Joey L.

Joey L. is a Canadian-born photographer and director based in Brooklyn, New York. Having borrowed his father’s digital point-and-shoot camera at the age of 10, Joey turned to photography as a means of expressing his creativity, which ultimately transformed into a lifelong passion. 

Since the age of 18, Joey’s work has been consistently sought out by a number of prominent advertising clients, including National Geographic Channel, the U.S. Army, Canon, the ACLU, Jose Cuervo, Lavazza, FX Networks, Summit Entertainment, History Channel, The Government of Abu Dhabi, and many others. He has photographed a number of recognizable faces including Robert De Niro, Danny DeVito, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain, John Legend, Dylan McDermott, Karlie Kloss, Author John Green, and two-time Olympic gold medalist Gabby Douglas to name a few. His work is regularly seen in magazines, subway advertisements, and billboards.

His own curiosity for different ways of living have brought him to new and unfamiliar territories — from areas as far away as the holy lands of Varanasi — a trip that he first took as a teenager, which served as the foundation for his ongoing Holy Men series—to culturally-distinct neighborhoods tucked away between the graffitied-streets of Brooklyn—as depicted by his annual pilgrimage to document Halloween in Brooklyn—a favorite personal project. 

A firm believer in fostering creativity and fulfillment through personal pursuits, Joey set out in November 2013 to shoot his first scripted short film entitled People of the Delta. The film not only featured members of the Dassanach and Hamar groups of Southern Ethiopia as the actors, but also collaborated with many of them for creative input. Most recently, Joey traveled twice to the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria to document the volunteer fighters of the PKK and YPG/J. The new series, Guerrilla Fighters of Kurdistan, highlight the men and women on the frontline of the ongoing conflict with ISIS—a war that is headlined daily but now humanized through Joey’s enlightening portraits.

In 2015, Joey and his team released a quirky web series aptly named Dudes with Cameras, inspired by his humorous behind-the-scenes escapades on shoots—giving viewers a look into how unpredictable and entertaining life on set can be.

In 2019, he publishes his firs book, We Came From Fire, which collects photos of his different journeys among kurdish fighters, a project started in 2015.