A new book by visual artist Ngadi Smart chronicles the effects of water poverty on communities across the West African country where around half of the population lives without access to clean water.
Water is life. And life is water.
In Sierra Leone, communities across the country know this to be painfully true. Around half of the population has no access to clean water, relying instead on unsafe drinking water from nearby ponds and wells. The effects are catastrophic. With one of the lowest life expectancies in the world at just 61 years of age, some of Sierra Leone’s largest causes of death in 2019 were diarrhoeal diseases, associated with contaminated water, and malaria, which is carried by mosquitoes that breed in still water.
Artist Ngadi Smart is from Sierra Leone and knows firsthand how valuable clean water is in her mother country. “We need water for everything—for cooking, for drinking, for bathing, for cleaning their children’s school clothes,” Smart tells Atmos. “When I was walking through one of the biggest informal settlements in Freetown I saw ‘wata na life’ scribbled across the wall. People there know the meaning of that saying: water really is life.”
The phrase has since become the name of Smart’s newly-released book, Wata Na Life, which was edited, designed, and published by Loose Joints.
Wata Na Life is the result of many years of work, which started back in 2021 when Smart was commissioned by British Journal of Photography to accompany WaterAid for three months to document the effects of water poverty on communities across Sierra Leone. As someone who hails from Sierra Leone, Smart was already aware of the country’s water crisis. Even so, it was through working on the project that she grasped the depth and complexity of the issues.
Smart spent months travelling between towns and districts, from Freetown, the capital, on the western coast to Taninahun in the south. The project, which chronicles the people she met and the landscapes she visited along the way, seeks to advance climate justice by amplifying the experiences and voices of those most affected by water poverty through storytelling.
“I photographed the project to show the needs of each community,” says Smart. “I [combined] photography with collage to show the identity and needs of each place because we visited so many different landscapes in Freetown alone — let alone the rest of Sierra Leone. It was almost like creating a three-dimensional portrait of each place and each person because it was important for me that the people who were photographed could look at the images and recognize themselves and their areas.”
The creative process was as intense as her travel itinerary. Smart would photograph a different community almost every day and edit the images in the evenings. “I would do a selection of the pictures that I liked, and then from that selection, I would start collaging. Sometimes we were too tired from travelling, but I reminded myself that — [considering the scale of] the project — it would be good to have the selection ready,” says Smart. The trip lasted from June to August, with the whole of September spent collaging.
“When I was walking through one of the biggest informal settlements in Freetown I saw ‘wata na life’ scribbled across the wall. People there know the meaning of that saying: water really is life.”
Ngadi Smart,
visual artist.
Fast forward two years, Smart’s Wata Na Life won the 2023 Loose Joints and Mahler & LeWitt Studios Publishing Award, an artist’s residency and publishing award focused on photography and ecology. The award—which was supported by Atmos as a member of the jury that helped select the finalist — gave Smart the opportunity to spend a month-long residence at Mahler & LeWitt’s studio in Spoleto, Italy, to fine-tune her project followed by a publishing deal with Loose Joints.
“The residency was really good,” says Smart. “It pushed me a little bit out of my comfort zone because Lewis and Sarah [at Loose Joints] have a very strong graphic direction. I really like that, and I think every artist should be put out of their comfort zone because it helps you create work that you wouldn’t have created otherwise.”
For Smart, the residency was spent reflecting on how images of Sierra Leone’s terrain could help foster a more rounded and honest representation of the realities of water scarcity and contamination. The effects are real: agricultural land is degraded, entire rivers polluted. And though Wata Na Life had until this point been heavily portrait-based, Smart spent her residency including depictions of the environmental devastation the communities spend so much of their time and resources trying to mitigate. That’s why, during her time in Spoleto, Smart revisited images she hadn’t looked at for years, experimenting with inks, glue, paper, and even photoshop to continue building on the narratives she had woven together years earlier.
Her style is unlike any other photojournalist. It’s vibrant, it’s abstract, it’s confrontational, and it’s born in part by her determination to invert conventional Western depictions of poverty and pain. Her colorful collages speak to the vitality and creativity of water-poor communities who are forced to innovate to meet their most basic needs.
“In Taninahun we met mostly cocoa farmers,” says Smart. “We asked them what they could make, and they said jewelry from the cocoa leaves. I expected them to make a bracelet or two, but the next day they came to us with hats, skirts, glasses, and other amazing creations. We photographed them with these accessories because we wanted to tap into their creative side as well. A lot of NGO photography doesn’t do that.”
There’s a jubilance to Smart’s work; a powerful sense of higher purpose. That’s in part down to her experimental—and often unexpected—use of color. But the shades Smart chooses isn’t simply aesthetic preference, it’s also a means of coding the geographies of her projects, linking portraits of community members with depictions of the land they tend.
“The colors are themed,” says Smart. “For example, in one district, the people used a well that had bright blue paint around it. I used those same colors as well as elements of the well to graphically connect most of the photos from there; there’s a blue tinge to a lot of the shots I took during my stay with them.”
Through collage, Smart literally pieces together the complex and fragmented reality of Sierra Leone’s water crisis. A combination of both internal and external corruption that drives deforestation and pollution across the country, a problem that’s compounded by government inaction, is masterfully referenced throughout the book through saturated landscapes weighed down by looming, abstracted entities. In her portraits, double exposures and stark lines are a nod to the multifaceted lives of the people most affected — both jubilant, uplifted by the communities around them, and harsh, weighed down by the pressure of accessing water as a matter of survival.
“Water poverty in Sierra Leone is not a basic problem,” says Smart. “It’s a layered problem, and the causes [and effects] vary in every location. It’s a complexity that’s reflected in the work and the book—Loose Joints did an amazing job.”
Smart spent as much time photographing communities in Sierra Leone as she did speaking with them and recording her conversations. It’s why every image in Wata Na Life is accompanied by a caption that helps shed light on the stories of the people in the photographs. Though Smart understands Krio, she enlisted the help of her mother to ensure every caption was correctly translated.
“The collages — these layers of images—are revealing, yes,” says Smart. “They look uplifting. But then, when you read their stories, their words often reveal horrible circumstances.”
“It’s a project that makes me very proud and, at the same time, sad; sad to have done it. I’ve always been connected to Sierra Leone and to my background, but it’s brought me even closer to it.”
Ngadi Smart
Visual Artist
Though the project was photographed three years ago, the issues caused by the country’s water crisis remain just as pertinent. Earlier this year, for instance, a UN report found that a national park responsible for a large portion of Freetown’s water supply is critically under threat because of unregulated land grabbing, charcoal burning, and quarrying. It’s why Smart—whose emotional and cultural proximity to Sierra Leone makes her determined to continue shedding light on the problem—describes the completion of Wata Na Life as bittersweet.
“It’s a project that makes me very proud and, at the same time, sad; sad to have done it,” says Smart. “I’ve always been connected to Sierra Leone and to my background, but it’s brought me even closer to it. The only thing I can do to help the situation is talk; to get out and discuss it. So, that’s [exactly] what I’m going to do.”
Wata Na Life by Ngadi Smart is published by Loose Joints, and is available to purchase here.
