Book of the day > My Lagos by Robin Hammond (@hammond_robin ). Published by Editions Bessard (@editionsbessard ). Limited to an edition of 600 copies, Robin Hammond’s series of portraits of Lagosians embrace the diversity of Africa’s most populous city. Each book’s dust jacket is a Nollywood poster bought in Lagos – each has been folded by hand. From the photographer: “Each book is unique in this way, and the reader gets to take home his or her own piece of Lagos. Intimacy and exclusion, love and hate, laughter and insult regularly rub shoulders on Lagos’s streets. It’s a complex place. I was trying to grasp, through my camera, life in this massive metropolitan area of more than 20 million people. Located in West Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, Lagos is as much an experience as a place. The local experience and the foreign experience are certainly not the same. But that difference is not the only meaningful one. The city’s residents experience it differently: the businessman and the fisherman, the prostitute and the entrepreneur, the housewife and the bricklayer. There are more than 20 million Lagosians, and, one could say, just as many Lagoses. It is a fascinating city, but one where life can be hard. One survey placed it as the fourth worst place in the world to call home, and another ranked it as one of the world’s most unequal cities. But many of the people I met also expressed how they saw Lagos as a place where dreams come true, where hard work pays off and where, with a few good connections and smarts, one can rise from the streets and into the mansions of the city’s big men. My new book, published by Editions Bessard, is called ‘My Lagos,’ but only partly because it is my view of the city. It comes mostly from the interviews I conducted with the subjects of my portraits. I asked them to describe what Lagos meant to them, and they would answer, ‘My Lagos is. …’ Their quotations in the book and their portraits connect us, in a small way, to a people most readers will never meet, and through them we experience a piece of a place most will never visit.”