Visualising Youth Precarity: Field Photography, Oral Testimony, and the Archive of State Surveillance

A photograph can expose an encounter without settling what that encounter means. What becomes visible, remembered and contested depends on how an image is framed, interpreted and circulated. This article examines photography as a site for reading youth precarity, police authority and structural resistance in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. It draws on a practice-led qualitative approach combining photographic fieldwork, oral accounts and relevant scholarship, with Gadamerian hermeneutics providing the principal interpretive framework and selected visual-culture perspectives supporting the analysis. The study distinguishes between direct field photographs and consented reconstructions produced where volatile encounters could not safely be photographed in real time. The analysis shows that photographs of stop-and-search encounters, confrontation, pursuit, forced submission and raids do more than preserve isolated moments of police–youth contact. Read across the corpus, they reveal how ordinary markers of contemporary youth life, including mobility, smartphones, laptops and private vehicles, can become associated with institutional suspicion. Precarity consequently appears not only as economic insecurity but as uncertainty about the terms of citizenship and public belonging. The article further argues that photographic circulation, particularly within the visual culture surrounding #EndSARS, can connect individual encounters to collective memory and counter-visibility. Photography thus becomes a form of visual witnessing through which relations of power can be questioned and alternative accounts preserved. The article recommends sustained attention to photographic evidence, digital visual archives and youth-centred public accountability in understanding police–citizen relations in Nigeria.