Lee Jeffries

Lee Jeffries is an English amateur photographer. Jeffries took his first photograph of a homeless person in 2009. He often takes portraits of homeless people sometimes he also is living on the streets for days to gain their trust, respect and permission to take photographs of the homeless. Jeffries gets to know the subjects he wants to photograph, Jeffries tries to uses this as a way to show the person and there personality to other people who look at his pictures.

Jeffries started photographing people in London and has since been to other countries in Europe and the United States taking pictures of different people. He has built up a reputation and his work has featured on some prestigious photographic web sites such as Time Magazine Lightbox, CNN, The Independent Newspaper. Through his work he has raised awareness of the homeless and money for various homeless charities.

Jeffries for his street photography only natural light and a small reflector. The photographs finally produced are post processed and manipulated. The majority of his photographs are black and white, but Jeffries does include some colour photography. The colour photography is muted and shows a strength of deep reflection and resolve in the subjects face

His style of photography is close cropped images removing as much as possible distracting background so the viewer focuses on the face, the character, the shadows, highlights the face in relief, the contours, lines and wrinkles, the eyes are magnetic usually staring straight down the lens and out of the photograph back at the viewer. It is hard to decide who is studying who. The photographs convey the emotions in the subjects face.

I really like his work, the powerful brooding emotions, they have a strong haunting atmosphere, the dominant commanding sole full eyes and that his images show. They make you wonder what the story behind the person in the photograph is.