The portrait of the young Strong Joe won Joey L. the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.
The young Joe is a member of the Tombohuaun community, in Sierra Leone. Joey went to the country of West Africa to shot his campaign Untapped for Water Aid, the NGO who deals with accessibility to drinking water. The result are not only the images about daily problems of a life without drinking water and the diseases connected to the shortage of this important good, but it highlights also tehe resilience of this community composed by 400 people, their daily life, their bonds, their highly organized structure and the work ethic.
Joey’s images capture the spirit of the community of Tombohuaun through two themes: the people who composed this community and their hard work in the oil palm plantations and fishing, different activities equally distributed among men and women. Joey L. has already been in other parts of Africa: his previous experiences let him recognize and use for portraiting features as jewlery, faces painted or cloths with colorful pattern.
For some of them, Joey has built in the middle of the jungle, together with the men of the community, a real set, with huge banana and palm leaves and a white sheet, used as light reflector.
The photo will be shown from Oct. 18th to 21st 2018 to the National Portrait Gallery of London, together with the other photos of the project. Two of the images in the exhibition will be exposed until Jan. 27th 2019 in a group exhibition.
For more information about Joey L., see his portfolio or contact us.
