Akintunde Akinleye
Hell from Heaven
On 26 December 2006, Akintunde Akinleye was at home in Lagos when he received a phone call from a friend about an explosion on the outskirts of the city in a suburb called Abule-Egba. Thirty minutes later he arrived at the scene of a massive oil pipeline explosion, one that ended up reportedly claiming the lives of 269 people and injuring dozens more. Akintunde is used to reporting on the social, political and environmental fallout from one of the world's major oil fields, but it must have been with a heavy heart that he lifted the camera to his eye that day to begin recording the horror of what he saw.
After walking around the disaster area in Abule-Egba, Akintunde spotted a man with a bucket trying to put out the fire. The man's sawmill had been completely destroyed in the blast. With a backdrop of smoky ruins, Akintunde took about six pictures of the man. “Technically, I did nothing extraordinary. I just waited for the right moment to take the images,” he says. One of the images, the winner of the World Press Photo's Spot News prize in 2007, appeared across the world the following day.
