Guardian · 10 hours ago

Women Behind the lens: ‘I May Not Be Able to Decide Whose Faces Are Painted on Walls but I Can...

Photojournalist Olaoluwa Olowu was walking the streets of Accra when she noticed that the murals, posters, and painted tributes celebrating Ghana's boxing culture depicted almost exclusively men - and that absence became a calling. She returned to a painting beneath a bridge with Elizabeth Boakye, a member of Ghana's national women's amateur boxing team, and asked her to stand beneath it, making visible what the street had left out. "I may not be able to decide whose faces are painted on walls or whose names become part of the streets," Olowu reflects, "but through my photographs, I can make sure female boxers are also part of that archive." The gesture is at once simple and quietly radical: not erasing what exists, but expanding it - insisting that the record of a sport, and of a culture, is incomplete without the women who show up to fight for it.