Two of my photographs — Sanctuary of Nature and Stillness in the Storm — were selected for Boomer Gallery London’s Fifth Edition exhibition, Dreams and Nightmares. Chosen from more than 2,000 submissions, alongside 200 artists from across the globe. This is the story behind the work.
Sanctuary of Nature, 2025. Fine art photography by John Lekan Durojaye (Cameraboss).
I have been making photographs for a long time. I know the feeling of finishing an image and wondering whether it is finished — whether the thing you were reaching for actually made it into the frame, or whether it stayed just out of reach, visible only to you. Most of the time, that uncertainty never fully resolves.
When I received the selection notification from Boomer Gallery in London — confirming that two works had been chosen for the Fifth Edition of their flagship open exhibition, Dreams and Nightmares — what I felt first was not triumph. It was relief. The kind that arrives when someone outside your own head confirms that the work landed where you aimed it.
Two thousand artists submitted. Two hundred were selected. I was among them twice.
The Exhibition: Boomer Gallery and What Selection Actually Means
Boomer Gallery is one of London’s most respected contemporary art spaces — known for its commitment to emerging and established artists working across all media, and for curating exhibitions that challenge comfortable assumptions about what visual art is and what it should do. Dreams and Nightmares was conceived as an open-call show with no restriction on medium or theme: a genuine open field, and an honest one. No brief to satisfy, no brief to hide behind.
That openness is also what makes selection meaningful. A themed show rewards work that fits. An open show rewards work that is simply strong enough to earn its place on the wall. Every piece in Dreams and Nightmares got there on its own terms.
I submitted two photographs. Both were accepted. Neither was made for this exhibition. They were made because I needed to make them, during a period of my life when photography was doing more than documenting — it was helping me think.
Sanctuary of Nature: The Eye Behind the Leaves
The idea behind Sanctuary of Nature started with a question I could not stop turning over: where do people go when the world becomes unbearable?
This was not a theoretical question. I was thinking about the pandemic — COVID-19, and before it Ebola, and the pattern of collective fear that had shaped so many lives across two continents I call home. I was thinking about what it looks like when an entire global population is simultaneously afraid, simultaneously searching for somewhere safe. And I kept arriving at the same answer: nature. People walked. People sat in parks and gardens. People put their hands in soil. The natural world became the one place that remained indifferent to the disease, indifferent to the news cycle, indifferent to the borders that were closing all around us.
The image is a human eye, close — intimate, alert, alive — framed by wet green leaves with water still resting on them. The eye peers through. The leaves hold. What I wanted to make was an image about protection — about the way that proximity to the natural world can feel, in the right moment, like being held by something older and larger than any human fear.
In our darkest moments, the natural world offers sanctuary. Not escape — there is no escape from grief or disease or uncertainty — but shelter. A place to breathe differently. That is what this photograph is about.
I wanted the eye to look like it was watching. Because during the pandemic, that is what we were all doing — watching, waiting, scanning the horizon for some sign that things were shifting. And yet around that watchful eye, life continued. The leaves were green. The water was fresh. Something was still growing.
Stillness in the Storm: The Discipline of Quiet
If Sanctuary of Nature is about finding refuge in the external world, Stillness in the Storm is about finding it within yourself. It is a harder idea to photograph.
I am someone who lives between two countries, two cities, two cultural identities. Leicester and Lagos. The UK and Nigeria. Wedding photography and fine art. The pace of my life — shooting, travelling, editing, planning, building a business while also making art — has never been slow. And I have had to learn, sometimes painfully, that stillness is not the absence of movement. It is a form of discipline. It is the thing you have to practise, deliberately, in the middle of everything that is pulling at you.
Stillness in the Storm is a meditation on that idea. It is about the interior space that remains available to all of us, even when the exterior is loud, even when the demands are relentless, even when the world — your world, specifically — feels like it is moving too fast to catch. There is a calm at the centre. Getting there requires intention. The photograph is my attempt to represent that calm visually — to make the interior legible.
Both works belong to a body of thinking I have been developing for years, which finds its fullest expression in the Aworan series — a fine art photography project rooted in African portraiture, light, identity, and what it means to be seen on your own terms.
The Gallery: Seeing the Work on the Wall
Sanctuary of Nature on the wall at Boomer Gallery, London. Dreams and Nightmares, Fifth Edition, 2025.
There is something particular about seeing your own work in a gallery that no number of screen views can replicate. A framed print on a white wall, under proper gallery lighting, among other artists’ work — it changes what you are looking at. It changes how you look at it.
I stood in front of Sanctuary of Nature at Boomer Gallery and saw things in it I had not noticed in the file. The scale changed the texture of the leaves. The lighting caught the wetness differently. The eye, at that size, in that room, had a presence that surprised me. I had made that image in a very specific emotional state, in a specific period, for specific reasons I have described above. In the gallery, it became something slightly different — something that belonged to whoever was looking at it, not only to me.
That is the point of putting work on a wall. That is the transaction galleries make possible.
Why Fine Art and Wedding Photography Are the Same Practice
People ask me sometimes whether the fine art work and the wedding photography are separate — as if the person who made Sanctuary of Nature must be a different professional from the one who photographs a Nigerian wedding at a country house in Leicestershire.
They are not separate. They are the same practice applied to different conditions.
The eye I bring to a wedding — the attention to light, the patience for the real moment, the compositional instinct that comes from years of making images that have to be looked at rather than scrolled past — that eye was built through the fine art work. And the fine art work is strengthened by the discipline of documentary photography, by the habit of watching human beings in uncontrolled situations and finding the image inside the chaos.
I have written about this in more detail in my piece on why wedding photography is becoming fine art. The Boomer Gallery selection is, in many ways, a practical demonstration of the argument: the same photographer, the same body of visual thinking, producing work for a gallery wall and for a wedding album. The standard is the same. The intention is the same. Only the subject changes.
What Comes Next: Aworan and the Lagos Chapter
Being selected for Dreams and Nightmares is a point on a longer journey. The work I exhibited at Boomer Gallery sits within a larger body of practice that I am continuing to develop — and which found its Nigerian chapter in the exhibition at Atirira Gallery in Lagos.
The Aworan series — a fine art portraiture project rooted in African visual identity, diaspora experience, and the complexity of belonging to more than one place at once — continues. Aworan 2.0 is in development, with plans for a Nigerian premiere. If you want to be among the first to know when that happens, follow @thecameraboss on Instagram, where I share updates as the work develops.
In the meantime, every wedding I photograph is part of this same conversation. Every image I make — whether for a gallery wall or a couple’s album — is held to the same standard. That is what it means to take photography seriously as a practice rather than a service. And it is, ultimately, what the Boomer Gallery recognised when they put my work on their wall.
Work with a Gallery-Exhibited Photographer for Your Wedding
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