What comes to mind when you see the garment?

For Lagos-based photographer Stephen Tayo, clothing has long been a way to address questions of identity and belonging. With his work, fashion, art, and culture photographer and filmmaker Stephen Tayo (b.1994) strives to offer social commentary on wealth, class, race, gender, and identity. In his latest exhibition, WHAT COMES TO MIND WHEN YOU SEE THE GARMENT?, that interest takes him somewhere more devotional: into the world of Aladura worship, where clothing becomes a language of faith.

Presented by FF Projects at Alára in Lagos, the exhibition marks Tayo’s first solo presentation with the gallery and the fourth project in FF Projects’ year-long residency at the space. Running from 1 August 2026, the series turns Tayo’s camera towards devotees of the Aladura movement, a strand of Pentecostal Christianity that emerged among Yoruba communities in the early 20th century. The movement gained momentum during the 1918 influenza pandemic, as communities turned towards prayer, collective worship, and divine healing. Drawing Christianity into conversation with Yoruba spiritual traditions, Aladura practice developed a distinct religious vocabulary in which ritual, music, and sacred objects offered a direct relationship with God, without the need for a European intermediary. Its structures of authority, meanwhile, found legitimacy in African cultural systems and divine revelation.

Tayo approaches this history through one of its most recognisable visual markers: the garment. Shot in black and white and departing from the vivid colour palette for which Tayo is known, the series takes on a distinctly documentary register. Many images are composed from behind, capturing devotees in candid moments, walking to and from service, lingering at its close. The eye is consistently drawn to the defining visual signature of Aladura practice: its garments. Flowing white robes, elaborate headwear, and bare feet move through the streets of Lagos, caught by Tayo’s patient lens. Known as sutana, aso-funfun, or simply “the garment”, the white robe carries meaning that reaches beyond Christian symbolism. In Yoruba cosmology, white, or funfun, is associated with Obatala, the orisha connected to purity and creation. The garment therefore occupies a space where religious traditions overlap, carrying a history that is both Christian and distinctly Yoruba.

This focus on dress also feels natural within Tayo’s wider practice. His career was built partly through photographing Lagos’s creative and fashion communities, working with stylists and designers. Here, however, the garment operates outside the language of fashion. It becomes a marker of belief and historical continuity. That shift is central to the work. Tayo is less interested in the garment as an object than in what it reveals about the people wearing it. Families and children appear alongside worshippers, while Lagos continually presses into the frame. Streets, buildings and passing figures form a backdrop to religious life, positioning Aladura practice within the everyday rather than separating it into a world of its own.

The result is a body of work concerned as much with Lagos as it is with faith. Tayo’s camera finds meaning in the ordinary movement surrounding worship: the walk home, the gathering outside, the child beside a parent, the white robe moving through the city. 

WHAT COMES TO MIND WHEN YOU SEE THE GARMENT? is on view at Alára, 12A Akin Olugbade Street, Lagos, from 1 August 2026 until 20 September 2026. An accompanying artist book is being published alongside the exhibition.