Media images of migration, conflict and environmental catastrophe scroll through our news feeds in an almost perpetual loop. So how can conceptual photography challenge the limits of photojournalism to offer a deeper exploration of today’s most pressing issues?

The work on show at the sixth edition of the Lagos Photo Festival, which opens in Nigeria’s main city this weekend, offers some answers. With a theme of “Designing Futures,” and with photography featuring large-scale cinematic productions with elaborate sets, props and subjects as collaborators, the festival celebrates creative thinking in a quest for new ideas and experimental forms of storytelling.

Debate may be raging in photojournalism over the ethics of staging photographs, but, with its focus on design, Lagos Photo is embracing the fictional and the contrived as alternate ways to depict African truths and reality.

“There is hardly any photojournalism work this year,” the festival curator, Cristina de Middel, said. “And that’s because the classical documentary approach to storytelling on the continent is exhausted.”

In his work “Tales From the World,” the French photographer Nicolas Henry’s images from Ethiopia, Rwanda, Madagascar and Namibia are constructed with help from his subjects “to visualize narratives … within their local communities.” Members of these communities pose against dusky sunset skies with complex foreground layers illuminated and saturated with color and bright, repurposed materials, suggesting a glimmer of optimism set against the backdrop of something more ominous.

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In the Democratic Republic of Congo — a country better known for vast natural resources and one of the deadliest wars in recent history — another French photographer, Patrick Willocq, has collaborated with a community of pygmies to stage his work, “I Am Walé Respect Me” and “The Superwalés,” featuring mise-en-scènes that almost appear to have spilled from the pages of a graphic novel. The project created fantastical scenarios depicting rituals surrounding first-time mothers and imagines the community as it might exist in 2050 when “the country has peacefully developed in a sustainable way.”

With her project “Unomgcana,” the South African photographer Nobukho Nqaba explores displacement, migration and global economics through the use of the Chinese-made striped plastic bags that are ubiquitous across Africa. For Ms. Nqaba, the bags in her photographs “are objects that carry a home and act as a means of survival for one who does not have much.”

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Other collaborative works such as “Trashmen,” by the South African artist Francoise Knoetze and the South African photographer Anton Scholtz, and “The Prophecy,” created by the Senegalese fashion designer Doulsy (Jah Gal) and the Beninois-Belgian photographer Fabrice Monteiro, also involve striking conceptual work. Both projects create mythical creatures or monsters sculpted from garbage as statements about social relations and consumer culture, and reflect the festival’s broader photographic trend.

Conceptual photography finds its strength in the freedom of the discipline, according to the Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop, who with the French-American photographer Antoine Tempé recreated iconic Hollywood movie stills using African models for their project “(Re-)mixing Hollywood.”

“It is a means of expression, rather than a faithful depiction of a situation,” Mr. Diop said. “I have no problem starting from the obvious truth of an actual photograph to create a romanced and idealized visual universe which can be seen as the perfect blend between my own aspirations and those of the sitter.”

There is of course still plenty of strong documentary work being produced from Africa, some of which will be shown at the festival, including “Looking Forward: The New York Times Lens Exhibit,” featuring a selection of images by photographers whose work from Africa has been published on Lens. But it’s the conceptual work that pushes boundaries and challenges the viewer, Ms. de Middel said.

“Photojournalism stories about the environment try to find someone to blame, but the work we are showing doesn’t point to anyone,” she said. “I prefer that, because it just opens our eyes to a subject and we are more likely to look for a solution ourselves and to create change.”

Lagos Photo has been about fostering change since Azu Nwagbogu founded the festival in 2010. He envisioned an annual showcase aimed at challenging Africa’s misrepresentation in mainstream Western media. Initial themes were defensive and focused on African photographers telling African stories, but the photographic boom driven largely by the festival has since allowed it to transcend those nascent ideals.

“Moving beyond telling our own stories, we can sculpt through photography and design a better future for our continent,” Mr. Nwagbogu said. “These are the two legs we can stand on. Now we need to look at what we are doing to inspire each other with images and objects designed to help us create a more sustainable future. We need to find creative solutions to our own problems.”

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With innovation driven by Lagos Photo and projects such as “Everyday Africa” — a social media movement also created in response to the common portrayal of Africa as a place consumed by war, poverty and disease — the African narrative and the creative force behind it have matured.

“Coming-of-age is an apt phrase,” Mr. Nwagbogu said. “We’ve always had photography in Africa, at least as far back as there has been photography, but we now have a more specialized skill set and greater expertise with new forms of storytelling, and that’s the kind of evolution that interests us.”

Mr. Nwagbogu believes that art plays a key role in shifting ideas about what people think they can do and what they can be. Through workshops and a year-round program that brings photographers together with leading writers, musicians, filmmakers and designers, the festival is creating a nerve center of contemporary visual culture aimed at inspiring the local population in Africa’s most populous city at the heart of the continent’s most populous nation.

“Lagos Photo is more than just an exhibition for a month,” Mr. Nwagbogu said. “We’re building a growing community in this super-energetic and frenetic city. That’s how to create alchemy so that magic can happen.”

Finbarr O’Reilly is a 2015 World Fellow at Yale, where he is working on a book, “Shooting Ghosts,” about the psychological costs of war, to be published in 2017 by the Viking imprint of Penguin/Random House. He was based in Africa as a Reuters reporter and photographer between 2001 and 2014 and was awarded the World Press Photo of the Year in 2006. He is also a 2013 Harvard Nieman fellow and a 2014 Columbia University Ochberg Fellow. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

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