By Faida Samuel

Memories are the journals that we all carry with us. Everyone has memories, whether good or bad, and some of these memories become treasures that cannot easily be erased. For Akpo Oghenetega Gbenedio, known as Tega Gbenedio, photographs and sounds often bring back memories that are important to her. This has influenced her interest in documenting places, objects, sounds and everyday experiences. Tega Gbenedio is a Nigerian-born, UK-based photographic artist. Her interest in photography started while she was growing up with her uncle, who was a photographer. She was fascinated by the photographs and scenes he captured. As a child, she was drawn to these images and her interest became clearer when she joined the Creative Arts Club in secondary school. There, she began taking landscape photographs, influenced by her uncle’s practice.

Although Tega had a strong interest in art, she did not have the opportunity to study art at university. She eventually studied Accounting, but her interest in art did not disappear. After relocating to the United Kingdom, her passion for photography grew stronger and she continued to pursue photography. She began photographing places and things that caught her attention on everyday British streets. This developed into a photographic practice that explores ordinary places and experiences through memory and observation.

In A Familiar Somewhere, she presents a body of photographic works alongside sound installations. The exhibition explores how ordinary places, objects, people, colours, and sounds can unexpectedly bring back memories that we thought we had forgotten. Some of the places and sounds in the exhibition are connected to her personal experiences, while others create room for viewers to connect the photographs to their own memories.

Overview of Work
The photographic works exhibited in A Familiar Somewhere were taken in Blackpool by Tega. The images have a soft and nostalgic quality. The series captures ordinary street life, including colourful buildings, old shopfronts, signs, amusement arcades, hotels, cars, people passing by, a cyclist, a horse-drawn carriage, architecture and other overlooked details of everyday life.
Consequently, Blackpool becomes more than a physical location. It is a mixture of old and new buildings, entertainment spaces, ageing architecture, signs and colours and everyday street life that allows you to see how different periods can exist together. Although the photographs are taken in the present, some have the visual quality of photographs from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their soft appearance, colours and street details add to this nostalgic quality, making the photographed environment look related to places and times that exist in the viewer’s memory already.

This is an important aspect of the exhibition. The place being photographed is Blackpool, but the place being remembered may be somewhere else. An amusement arcade can bring back memories of a childhood outing. A particular colour, sign, building, or sound can return a person to a home, street, television programme, family trip, or ordinary moment from the past. The works therefore sit between Nigeria and the UK. They were physically made in the UK, but the memories they produce are not limited to the UK. The photographs are accompanied by fragments of familiar sounds, including children playing, traffic, television, radio, footsteps, conversations, street sounds, and domestic noises. The sound does not simply explain the photographs. Instead, it provides another way into memory. A viewer can look at a photograph of contemporary Blackpool while hearing a sound that recalls a childhood home.

The exhibition does not only ask viewers to look at a place. A photograph can therefore contain two places: the place that was photographed and the place that exists in memory. For this review, three photographic works are discussed: Rock Shop and Sweets, The Golden Mile and Rock, Doughnuts and Sweets.

The photograph in Plate I presents a shop filled with hanging footballs in different colours, brightly coloured sweets, toys, and other objects. At first, the photograph records an ordinary shop in Blackpool. However, the objects inside the shop can take the viewer beyond the physical location. The arrangement of the toys and sweets can recall shops from the late 1990s and early 2000s. For some viewers, these objects may bring back memories of childhood shopping trips with parents or relatives. The photograph can therefore remind us of a different shop, a different street, or even a different country. The viewer does not have to have visited this particular shop in Blackpool to feel that it is familiar. The familiarity comes from the objects and their arrangement. The photograph becomes a trigger through which another place enters the viewing experience.

The first element that captures the viewer’s attention in The Golden Mile is the boldly written signage. The photograph shows people moving along the street, with some appearing to leave the Golden Mile amusement area while others move towards it. The movement of people gives the photograph the character of a busy public space.

The image records a contemporary moment in Blackpool, but the scene can also recall memories of family trips, seaside outings, amusement centres, and crowded streets. For viewers who grew up in the late 1990s or early 2000s, such spaces may bring back memories of leisure and family experiences from that period. The work shows how nostalgia can begin through recognition. A viewer sees something in the present that resembles something already stored in memory. The photograph does not tell the viewer what to remember. Instead, it creates the conditions for memory to take over the image. This allows viewers to connect the scene to their own experiences of public spaces, family outings, and leisure.

In Rock, Doughnuts and Sweets, bright lettering, rock sweets, doughnuts, ice-cream and crowded food stalls represent a familiar visual scene. At one level, the photograph. shows a food and entertainment area in Blackpool. At another level, these objects take the viewer somewhere else. The pictures’ visual details can invoke childhood fairs, amusement parks, seaside trips, and family trips. They can also bring back memories far away. The viewer could recall the smell of fried food, the taste of sweets, the noise of an amusement area or the experience of being given money to purchase something from a stall. It is not just a photo of a food stall. It is a touch point between the present and the past. The work illustrates just as well how memory is not limited to one sense. A visual image can trigger memories of sound, smell, taste and touch. By this way, the picture goes from documenting a place to creating an emotional connection with places that are no longer physically present.

Conclusion
A Familiar Somewhere explores the relationship between place, photography, sound and memory. Tega Gbenedio photographs ordinary places in Blackpool but the significance of these photographs goes beyond the places they document. The exhibition shows that a place doesn’t have to be personally known for it to feel familiar.

What makes the place familiar is often in small details that link the present to something already in memory. And so the distinction between the place being photographed and the place remembered is of the essence in the exhibition. Blackpool provides the physical place, but memory allows the photographs to travel beyond it. Gbenedio reminds us in A Familiar Somewhere that memories are often in ordinary things. A photograph may cover a street, a shop or a food stall but what the viewer will come away with is a different place, a different time or part of a life that was forgotten. In this way, the exhibition makes a bridge between what we see and what we remember.