He is curled on the floor with his back facing the viewer. On the sheet-metal garage door before him, ‘no parking’ is written in caps. A few feet away from his head is a cage-like structure housing a plastic tank. At the top-right of the frame, the exhaust pipe of a generator peeks out of its enclosure, bringing balance to the photograph.

A recurrence in the image is the sense of something housing something else. The cage houses the tank. The building houses the generator. And so the man, who appears asleep and unsheltered, is the oddity in the photograph. His presence is made even more bizarre by the elements in the scene – the instruction on the door, the concrete floor, the exhaust pipe – all of which point to how unsuitable this place is for sleeping. 

Take, for example, the aural and nasal displeasure which would emanate from the sound and fumes of the generator. Consider, too, the hard and rough texture of the floor on which the man sleeps. To cushion this effect, he spreads out a T-shirt to provide a thin layer between the floor and his skin. But how much comfort could come from that? Regardless, he appears at ease, untroubled by all around him.

Shot by Lagos-based photographer Dami Adeyemi, this photograph is part of the series Bodies Without Walls (2025). The series comprises self-portraits in which Adeyemi does not pose as himself. Rather, he is positioned as a placeholder for the unhomed, those often overlooked by society. By putting his body in their place, these self-portraits become a performance that highlights the “persistence of homelessness” in Lagos – a city from which, now and again, we hear news of the government demolishing a settlement, upturning the lives of its dwellers, leaving them unsheltered. This is where our awareness of their plight ends – in this public announcement of unfolding tragedy. We go on with our lives. They go on with theirs. They find a way to survive in a society where they are unacknowledged, as though they do not exist. However, if we are willing to look, they surround us – some of them driven into homelessness by a public tragedy, and others by a private misfortune.

*

On some mornings, as early as 5 a.m., I set out to walk. It is a routine I have maintained for years. A circular movement that takes an hour or an hour plus thirty minutes, depending on my pace, to cover Obi Wali Road, East-West Road, NTA-Apara Link Road, and back to Haruk Road, where my house is. For a couple of months in 2024, outside my gate to the right, a woman and a child took shelter on the veranda of a salon. The mornings were cold. The child would sometimes cough. The woman would wake, check the child, and cover its body with the thin fabric they shared. 

After a while, I noticed their schedule. They arrived at the spot late at night. They went to sleep and then left at the first sight of dawn. As the days passed, stories about the woman began to trickle out. I heard there was a fire and she lost all her belongings. I also heard she had no family here and therefore had no help. A concerned neighbour mentioned raising money for the woman so she could afford the transport back to her hometown. 

Soon, the precarity of the woman and the child became known to a small group of people in our neighbourhood. They began to, from time to time, at the cover of night, keep some items on the slab to ease her stay. They brought food, clothing, cartons, thick fabric, and a pillow. The offerings came, then slowed, and eventually, one morning, she left with the child and never returned.

Farther out in my walk, along Obi Wali Road, there was a man who, now and again, I would catch in the dull light of breaking dawn, washing his mouth near a gutter. Next to the gutter, a red metal container with cracks and rust served as his storage. From a distance, it seemed to be in disuse. On a closer look, however, one could spot a few worn clothes hanging from its corners – clothes I presumed to belong to the man, since he would often retreat into the container after his wash, emerge dressed, and then set out for his day.

In addition to being a storage space for the man, the container is his place of rest, the place where, at the end of the day, he returns to lay his head, to find relief, momentarily, from the hardships of his life. Though I wonder what relief a place like that could give him. While it provides shelter and storage, serving the basic functions of a house, it lacks the provisions of a proper home. For one, it is not a place where fond memories can be formed. It is not a place where one can gladly host a guest. And it lacks the physical and emotional respite obtainable from a home.

To make the space conducive, I imagine that within its enclosure, the man laid out cut-outs of cartons to soften the hardness of the metal, to protect himself from its extreme reaction to hot or cold weather. But like the man in the photograph and the woman at the salon, I know this would do little to provide comfort. For instance, holes riddled the container. And so the man and his belongings were unprotected from the rains which the clouds over Port Harcourt let down in abundance. Hence, on those days when the rains lashed the city, whatever means of comfort he fashioned on the floor would be ruined before his return at nightfall.

One morning this year, I saw him again, by the gutter, hand-washing his clothes. But this time, the container was no more. He flapped his laundry in the air, walked behind a wooden shop by the road, and emerged fully dressed. I slowed my pace. He hopped over the gutter, faced East-West Road, and set out for his day.

*

In another photograph, the man, still shirtless but this time also unshod, sleeps on a roadside curb. He faces a heavy tangle of roots on which shafts of sunlight fall. The first thing that comes to mind is the echo between the steadiness of a man in deep sleep and the steadiness of a well-rooted tree. 

But this seeming commonality between man and tree highlights their diverging point, for while the man takes rest in the open to indicate his homelessness, a tree is never homeless. Its natural state is to be homed in where it is rooted. Over time, it extends its shelter, housing other life species too, from insects to birds to small mammals. Yet this is something the tree cannot provide for the man.

Under its shade, he can take momentary shelter, but it cannot house him like it would house a bird, a squirrel, or a colony of ants. It cannot be a place for him to inhabit. In the photograph, the tree stands as a signifier of what the man aspires to have: somewhere to root himself. In the absence of this, the man moves from one location to another, catching sleep in the most unlikely places: next to a garage door, on a roadside curb, beside a casket shop, next to a fence, atop a metal structure – places whose discomfort is evident in their surroundings. Yet he makes do with them. Such is the condition of the homeless: to make do with what one would not ideally make do with.

In cities as in other settlements, certain activities make one’s access to a home an essential need. It is the place where we clean ourselves up at the start and end of each day. It is the place where one can recharge from the drain of social interactions. Above all, it is our place of sleep, a place where the body winds down. This is a time when one is most vulnerable, hence the need for a secure shelter while in such a state. Sleep is also private, which is why we often get self-conscious about nodding off in public. It is also an unavoidable event, one that the body demands for itself. It can therefore, for those who may have put it off for too long, happen anywhere. This could be why, in Bodies Without Walls, Adeyemi chooses sleep as the activity to recreate. By capturing himself sleeping in unlikely locations, he reveals the precarious position of those living without shelter – as if to make visible, to put in front of us, the plight of the homeless at their most vulnerable.

*Photography by Damilare Adeyemi