Through this photo series, I reimagine what Lagos Island could be as a central area of Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos. Any time I am outside, I try to reimagine the backdrop of wherever I am in a more surreal scenario. While mundanity is beautiful and soothing, I believe that seeing the places we encounter often through a surreal lens can help us appreciate them more and radically reimagine new possibilities for what our world could be like.

I had fun taking photographs of different parts of Lagos Island, and I had even more fun reimagining them while editing, exploring different visual elements that complement the images and achieving the surrealism I was aiming for. Working on this also allowed me to play around with colors. Honestly, I often wish the world were more colorful than it is. Would it not be cool to see the skies turn purple once in a while?

I have always loved a touch of exaggeration, irony, playful color and even unrealistic depictions. They are a way of expressing my silly imagination and my desire to make things feel more magical.

Reimagining Lagos Island through an Afrofuturistic lens was also a major goal for me while working on this series. We rarely get to see what an African megacity could look like in the future, and when we do, it is often through Western ideas of what that future would be. I wanted to see what Lagos Island might look like if aliens took over, or if the moon shone bright in the middle of the day. It makes no sense if you think about it too deeply, but that is the beauty of it. With these images, I blur the lines between the surreal and the real.

Graphic-photo gallery by Tariq Lawal. Lawal is a high schooler producing content as a part of The Stanford Daily’s 2025 High School Multimedia Workshop.