LAND OF MOREES
Jude Lartey's heartfelt tribute celebrating the resilience, joy, and unity of a steadfast coastal community
Jude Lartey is a self-taught Ghanaian image-maker and filmmaker whose work belies his youth. With a precise visual language and an instinctive sense of narrative, he produces images that feel both intimate and assured, grounded in lived experience yet expansive in scope. Across fashion, film, and documentary, Lartey examines masculinity, community, and belonging, often using style as a storytelling device rather than a surface gesture. His images situate people within clearly felt moments in time−an approach evident in projects such as his campaign for Converse, where clothing becomes a conduit for memory, identity, and place. Working from his home studio, Lartey constructs cinematic worlds shaped by careful staging and considered casting. Hand-built sets and familiar muses allow him to translate imagination into images that feel deliberate yet emotionally open. Beyond the studio, his documentary practice turns outward, offering nuanced portrayals of Ghanaian life that resist spectacle in favour of quiet observation. This sensibility comes into full focus in Land of the Morees, an ongoing personal project, which traces the daily rhythms of a small coastal fishing community. Rooted in childhood encounters with Ghana’s shoreline, the project reflects a sustained commitment to coastal life as both subject and source.
The project forms part of Jude Lartey’s ongoing photographic practice, a body of work grounded in the documentation of personal memory and collective history across Ghana and beyond. First presented in 2024 as his debut solo exhibition in Ghana in collaboration with La Foundation For The Arts (LAFA), the project marked a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice−both a homecoming and a commitment to sustained engagement rather than episodic observation. Since the exhibition, Lartey has continued to return to Moree, deepening relationships within the community and extending the series with a sense of care and continuity. The work evolves alongside these connections, resisting finality and instead unfolding as a living archive shaped by trust, time, and presence.
Lartey is currently developing a selection of prints from the series, with plans to direct proceeds back into the community that made the work possible. This gesture reinforces the project’s ethical grounding, positioning authorship as a shared exchange rather than a one-sided extraction. As his images circulate internationally−receiving attention from publications and brands including The Guardian, GQ, Vogue, Dazed, Adidas, and others − Lartey distinguishes himself as an image-maker attuned to the subtleties of lived experience. His work articulates the textures of a generation and the cultural moment it inhabits, offering photography not as spectacle, but as a site of remembrance, reciprocity, and quiet insistence.
Jude Lartey's heartfelt tribute celebrating the resilience, joy, and unity of a steadfast coastal community
Jude Lartey is a self-taught Ghanaian image-maker and filmmaker whose work belies his youth. With a precise visual language and an instinctive sense of narrative, he produces images that feel both intimate and assured, grounded in lived experience yet expansive in scope. Across fashion, film, and documentary, Lartey examines masculinity, community, and belonging, often using style as a storytelling device rather than a surface gesture. His images situate people within clearly felt moments in time−an approach evident in projects such as his campaign for Converse, where clothing becomes a conduit for memory, identity, and place. Working from his home studio, Lartey constructs cinematic worlds shaped by careful staging and considered casting. Hand-built sets and familiar muses allow him to translate imagination into images that feel deliberate yet emotionally open. Beyond the studio, his documentary practice turns outward, offering nuanced portrayals of Ghanaian life that resist spectacle in favour of quiet observation. This sensibility comes into full focus in Land of the Morees, an ongoing personal project, which traces the daily rhythms of a small coastal fishing community. Rooted in childhood encounters with Ghana’s shoreline, the project reflects a sustained commitment to coastal life as both subject and source.
The project forms part of Jude Lartey’s ongoing photographic practice, a body of work grounded in the documentation of personal memory and collective history across Ghana and beyond. First presented in 2024 as his debut solo exhibition in Ghana in collaboration with La Foundation For The Arts (LAFA), the project marked a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice−both a homecoming and a commitment to sustained engagement rather than episodic observation. Since the exhibition, Lartey has continued to return to Moree, deepening relationships within the community and extending the series with a sense of care and continuity. The work evolves alongside these connections, resisting finality and instead unfolding as a living archive shaped by trust, time, and presence.
Lartey is currently developing a selection of prints from the series, with plans to direct proceeds back into the community that made the work possible. This gesture reinforces the project’s ethical grounding, positioning authorship as a shared exchange rather than a one-sided extraction. As his images circulate internationally−receiving attention from publications and brands including The Guardian, GQ, Vogue, Dazed, Adidas, and others − Lartey distinguishes himself as an image-maker attuned to the subtleties of lived experience. His work articulates the textures of a generation and the cultural moment it inhabits, offering photography not as spectacle, but as a site of remembrance, reciprocity, and quiet insistence.