spaces, ultimately culminating in his famous pictures of the old man, which he says changed his life. 

His photographs have a spontaneous phantasmagorical quality. His subjects are mostly photographed on the streets, in the course of their daily lives. This lends his work a tremendous degree of authenticity. But these subjects, which he adventitiously spots, usually feel like characters beamed in from a different, more colorful, and fantastical, world. Take the old man in his viral photos. Looking at the pictures, we’re enraptured by the man’s presence; it’s almost like a summoning; we’re transported to that day in Ibadan, in 2022. We feel the warmth radiating from his face, which is drawn into a wide smile. He’s a paternalistic figure, an incarnation of the loving old man on your street who unsparingly lavishes you with praise and unsolicited advice in equal measure. Except he’s not; or rather he’s not just that. Beneath his outward paternalistic appearance is a mystique that teeters at the edge of overwhelming; conjuring, in one’s imagination, visions of sage-like grandiosity. It’s perhaps why these images transfixed us all when we first viewed them. 

This distinctive anachronism animates his latest viral series: a suite of pictures featuring Nigerians dressed, mostly, in flamboyant Yoruba attire. It’s a sight that would be unremarkable in the streets of Isale Eko, or Ibadan, but set against the rustic backdrop of Peckham, the photographs pulse with marvelous frisson. Ojude Peckham is the series’ title. In one set of images entitled Yoruba Dior, two elderly women are frozen mid-step by Adisa’s camera. They wear bedazzled iro and bubas. Their accessories—ornate geles and portable purses—are similarly flamboyant. As if to push past maximalism, into something even grander, the woman on the left drapes, over her outfit, a yellow towel-like material, emblazoned with “Dior,” arranged in a pattern. It’s a glorious sight. 

He now lives in the U.K. He moved there in 2023 after a windfall from NFTs. “I moved because I could afford it. I also wasn’t sure if my NFT income would last forever,” he tells me. Since then, he’s acquired a master’s in marketing, which he says helps him in selling his work and bolstering his brand. “I can always think of campaigns that can help me go viral.” He had tried to take good pictures of Nigerians in Peckham a year earlier but had come up short. “I think we went on the wrong day, it was really cold.” This year, he took another swing at it and came back with the magnificent pictures we’ve been able to savor. Most of his pictures are products of serendipity. “I never plan serious shoots. I used to, back in university, but not anymore,” he notes. “Every day I step out, I pray to God to deliver the perfect scene, because it takes one picture to change your life.”