Small World, Big Love with Faith Adiele: A Snapshot of visual storyteller Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström
Upon learning that DETOUR was focusing on work and the business of Black Travel for September, I immediately called some friends who inspire me as travel innovators and entrepreneurs. Being a Black travel pioneer usually means heading out without a map, as, despite being some of the world’s earliest and most traveled people, our ability to make travel our careers is fairly new. One thing I discovered during these work chats is that, while all these major players wear multiple hats — writing, producing, photographing, speaking, consulting, advocating, promoting — each is guided by a single principle. For Ernest “Fly Brother” White II from last week’s column, everything is about transformation. For this week’s subject, Stockholm-based Nigerian-American visual storyteller Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström, it all comes down to cultural connection.
Lọlá, a self-proclaimed multipotentialite (someone who excels in multiple creative fields), is one of the most energetic and hardest-working people I know. In addition to traveling the world as a sought-after travel photographer and speaker, she is author of international bestseller Lagom: The Swedish Secret of Living Well, an acclaimed novel In Every Mirror She’s Black, which reveals the lives of Black women in Sweden and Due North, a collection of travel observations, reflections and snapshots that took home the gold from the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW) Lowell Thomas Awards.
And yet, she told me over Zoom while her kids hover nearby, hoping to snatch her phone while she’s preoccupied with “Auntie Faith,” she doesn’t like to use the term work. “Because I love what I do,” Åkerström said. “I feel like it’s my purpose. And even though I do a lot of different things on different platforms, the connecting thread between everything is cultural connection. How can I get us closer together by challenging the way we think, challenging us to see someone else in a different light? The way I do that is by, first of all, connecting us on our similarities, so that when I present our differences, you already see a bit of yourself in me and are more receptive to my differences.”
This ability to see what connects us shines in her photography, whether it’s vivid landscapes of reindeer sledding on frozen lakes or sunrise on the Nile that reflect her training as a painter or intimate portraits of hotel workers and women dressed for church that reveal the care she spends getting to know her subjects. She explains that when accepting an assignment or starting an initiative, she asks herself, “Am I learning something new about a different culture? And am I also squeezing myself out like a sponge so that they also understand and learn from me as well?”
Her commitment to connection shows in her warm smile and easy laugh and is informed by a personal history of being excluded and isolated “when people could not define who I was or figure out what box I was supposed to be in.” Since leaving a career in Geographic Information Systems to follow her passion, however, she’s traveled to 70-plus countries, receiving such distinctions as one of eight 2022 Hasselblad Heroines, a global celebration of female photographers, and 2018 SATW Travel Photographer of the Year, and having her work featured in NatGeo, New York Times, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, Travel+Leisure, Travel Channel, Lonely Planet, Forbes, Slate, Fodor’s, AFAR, Adventure Magazine and others.
And now that she’s found her purpose, she’s committed to helping others find theirs. She mentors through such organizations as the International Women’s Media Fund (IWMF), which supports women journalists, and Geotraveler Media Academy, her own workshop program that helps emerging photographers go professional. “I connect them to editors,” she explained. “I teach them how to pitch. I do a lot behind the scenes.” During COVID, she discovered that the travel industry lost “an estimated $1 trillion in revenue and over 100 million jobs,” with the worst effects felt by local artisans, travel operators and professional guides. In response, she co-founded Local Purse, a start-up that creates live online cultural shopping experiences and connects artisans with shoppers around the world. As someone who was born in Nigeria, travels the globe and created home first in the U.S. and next in Sweden, Lọlá is literally mapping cultural connections.