Hakeem Shitta

Hakeem Olatunbosun Shitta (6 August 1955 – 5 June 1997) was a Nigerian photographer, publisher, editor, and martial artist known for documenting Nigeria's arts and cultural life through portraits, backstage photography, and street-level images of artists, performers, writers, and public events in Lagos and beyond. He founded and edited arts and culture periodicals including Arts Illustrated Weekly and Arts Diary, and compiled the influential Handbook of Nigerian Artists (1993), a reference work on Nigerian artists and their careers. Shitta's photographic work—spanning thousands of images from the 1970s through the 1990s—forms a substantial archive of Nigeria's creative scene and has been discussed in later commentary on the country's visual history and cultural documentation, including posthumous coverage in The Guardian Nigeria.