Aduragbemi draws attention to cityscapes in “what eye see”

For Kent-based documentary and fine art photographer Aduragbemi Okeyemi, black-and-white photography is an intentional artistic language through which he captures the world around him.

In What Eye See, his attention is drawn to everyday architecture, cityscapes, people and the ordinary urban environment, which he reimagines through the language of black-and-white photography. The result is a compelling body of work that poses a simple but thought-provoking question: What happens when you are encouraged to look again?

Stripped off the colour, his images place composition at the centre of the audience’s viewing experience. Lines, texture, light and shadow become the principal actors, drawing attention to the visual structure of each frame. The photographs demonstrate an attentive understanding of how these essential elements can transform ordinary scenes into something visually compelling.

At the heart of the project, What Eye See is an engagement with the fundamental elements of black-and-white photography: composition, texture, light, shadow and lines.

Devoid of colour, the photographs place greater emphasis on form, tonal contrast and atmosphere, encouraging viewers to pay closer attention to details that might otherwise melt into the background. Surface becomes structure; shadow becomes form; architecture becomes geometry.

The title of the project, What Eye See, distinguishes itself conceptually through an intentional play on words. By replacing the familiar “What I See” with “What Eye See,” Aduragbemi shifts the emphasis from the photographer as an individual observer towards the very act of seeing. The “eye” becomes both subject and instrument. The photographs, therefore, are not simply declarations of the photographer’s vision but invitations to look again and to look differently.

Here, a building is no longer just a building. A street is no longer merely a route from one destination to another. Light falling across a surface, or the texture of an ageing structure, can become the principal subject. Aduragbemi’s expression lies in making the familiar sufficiently unfamiliar for us, the viewers, to reconsider it.

For me, this approach places What Eye See within the longstanding tradition of documentary photography while simultaneously pushing it towards a more contemplative understanding of the genre. Documentary photography has often been concerned with recording what exists; Aduragbemi is equally interested in how what exists can be perceived.

His commitment to black-and-white photography reinforces this position. Rather than treating monochrome as a nostalgic reference to an earlier era of photography, he employs it as an active contemporary tool capable of distilling an image to its essential visual components. By removing colour, he allows other elements—form, texture, contrast, light and shadow—to assume greater expressive weight.

Ultimately, for me, What Eye See is less concerned with telling the viewer what to see than with encouraging the viewer to look again. It asks us to slow down, to reconsider the ordinary and to discover visual possibilities within things we may have previously overlooked.

In Aduragbemi’s world of documentary photography and fine art, seeing is not a passive act but an encounter—an active engagement between the eye, the image and the world it seeks to reveal.