Daniel Oyegade is a British-Nigerian photographer and creative director based in Manchester. He’s been practicing freelance photography since 2017 and has recently completed a Masters in Photography. He also studied Undergraduate Law at UCLan and plans to take a Legal Practice Course next year.
Daniel regularly shoots on film and focuses on fashion and portrait photography, whilst also divulging into art and street photography. Much of his photographic influence comes from the 1950s, specifically iconic 50s photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as contemporary photographers such as Justice Mukheli.
Daniel uses the Nikon F80 film camera with auto-focus, and the Pentax 67 medium-format film camera. He also uses the Nikon D3200, but rarely shoots digital.
Funnily enough, Daniel didn’t have much interest in photography until he applied for a job at Tesco; “I applied to work at Tesco and we had this induction day. I used to skateboard at the time and there was this girl who wanted to photograph me skateboarding…I got the pictures back and I thought ‘oh, this is really interesting“. From there, he began to take his own photos on his friend’s iPhone and set up his Instagram account @wxvei (give him a follow!). The immediate and positive reaction to Daniel’s iPhone portraits led him to purchase his first camera, an entry-level DSLR, before progressing to film cameras and experimenting with different media formats.
Daniel enjoys the ‘realness’ of film photography; “Film is something that I take more care with. On my main camera [Pentax 67] I get about 10 shots per roll of film, and so it just makes you very careful about what you shoot and what you don’t shoot.”
“It’s a lot more meticulous I find but I like the carefulness of it.”
One of his favourite works is ‘home is where the heart is <3‘, a short film accompanied with 12 images and spoken word.
He describes this film as an exaggeration of ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Noah Hurari; “[Hurari] talks about how humans started off as this really communal species. Everyone did everything together and that was the goal. Now it’s gone towards this place where the intent is to have a big house and kind of isolate yourself as much as you can in a gated community, away from other people.”
“[home is where the heart is <3] shows this woman in these really nice clothes and she kind of goes around all day and dresses up and there’s no one around her, but she’ll put on these performances where she’ll compose herself as if she’s talking to people or entertaining the room – but it’s just her.”
Daniel shot the whole film on an old VHS camera which he bought from a charity shop and managed to get working again. This was also his first attempt at filmmaking.
“I write a fair amount of poetry so I thought I would put that together with my inclination to video, cinematography, and also photography. I like putting together different forms of media and seeing what works…and I knew what I wanted, it was just getting the skills to do it.”
Being based in Manchester, Daniel describes the city as ‘open and diverse’ and finds that there are plenty of opportunities for a diverse range of photographers. His recommendations include Joshua R. Drakes (@photosbyjrd), Apolluss Anderson (apollus), and Callum Su (@callumsoup, love the username).
Make sure to check out Daniel’s IG @wxvei as well as his website danieloyegade.com
All Images from Daniel Oyegade.