Meet the Nigerian-born singer who gave up photography for music

Nigerian-born singer Viktor Taiwo, is currently finding his way through life as a singer, after first heeding to the allure of photography.

Taiwo, 24, fell deeply in love with photography as a teenager, after playing with the aperture on his mother’s camera.

“I realized it could be pitch-black, and I could change a knob and it would be bright,” he says. “It blew my mind.”

By 15 years, Taiwo had become a working photographer, who worked with a DSLR at numerous weddings and parties in Britain. He received payment for his work, but the pressure that comes with the job overwhelmed him. “I hated photography after that,” he says.

After dropping photography, there was a creative void which existed within Taiwo, and he sought about trying to fill it. His friends suggested he take up music, and initially, he blanched.

“For me it was, ‘O.K., I sing, but that doesn’t mean anything,'” he says. “It’s like someone saying to you, ‘You run for buses sometimes. Go do marathons.'” It wasn’t until he was in college at Middlesex University in London that he began to consider music as a possible career. “I thought, ‘This is part of my identity, and it’s as personal to me as anything,'” he says. "Let me just try it."

The songs Taiwo made of that early experimenting — a faultless mix of silky-smooth R&B melodies and electronic flourishes, all lifted by Taiwo’s soulful falsetto — would eventually become the singer’s debut EP, “,” released in June. A standout among its five tracks is “Curse,” a slow-burning admission of past guilt that winds down to a staccato, six-note acoustic guitar line. The song’s black-and-white music video, which premieres below and was directed by the Brooklyn-based artist collective BKLYN1834, finds Taiwo running through the woods in search of (or, perhaps, away from) the woman he’s wronged.

After releasing his first EP and playing a couple of standing-room-only New York City shows, Taiwo’s focus right now is on expanding his musical reach. That includes writing about Nigeria, which he hasn’t visited since leaving at age 8.

“I’m old enough now to see my experiences there more objectively than I was as a 9- or 10-year-old who’d just left,” he says. For now, however, his references are largely rooted in his adopted home: He cites fellow Brits Brian Eno and Corinne Bailey Rae as influences, as well as the “Smooth Operator” chanteuse Sade, who was also born in Nigeria. “The way they sing is so — I wouldn’t even say quiet, but there’s just this calmness to it,” he says of Bailey Rae and Sade. “It doesn’t attack you. It invites you in.”