Wata Na Life takes its title from Krio, the lingua franca of Freetown, and its subject from the daily reality behind that phrase. In 2021, Ngadi Smart returned to Sierra Leone, the country of her birth, on a three-month commission with WaterAid, working in communities where the great majority of people live without basic sanitation and where changing rainfall, exhausted farmland and failing infrastructure have made water a matter of constant negotiation. The book that came out of that work, published by Loose Joints in 2024, is not a documentary record in any ordinary sense.
Smart is a visual artist whose practice moves between illustration, photography and collage, and Wata Na Life is built from all three. Photographs of people met during the commission are cut, layered and recombined with landscape, pattern and saturated colour until the page becomes a dense, moving field. The effect is deliberately unresolved: images crowd and overlap, edges stay jagged, and the composure of the single photograph gives way to something closer to argument. These are not pictures of waiting. They present resilience without sentimentality and place questions of power, dependence and outside consumption inside the frame rather than beside it.
The book is also a considered object. Its eighty-eight pages, seventy-five colour plates and 220 by 260 mm format are bound as a post-folded handmade book, stab-stitched to a raw hard cover with a cloth spine, so that the physical construction echoes the layered logic of the collages. It was developed during a residency at Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto after Smart received the 2023 Loose Joints and Mahler & LeWitt Studios Publishing Award, and was nominated for the First Photobook award at the 2024 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards.
For collectors attentive to the photobook as an authored form, Wata Na Life is a clear case of an artist using the medium against its documentary grain. Smart’s earlier work has been shown widely, including at Kyotographie and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and this book translates that interdisciplinary confidence into a sustained sequence. It is a serious, self-possessed debut from a photographer and collagist whose visual language is still taking shape, and it rewards repeated looking.
