This is What Hatred Did

This Is What Hatred Did is Cristina de Middel's staged photographic response to Amos Tutuola's 1954 novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, restaging its hallucinatory vision of Lagos as a threshold between the living and the spirit world.

Working with Nigerian sign painters, wrestlers, market traders and studio photographers, de Middel built tableaux that borrow the visual language of hand-painted film posters and Nollywood melodrama to picture Tutuola's ghosts, monsters and shape-shifting bush spirits. The resulting images sit deliberately between document and invention, refusing to resolve into either straight reportage or pure fiction. The book was published as a 180-page hardcover by RM in 2015, sequencing the photographs without captions so the narrative unfolds the way Tutuola's own prose does, digressively and without apology to Western logic.

De Middel came to international attention with The Afronauts (2012), her staged retelling of Zambia's 1964 amateur space program, and has continued to build a body of work that treats myth, propaganda and collective belief as material for photography rather than obstacles to it. This Is What Hatred Did extends that method to West African literature and popular image-making.