Born in London to Sierra Leonean parents and once destined for medicine, Ejatu Shaw has quietly become one of the most compelling visual voices of her generation, shooting Angela Bassett for an Ebony cover, Usain Bolt for Puma, and now turning her camera toward grief.
The image that announced Ejatu Shaw to the world was taken on a rooftop in London. Angela Bassett dressed in a champagne gown, leaning against a balcony wall, the city stretched out behind her, stared into Shaw’s lens for the May 2025 cover of Ebony magazine. Shaw, who still can barely believe she got the call, described the moment as profoundly empowering: being a Black woman photographer, capturing this iconic Black woman, surrounded by a team of Black creators, it felt like everything her career had been quietly building toward.
She is 30 years old.
The British-Sierra Leonean photographer and multidisciplinary artist has quickly become a rising force in the global art and fashion scenes, but her story is not the straightforward one of a prodigy who always knew what she was. It is something messier, more interesting, and more deeply rooted in a family trip, a father’s gift, a religion she wrestled with, and a country she had to travel to in order to understand herself.
Shaw was primed to study medicine “the child that was destined to become the doctor,” as she puts it. An art lover who had always been painting and making things, she looked for a compromise her parents would accept and settled on architecture the middle ground between creativity and a reliable income. Then, in 2013, everything shifted.
During a family trip to Sierra Leone, Shaw spent the entire time photographing the scenery, the people they visited across different households, the textures and light of a country she was connected to but had never fully known. On the long car journeys between visits, she edited the images on her phone, absorbed in the process. Her father noticed. He bought her her first camera a Sony Nex-5N and what followed was not so much a career pivot as a quiet, unstoppable reckoning with what she was actually meant to do.
Shaw completed a Master’s degree in Photography Arts at the University of Westminster in 2020, by which point her work had already begun attracting serious attention for something far more personal than celebrity portraits.
Shaw grew up navigating the interlocking pressures of being Black, British, Muslim, and Fulani a second-generation diaspora experience that placed her between cultural worlds without fully belonging to any of them. By the age of 11, she felt an urgent need to understand her place in her community, caught between the cultural expectations of her Sierra Leonean heritage and the economic marginalisation that kept her from fully connecting with her white British peers.
Photography became the language through which she could hold all of those identities at once without having to choose between them. Her work masterfully blends elements of her Islamic faith and African heritage, drawing profound influence from iconic mid-century African studio photographers such as Malick Sidibé of Mali, Sory Sanlé of Burkina Faso, and Omar Yahia Barram of Sudan artists who understood that to photograph Black subjects with dignity was itself a political act, a reclaiming of visual representation from those who had long controlled it.
Through self-portraiture and conceptual photography, Shaw transforms personal memories into layered visual narratives that explore identity, memory, and self-reflection. Her earlier series Poly derived from the word “plural” was a direct confrontation with the reductive labels placed on her from birth, an insistence that she could not be flattened into a single story.
The personal work opened doors that more conventional routes might not have. In 2025, the British Fashion Council named her a New Wave Creative a recognition of emerging talent reshaping British visual culture. That same year, she photographed Angela Bassett for Ebony, Cynthia Erivo for The Guardian, the Sunday Times, and Vogue, Usain Bolt for Puma, and shot and designed singer Craig David’s album cover.
It is a portfolio that would be remarkable for a photographer twice her age. What makes it notable in Shaw’s case is that none of it appears to have diluted the integrity of her personal work. The commercial assignments and the deeply private projects seem to coexist each feeding the other rather than competing.
Shaw’s most ambitious current project is also her most personal. She is working on a series called To Him We Return, which follows her investigation into the sudden death of her father a project that brings the audience along her grieving process as she retraces and rehearses his last moments.
She had planned to photograph him extensively, to interview him, to let him tell his own story in detail. He died a few weeks after she wrote about that intention. The family archives the photographs her mother had meticulously kept across decades became, suddenly, all she had left of him. Heart-shattering, she called it. But also a reason to keep going, to keep photographing those who are still here.
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There is a line that runs through everything Ejatu Shaw makes from the teenager editing iPhone pictures on a dusty road in Kenema, to the photographer on a London rooftop with Angela Bassett in her viewfinder. It is a line about what images can hold that words cannot: grief, belonging, heritage, the faces of people who deserve to be seen. Sierra Leone put the camera in her hands. She has not put it down since.
