This Is What Hatred Did — Cristina de Middel, first edition

Cristina de Middel’s This Is What Hatred Did is a haunting visual transcription of Amos Tutuola’s 1954 Yoruba folklore novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, reimagined through photography, fiction and reportage in the fraught urban landscape of Makoko, a floating slum in Lagos. At once allegory and documentary, the book slips between myth and reality, echoing Tutuola’s narrative style with staged images, saturated hues and vivid printed matter that seem to emerge directly from the underworld.

De Middel maps the surrealism of Tutuola’s prose onto the lived complexities of postcolonial Nigeria, where traditional cosmologies and modern violence collide. The result is a dreamlike and disorienting photo-text in which each page carries the tension of hallucination and truth. Part photobook, part object, the edition opens with a lush botanical endpaper—lush and feral, signaling the psychic jungle to come. In the Darwin archive, it stands alongside works by Pieter Hugo and Samuel Fosso in its commitment to unsettling the gaze and expanding the visual vocabulary of African urbanism.

Title: This Is What Hatred Did
Artist / Author: Cristina de Middel
Date: 2015
Technique / Printing Method: Offset printing
Medium / Materials: Hardcover photobook with colour plates and illustrated endpapers
Edition: First edition
Signed: No
Dimensions (cm): 13 × 28
Language: English
Pages: 180
Publisher / Editor: RM Verlag / La Fábrica / Images en Manoeuvres / Archive of Modern Conflict
Design: Natalia, N2 Estudio Gráfico
ISBN: 9788415118731
Condition: NEW