Adama Jalloh: Love Story, an ongoing record of Black London

Love Story

Love Story is about Jalloh's relationship with parts of London and her admiration for the subtleties she encounters in Black communities there. The material is deliberately everyday: mothers and their children in their best clothes on a Sunday, school children owning the streets after half past three on a weekday, teenagers running errands for their mothers, someone taking a moment alone.

The reason those moments are the subject is that they are familiar to her. Jalloh photographs them in order to glorify what is closely linked to her own experience rather than to explain a community to outsiders, and the series has none of the framing that documentary about Black London routinely arrives with.

Being Black, British, African and a woman has shaped the way she documents over time, and Love Story has also served as a way to identify and connect with what home can mean — to her and to others — whether that is located in people, in objects or in spaces. The project has run since 2015 as an ongoing series, with the stated aim of documenting and preserving moments of those around her so that others can look back on them.

Preservation as the purpose

That aim is worth separating from the more common documentary ambition. Love Story is not built to make an argument or to intervene in a debate; it is built to exist later. The photographs are made so that the ordinary weekday texture of a place and a community has a record, which is a different brief from either reportage or portraiture commissioned around an event.

It also explains the register. A series assembled from small moments over six years accumulates rather than concludes, and its coherence comes from the consistency of attention rather than from a narrative arc.

Practice

Born in 1993, Jalloh is a portrait and documentary photographer based in London. Her work revolves around race, identity and culture, and it builds a steady archive and an ongoing conversation about the landscape of the city and the transitions taking place within it.

What she seeks in a photograph is intimacy, honesty and familiarity — moments that resonate with her own memories and experiences as well as with a viewer's. Read alongside the rest of this archive, her work sits at the point where portraiture and long-term documentation stop being separable practices.

The work sits in a longer British tradition without belonging to any of its familiar modes. It is not reportage, because nothing is happening; it is not street photography in the observational sense, because the people in the frame are not strangers; and it is not portraiture on commission, because nobody asked for it. What it resembles most closely is a family album kept on behalf of a neighbourhood.

That framing also explains why the series has no obvious end point. A project defined by preservation is finished only when the photographer stops, and Jalloh has kept it open since 2015 — which means the record it produces will eventually be a document of change in a part of London that has changed very quickly.

The insider position also changes the economics of the work in a way worth spelling out. A documentary photographer arriving in an unfamiliar community spends most of the project's budget — in time if not in money — earning the access that makes unguarded pictures possible, and the pictures carry the residue of that negotiation. Jalloh's access was never purchased because it was never separate from her life; the photographs come out of proximity that predates the camera. What the camera adds is the decision to treat familiar scenes as worth keeping, which sounds small and is not. Most communities are photographed either by outsiders at moments of crisis or by no one at all, and a sustained record made from inside, in ordinary time, is the rarest kind of archive a city produces.