Adaeze Okaro (Nigerian, b. 1994) is a self-taught photographer working across portraiture, fine art, documentary imagery, and fashion photography.,Born and raised in Enugu state, she is based in Abuja, Nigeria.,Her portraits of Black women and men, rendered in saturated color and deep shadow, draw on family photo albums and the domestic rituals of her childhood.,
She was introduced to photography by her father at age sixand turned professional in 2018.Okaro traces the cobalt and violet she favors in her portraits to specific sensory memories from childhood — the scent of hair cream, the sweetness of fried plantain, the cold of metal bangles against skin. She often lets faces fall into shadow rather than brightening every detail, treating the way melanin holds light as a deliberate choice rather than something to correct. Beaded jewelry, wraps, and other adornments recur in her portraits as carriers of history rather than decoration, encoding meanings — protection, mourning, joy — that she often leaves unexplained.
In 2021 Okaro received Adobe's Stock Artist Development Fund, producing work exploring themes of self-celebration and belonging through subjects photographed in their own homes in Nigeria.She has since worked with Dove, Getty Images, Girlgaze, VSCO, and Adobe.,,Her photography has been featured by Vogue Italia's Photo Vogue and WePresent by WeTransfer.Her 2023 series Planet Hibiscus was included in Linda Dounia's Feral File exhibition “In/Visible”. Its participating artists worked to retrain AI image generators, which default to thin, white imagery for a prompt like “Beautiful Woman”.Okaro also shared years of her own unused photographs with Linda Dounia, who wove them into the collage collaboration On Softness.
