David Uzochukwu: the 18-year-old photographer already shooting for Nike

Over the last month, London dwellers will have been hard pushed to miss the distinctive work of photographer David Uzochukwu, whose images of FKA twigs, created in collaboration with the artist for Nike, have been pasted up on billboards around the capital and across the world. Working with Nike and twigs, David tells us, was “very exciting and challenging. I was running on an adrenaline high throughout the shooting days. The campaign was mainly scheduled around the motion aspect and I’d never been on a film set before, I was thriving off of the energy.”

The self-taught photographer may have only recently turned 18, but he’s already sitting on a killer portfolio of editorial and commercial work. On the editorial side there’s the portfolio he shot for Wonderland magazine with creative director and stylist Matthew Josephs featuring the most exciting talent from around the world including Londone Myers, Gaika, Montell Martin, Imma, Elliott Brown, Rharha Nembhar, Ibrahim Kamara, Brian Whittaker, Tschan Andrews, Raleigh Ritchie and Leomie Anderson and a second shoot with ethereal musician Benjamin Clementine, on the commercial, projects with Adobe Photoshop. Whether he’s shooting editorial or commercial work, the photographer clutches tightly at his signature style, where vulnerability is met with power and dipped in soft lighting.

“It was love at first sight,” David tells us of his relationship with the camera. “I picked up a camera sometime between age 11 and 12 and just didn’t want to put it back down again. The ability to focus on small aspects of my surroundings and take them out of context fascinated me.” By the age of 15, he’d won awards by EyeEm and Flickr, before moving on to shoot singers and editorials. As for future plans, the Austrian photographer, who is based between Brussels and Paris, tells us “I want to dedicate myself more to my personal work! There are so many things to make.”