From The Streets Of Aba To The Pages Of Vogue! Sisters Akwaeke & Yagazie Emezi Get Profiled In Vogue USA’s February 2018 Edition

The Emezi sisters Akwaeke and Yagazie inspire us so much and we’ve loved following their lives and the feats they keep attaining.

Like, imagine being photographed by one of the world’s greatest photographers, Annie Leibovitz. If that isn’t MAJOR, then boy, I don’t know.

The two sisters who were born and raised in Aba, Abia State are profiled in the February 2018 issue of Vogue Magazine in a feature piece titled, 5 Families Who Are Changing The World as We Know It.

Below is what the magazine wrote about them:

When Yagazie Emezi was about six, she was hospitalized after being run over by a truck. (Luckily, she says, her bones were still growing.) To the Nigerian-born documentary photographer, the experience was more formative than traumatic. “I’ve had the scar for most of my life,” says Yagazie. “I don’t remember myself without it.” Yagazie’s matter-of-fact attitude informs her ongoing project Re‑learning Bodies, a series of photographs of people from African communities that presents scars less as a result of violence and more as a testament to lived experience. This shift in conventional thinking is something Yagazie’s sister, Akwaeke, also explores in her stunning debut novel, Freshwater, a beguiling book that skips from Nigeria to Virginia to Brooklyn, drawing from Igbo tradition and the author’s own autobiography. Through different forms, the sisters see themselves as part of a larger endeavor to break with norms and tradition. “There’s this reality that’s considered mainstream, where beauty looks like X,” says Akwaeke. “We’re stepping outside that reality, and we’re saying we’re not going to move.”

An excited Yagazie took to Instagram to gush about the feature writing:

We grew up in Aba, fetched and bathed in rain water, ate white rice with ketchup or groundnut oil, did homework by candlelight, told stories to each other in the dark, read and snacked through tons of books, played for hours and let our imagination fly. We created fantastic worlds for ourselves, still hard to believe that we now occasionally live in them.
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(Fun fact – there were many fabulous outfits in wardrobe … I walked in wearing one that really wasn’t me although very much glam and beautiful. Annie and I stared at each other like ????. So I went out picked out something more casual and we were both happy ????????????)

Ah-mazing!